A Survivor's Guide To Successful Aging: With recipes for 1 week provided by Christina Schilling by Schilling Ray

Author:Schilling, Ray [Schilling, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

I like to stress again, however, never to attempt to listen to a cassette or disc when you are driving or operating machinery!

If you are concerned about how much time you need to invest in such an exercise, you can be assured that you will not need hours and hours. Twenty to thirty minutes will be ample. Find the relaxation technique that appeals to you most, or meditate and incorporate breathing exercises. These are some examples of useful activities for meditation or relaxation. As with any exercise, you will get better with practice and will find more benefits to your emotional well-being as you go on.

Anger and hostility are not only emotions that make your life and that of others miserable. Anger and hostility are risk factors for heart disease. Hostile individuals are on a potential suicide mission. They are five times more at a risk to die before the age of fifty than people who are not hostile and do not get mad at the drop of a hat! Anger and hostility are risk factors for heart disease. Dr. Amen, a well-known psychiatrist who uses special brain scans for assessments, called single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) to investigate brain function has accumulated over 80,000 SPECT scans of brains of patients. I was at a lecture where Dr. Amen was the keynote speaker and remarked that SPECT scans can show a distinct image in an angry, hostile individual. People with this condition have a dis-balanced brain pattern. Here is an example from Dr. Amens’s website of a fourteen-year-old male who had an anger problem, but could be successfully calmed down with appropriate medication:

http://www.amenclinics.com/the-science/spect-gallery/item/angersevere-odd#page

You can learn to avoid escalations into rage attacks and shouting matches; you can rethink a statement instead of blowing up. You can also learn to laugh at a situation. If anger becomes an obstacle that is too big to handle, you may benefit from cognitive therapy and counseling. Remember, you do not have to embark alone on a difficult journey!

Dr. Amen also talked about taking care of the “ants”, those annoying little negative thoughts that creep in during the course of a day. Stop yourself when you think negatively. Start concentrating more on the positive, and don’t make it a habit to expect disaster. For example, you may want to stop watching the eleven o’clock news before you go to sleep. Often you are not hearing or seeing wonderful things that contribute to a restful sleep!

Put humor into your life . Laughter helps to release frustration, and it releases endorphins, the feel-good hormones. Humor also helps us cope with the unavoidable stressors we encounter in day-to-day living.

And finally, be affectionate and empathic (without conditions attached) toward people around you, and love and accept yourself.

Achieving and maintaining fitness of the mind is an ongoing project, a lifelong task. It comes down to learning some exercises that promote emotional well-being and help us cope with stress. We can learn meditation and relaxation. But we must also get to know ourselves more intimately and examine our habits, thought patterns, and attitudes.

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