Older people suffer more insomnia As people grow older, they suffer more from insomnia. Nearly 30 percent of people aged 65 and older had trouble sleeping.
One cannot shrug off waking-time excesses just by going to bed. Many of our bad habits can literally rob us of our vitality and lead to a large number of maladies, including mental illness.
If, however, we learn better habits of sleeping, that helps us in our life throughout the day. And cleaner habits through the day helps us to sleep more restfully. At the end of a good day we can settle down more quickly to get ready for sleep, and, when we awaken in the morning, the day can be grabbed by the horns.
There are three things that prevent restorative sleep—overfatigue, material disturbances from the outside, and mental disturbances from within. (Read More)
Here’s a challenge for you: Get a small breast-pocket-size notebook and flip to an open page. Put it in your pocket with a pen and turn up your mental radar.
Now, every time during the entire day that you answer a question or greet someone insincerely or by lying, put a check mark in the notebook.
If this number adds up to a half dozen or more fabrications, most likely you are expending a tremendous amount of energy trying to please others for profit or to avoid pain.
That can’t feel good. Lying takes you far off your path to being genuine and gut-level happy.
Us midlifers must throw that facade away and discover our full greatness. Moreover, we’ll never have to look over our shoulders again nor away from the mirror.
Your preciousness is only revealed all pretenses and ingrained, defensive bad habits are discarded.
Exercise is one of the best and most effective ways that you can help ease your anxiety naturally, without pills and other potentially addictive or dangerous medications. The primary reason exercise works so well as a coping strategy is that it releases endorphins (the “feel good chemicals”) to the brain and gives your mind a healthy boost of serotonin. This is the same way that many SSRIs work, which are commonly prescribed for both anxiety and depression. Additionally, exercise puts you in control of your body and is a proactive approach in treating your health.
Most anxiety disorders have one critical component in common – control. People who are worried about losing control are often those who are the most apprehensive , and those types of control based worries n/f fears can easily lead to more serious disorders, or even panic attacks. While most people accept the fact that control is not necessarily in their hands at all times, those with anxiety cannot accept this fact or give up their sense of perceived control of their circumstances or world around them. They feel that they need control in order to function. The intuitive feeling of a loss of control can send them into a downward spiral that launches a full anxiety attack.
Rich Presta, the author of several self-improvement programs for individuals struggling with anxiety and phobias such as the fear of driving, had this to say, “Control is an illusion. We’re in actual control of very little except our own thoughts and reaction to those thoughts. Our jobs, the economy, or children, and even our health, are not under our control, but our INFLUENCE. The distinction is slight, but important.”
While we cannot control everything that happens in our lives, we do have control when it comes to our bodies, and we can exercise as a means of gaining supremacy over our bodies and to a great degree, our mind as well. Exercise and physical fitness helps alleviate anxiety by working out the stress that you are feeling as well as raising endorphins that send messages to your brain. What can be better than that?
In the morning, you can perform cardiovascular exercises. This may include running, jogging, stair climbing and even elliptical workouts. Whatever you can do to get the old ticker working will do just fine when you are exercising to treat anxiety. This will not only help you mentally, but physically as well. It will burn off calories to keep you looking good at et beach in the summer and keep your heart in good shape so you have greater overall health.
Prior to going to bed, you may incorporate some Pilates exercises or even some Yoga. These are stretching exercises that will relax you as well as keep you in good shape. You can be relaxed and feel ready for a good night’s sleep when you are practicing these exercises at night, it’s an excellent habit get into to get to sleep easily and can do wonders for insomnia brought on by anxiety. You do not have to attend Yoga classes to learn the moves and you do not have to contort your body into all sorts of impossible shapes. The main thing is that you learn how to stretch and relax.
By incorporating exercise into your life to treat anxiety and depression, you do not only boost your mood and relax your body, you give yourself something to concentrate on, instead of concentrating on yourself. An exercises routine will take away the troubles that you have in your mind and give you something else on which to focus. It truly a wonderful and effective treatment for anxiety and depression.
Late bloomers are often still in emotional diapers when they hit the big five-zero. Yes, they may dress in the proper monkey suits, say the politically correct things, and even be considered by others to be normal to the bone. Yet deep down inside they are living a lie and tired of putting on airs.
They have sufficient breadth of experience to know that they are living life vicariously and suffocating under the pressure of trying to act and be “normal.” That type of normalcy makes me scream!
They secretly wish that they could go back to their tender early childhood and erase all the traumas and negative defining moments – some of which they are aware of and others that they are not - and reprogram their minds for happiness and enlightenment for eternity.
Get real with yourself while time is still on your side.
We are 55, 60, 70 or older and everyone and everything tells us we must slow down and stop dancing. We must prepare for retirement, but we have no money. We must define our legacy, but we see ourselves as only drifters in the polluted pond of has-beens.
If that is where you find yourself, then take a deep breath and decide that you can reprogram your mind and exponentially improve your life results.
Every breath must remind us that life is still on our side and that we can make significant gains whether our clock will tick for four months or four-hundred months longer.
Start by being real. Understand that if you are doing things to avoid pain or to right wrongs, then you are living in an empty vessel. Doing the right things for the wrong reason is a big, fat lie. That lie may lead to riches or toned muscles through sheer willpower, but will not last because your successes are build on a crumbling foundation and not on strong and pure principles.
Growing old gives us a chance to understand our ignorance and blind spots implanted in our precious yet vulnerable minds before we had a chance to protest. Our bio-computers (brains) are running on damaged programming that desperately needs updating.
ee cummings sums up the quest to be true to oneself: To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Start today by being real and every day hereafter. Expect the best despite circumstances that would lead you to think to the contrary. Grow old with grace in spite of your external circumstances.
