A New Vision of Midlife and Beyond
For the first time in human history, most of us are living well into our seventies, eighties and nineties, which means we are going through multiple careers, relationships, and identities.
A "midlife crisis" may now be joined by a "later life crisis," as we strive to find a new model for what life looks like in these later years. Whether or not we retire in our 60s, 70s, or 80s, most of us can still expect to have many years ahead in which to work, play, and enjoy social relationships. Yet this time may also be marked by uncertainty, loss of identity and disappointment. How can we prepare ourselves for a satisfying and enjoyable aging and retirement?
We now have a huge body of research that shows which factors really contribute to our satisfaction and contentment in midlife and beyond. According to Michael Brickey, PhD, author of "Defy Aging," optimism, resiliency, humor, self-reliance, a sense of purpose and positive self-talk are among the qualities of character that support healthy, vital aging. Understanding how to develop these skills and attitudes empowers you to take charge of your midlife transition.
We're all familiar with the phrase, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." Well, you can. The brain remains remarkably "plastic," to use the technical term that describes its ability to grow and change, until the end of life. "Use it or lose it" is more descriptive of what is needed to maintain cognitive and emotional vitality.
A new movement in the field of psychology called Positive Psychology focuses on building positive emotions, engagement and meaning in life. Combined with recent research in aging, emotions and neuroscience, we can begin to build a new paradigm for midlife and beyond.
We are going to share with you some simple, yet powerful ideas and activities that will help open up your sense of the wonder and possibility of your midlife and later years.
Counting Your Blessings, Literally!
Positive Psychology offers many easily mastered techniques that boost your brainpower and your emotional health. One example is the deceptively simple "Three Gratitudes" exercise. When settling down to a night's rest, review your day in your mind's eye and think of three good things that occurred. Once you have identified these three events, interactions or moments, ask yourself why they occurred. This part of the exercise is powerful in and of itself, but you can also enhance it by suggesting to your unconscious mind that your dreams bring you more information about the good things in your life.
Weve included all 3 parts of the exercise in our handout but the first two are the most important parts.
Seems pretty simple. How could this activity change your brain structure? The scientists who research the impact of this and other Positive Psychology exercises believe they re-educate attention and memory from concentrating on what is wrong to being more aware of the positives in your present and in your past. Neurobiologists have demonstrated that our brains grow new neural connections when we think and behave in new ways. Our goal is to "inspire you to rewire" your brain, to quote Dr. Daniel Siegel, one of the lead researchers in this exciting field.
The actual research on use of the "Three Gratitudes" and other Positive Psychology exercises demonstrates a 94% reduction of depressive symptoms over a six-month period. The results are comparable to the use of cognitive therapy and anti-depressant medication.
Why are these ideas important to people in their fifties, sixties and better?
Challenges on the Pathway to A Happy Midlife
At some point in our adolescence, we pull together an early adult identity to launch ourselves, to survive, to cope or, if we are lucky, to begin the process of becoming. At midlife we begin to discern more immediately the end point, and are compelled to bring forth the self we more actively choose. This can happen because we put together our early self-identity to help us cope, rather than as a true reflection of our values. Or we may outgrow the initial ideas that informed our youthful self.
Our awareness of life's limits comes from many sources. The most significant is loss. Aging parents become ill or die, children grow up and move away, the body is less agile, thicker perhaps, hair gray or gone. Our work too may be marked by loss — skills out-moded, positions outsourced, dreams faded.
Yet better diet and healthcare means more and more of us are living longer. With age comes perspective, and, for most, wisdom. We do learn from our mistakes, after all, and most of us want to share what we've learned so that others may benefit from it. The great psychologist, Erik Erikson, said that healthy identity in the latter stages of life is organized around "generativity," which is the desire to support those who are coming up and who receive what we leave behind.
Coincident with the cresting arch of the baby-boomer generation are unprecedented social changes. We are less connected to traditional family and gender roles and we're more concerned about "big picture" issues like environmental, social and economic problems at the local, national and international level.
Social changes and our longer lifespans call for a revised model of midlife, aging, and retirement. Outdated are the expectations that we retire at age 65 and segregate ourselves in a retirement resort. Age 65 is now considered "the young old" and these days people at age 65 are full participants in society.
In her book, "New Passages," Gail Sheehy calls the years from age 50 to 70, "The Age of Mastery." The new midlife passage is one in which we can reconcile with the past and move into our "second adulthood" — one as active and engaged as the first. Recrafting a sense of purpose and meaning is integral to this process. When we do so, we look back, knit together the shape of the years into a coherent whole and look ahead to more of the same. Positive Psychology offers valuable guidance in ways we can learn to do this because it is an approach that begins with what's right in our personality, our current life and our potential. It investigates how building on the components of healthy functioning addresses discomfort or symptomatic conditions and enhances our positive emotional experience.
Signature Strengths: Paving Stones on the Path to Engagement
We all have personal strengths, for example. Positive Psychology has devised measures to help us understand our character strengths, which guide our choices in order to build upon them. When we are using our strengths, we feel happier and more engaged in life. So the good news is that we can improve our sense of engagement and meaning in life, at work and in relationships by identifying and focusing on our character strengths.
Lets start by talking about what we mean by character strengths. In the Positive Psychology world, understanding character strengths is a fundamental element of enhancing happiness. Traditionally, the mental health field has focused on mental illness. Positive Psychology focuses on the healthy parts of our emotional and cognitive lives.
Positive Psychology researchers have constructed a taxonomy of universal values that contribute to healthy character. By polling experts in philosophy, religion and psychology, six primary value categories recognized by people around the world were identified. They are wisdom, transcendence, justice, temperance, humanity and courage. These major categories are expanded into 24 sub-categories, which are used to identify the values that underlie your character strengths. These strengths are known as your Signature Strengths. The Positive Psychology approach demonstrates that when people use their signature strengths, they feel happier. So, for example, if your top signature strength is "love of learning," the Positive Psychology approach predicts that engaging in this strength in the method of your choice builds happiness.
There is even a formula that organizes the basic principles of this approach: H=S+C+V.
H is your level of happiness, S is your set point, C is the conditions of your life, and V stands for the voluntary activities you do.
In other words, your happiness consists of how happy you naturally are (your "set point"), plus whatever is going on in your life to affect your happiness ("conditions"), plus activities you voluntarily choose. It is important to choose activities that build on your signature strengths, enhance your experience of pleasure, foster engagement in the activities you choose and deepen your personal sense of your lifes meaning.
To understand your strengths, you can poll your friends and family, spend time journaling or get some personal coaching or therapy. One powerful assessment tool currently available for free online is The Values in Action Strengths Assessment commonly known as "The VIA." You can find the web site and instructions needed to find and take this test at the end of this article, and trained facilitators can help you interpret the results. The feelings of competency, connection to self and others, and affirmation of skills, talents and values that occur when we use our strengths contribute to our experiences of satisfaction, bonding and, dare we say it again, happiness?
Looking back at the formula, consider what components can be changed. It's pretty hard to change our natural "set point." We are all born with differing temperaments that regulate our emotional responses. Some people are naturally shy and quiet, others more outgoing.
When it comes to the conditions of our lives, some aspects may be very difficult to alter, although others may not. Clearly, focusing on choices that are under our voluntary control is the easiest way to make positive changes immediately.
Due to biology, circumstances and interests, each person has a unique understanding of lifes pleasures. One of the easiest interventions coming out of Positive Psychology is to pay attention to what you enjoy and savor your own brand of pleasure. Addictions aside, following the lead of your own response is part of the true path to happiness. For example, if you love to draw, and yet never make time to do so, consider how to make sure this interest is translated into action.
Tomorrows memories are constructed out of todays experiences. By understanding what brings you pleasure, and making opportunities to create it, no matter how small, the quality of your daily experience is enhanced.
One Positive Psychology exercise that focuses on pleasure is the exercise called, "Creating a Beautiful Day."Again, this deceptively simple practice draws ones attention to the "here and now" components of happiness. In this exercise, you invite yourself to set aside a day or half-day to do those activities you really enjoy. It is important to give yourself permission to do so, and not to spoil this day by reminding yourself of other things you should be doing.
Once youve had your beautiful day, Positive Psychology invites you to extend your pleasurable experiences by using savoring techniques, such as the following:
Sharing with Others: You can seek out others to share the experience and tell others how much you value the moment. This is probably the single best way to savor pleasure.
Memory Building: Take mental photographs or even a physical souvenir of the event and reminisce about it later with others.
Sharpening Perceptions: Focus on certain elements and block out others. Articulate the elements as finely as you can.
Absorption: Let yourself get totally immersed and try not to think, just sense.
Notice that this exercise emphasizes a cognitive approach to structuring your experience — using your thoughts to direct your feelings. This is one way that the practice of the
"Three Gratitudes" reduces depression. We actively structure the content of our memories by directing our thoughts and influencing our feelings. No matter who you are or what your circumstances, each person knows pleasures that can be built upon.
Optimism Can Be Learned
Sometimes we cannot change the conditions of our life, but can change our attitude towards them. It has been demonstrated that optimism is a learned skill.
Positive Psychology is grounded in a profound understanding of the link between learning and experiencing optimism. The roots of Positive Psychology go back to early breakthrough research on learned helplessness. Before we understood that circumstances impact the belief that we can take effective action in our best interests, abuse victims, like beaten spouses or oppressed minorities, were overtly or covertly blamed for their victimization. It was thought victims of domestic violence could easily choose to leave their spouses, or those who are discriminated against could just keep trying despite constantly having the doors to opportunity closed to them. Research on behavior modification demonstrated that people could be reduced to passive inaction if they were constantly subjected to negative experiences they couldn't make sense of and over which they had no power.
Once it was understood that helplessness was a learned response, it didn't take long to focus on optimism: what circumstances create it, what kind of thinking is characteristic of optimism and how people can learn to think optimistically. Becoming aware of our cognitions and retraining how we think of situations are key components of the Positive Psychology approach.
In a nutshell, research in the structure of cognitions and their relationship to feelings demonstrates a significant and consistent difference between the way optimistic and pessimistic attitudes are reflected in our thinking. Optimistic people tend to believe that good things are permanent and pervasive, plus the source of life's problems lie outside them. People whose thinking tends towards the pessimistic (anxious and depressed people frequently fall into this group) have the opposite pattern: They tend to assume that bad things are permanent and pervasive, plus the source of life's problems in within them, that they are the cause.
Because there is also a connection between unresolved betrayals and feeling powerless, or helpless, the ability to forgive can be a key component in experiencing greater optimism.
Gratitude and Forgiveness
Gratitude and forgiveness are two positive emotions that are important in supporting a healthy midlife. Gratitude provides us with a coping strategy to buffer us against negative events, and transform losses and challenges into meaningful life events.
Gratitude corresponds with a sense of wonder and appreciation for life, one of the core characteristics of what Abraham Maslow called, "the self-actualized individual."Maslow believed that the lack of gratitude, or taking ones blessings for granted, is a primary cause of suffering and misery.
Like the counting your blessings exercise, gratitude redirects attention to strengths and what is working in one's life. Because gratitude often stems from a positive feeling about the actions of another person, it helps us strengthen and appreciate social connections, and these social connections are a crucial element of midlife happiness as people move out of the workforce and into retirement.
Forgiveness strengthens positive emotions such as kindness and generosity; in fact, people with a tendency to forgive report fewer negative emotions like anxiety, depression, and hostility; they are also less narcissistic, less exploitative and more empathic. Forgiveness opens up our ability to move past betrayals, injustice or abuse. Unresolved wounds can leave a trail of bitterness that clouds one's perspective on life. People who practice forgiveness tend to ruminate less than people who hold onto past resentments and anger.
It is important to clarify that being able to forgive a transgression does not mean you have to forget or deny that it happened. Think of forgiveness instead as an intentional response by the victim to the transgressor and involving emotions, thoughts and behavior, as suggested in this quote from "The Art of Forgiving."
"It would give us some comfort if we could only forget a past that we cannot change. If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from their pain. But the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory. The only way to remove the nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness."
In the Positive Psychology model, forgiveness plays a key role in changing how we regard our history. When we are able to forgive, what happened in the past does not have power over how we feel today. In midlife, we may need to undergo therapy or get some help creating forgiveness rituals in order to be freed from past resentments, be truly present in the moment, and be optimistic about the future.
Another quote from "The Art of Forgiving"illustrates this:
"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you."
Resiliency and Perseverance: True Grit
Resiliency and perseverance are stepping stones on the road to a refreshed and renewed life vision. Midlife can bring transition and change that can trigger feelings of helplessness and a sense of being overwhelmed. They in turn can trigger uncomfortable emotions like anger, disappointment, confusion, uncertainty, and grieving. Transition and change can create cognitive challenges like the need to gather information in order to prepare for the next step. Therefore, the skills of resiliency and perseverance are needed to push through uncomfortable or negative experiences when one tries something new, takes new risks, works on forgiveness or the resolution of grief. Some people call this ability to persist or endure, "grit." But the Positive Psychology approach is not about going numb and enduring pain. It provides tools to help you move through uncomfortable feelings to get to the other side. The most basic tools involve strengthening resiliency and perseverance.
Resiliency can be enhanced by engaging in exercises, activities or coaching that build self-confidence, self-esteem and self-concept. One example is the activity called, "A Positive Introduction" where you identify a strength and compose a self-introduction that illustrates it being used. A benefit of this exercise is that it reminds you of the best you can be, and conveys that best self to others. Positive Psychology offers many ways to build optimism which is crucial to persevering in challenging situations.
We can also impact our choices by utilizing our strengths. If "the capacity to love and be loved" is your top strength and you're depressed because the kids have left home, consider ways to strengthen other significant relationships, with other kin or perhaps people in your community. If "appreciation of beauty and excellence" is your top strength, consider an art class, volunteering to improve the local school's landscaping or decorating your living room. When our life reflects our strengths back to us, we feel happier because we are maximizing our potential. Happiness itself is a source of strength that helps us to be resilient.
The concept of "flow,"being totally immersed in an activity, is linked to the use of signature strengths. We are in flow when we are doing what we are good at, and loving it. When you are in flow at work or at play, you are intensely focused on what you are doing, you lose your self-consciousness, time seems to pass more quickly than usual, and you are engaged in the process of your activity, and not just the end result. In other words, you are fully involved in the present moment.
Its easy to see how expanding our strengths helps us to move into activities that generate the experience of flow. When our activities align with our strengths, we are at one with our best self. Deep engagement is at the heart of flow. By this we mean our activities are grounded in our strengths and directed towards fulfilling our personal sense of purpose.
Positive Emotions
Dr. Barbara Fredrickson was the first person to clearly demonstrate the role of positive emotions. According to her research, the functions of positive and negative emotions are different. Negative emotions, including fear, anger and disgust, narrow our focus towards specific actions that serve the function of promoting survival like readying ourselves for attack or running from danger. In ancient times negative emotions evolved to support our ability to survive: Human beings who lived in the wild were confronted with split second decisions that made the difference between life and death. Nowadays we occasionally face such extreme events, but these same emotions help us decide whether or not to quickly move our vehicle to another lane or to avoid a dark alley on the walk home.
By contrast, positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, love, pride, elation, and gratitude, broaden an individual's momentary thought-to-action repertoire, skills like planning ahead and structuring time. The broadened modes of thinking associated with positive emotions often have the effect of building an individual's enduring personal resources, ranging from the physical, intellectual, psychological and social. So in the beginnings of human civilization, people learned to create running games to build up quick physical responses needed for hunting: nowadays we might think of taking bowling lessons in order to became a valued member of the local league. In ancient times people learned to identify and remember edible verses poisonous plants, nowadays parents pass on important social knowledge like remembering to acknowledge gifts or teaching the importance of family ties to foster security.
Gratitude, joy, and other positive emotions fuel individual growth, development, and resilience. Moreover, because one person's experiences of positive emotions can reverberate through his or her family, workplace or neighborhood, they can generate optimal social functioning, helping groups and communities to thrive as well.
In summary, our signature strengths help us to engage in meaningful activities, positive emotions like gratitude, forgiveness and optimism help us to make meaning out of our life and resiliency and perseverance give us strength to make transitions. A tune-up or transformation of all of these can carry us forward into our new vision of midlife and beyond.
Why is a new vision necessary? Lets take a look at the idea of a midlife or later life crisis. What do we mean by this? Although not everybody goes through a crisis, most people confront the need to change at midlife and beyond because of our longer lifespan. Some of us who grew up in a time when most people stayed married forever are continuing to date or are entering committed relationships for the second or third time in their fifties or sixties. Many of us who thought our early adulthood career choices would sustain us through old age are having to come up with a new career plan when they thought they would be well into retirement. There are those who want to keep working, but dont know how to integrate our skills into the technical arena of todays workplace. For some, these challenges are not of crisis proportions; for others, they are. A new vision can pave the way to fulfillment in midlife and beyond.
A New Vision at Midlife: Creating Meaning
The process of creating a new vision at midlife is grounded in examining our values and needs, reflecting on our relationship to the world around us, and making sense of our lifes meaning.
Midlife researchers like Sheehy underscore the profound opportunity midlife offers to consolidate and renew the sense of self. One of the grandfathers of psychology, Carl Jung, believed that our real self emerges at midlife, as we reckon with the inevitable limits of life and realize that now is our chance to truly be who we want to be, for we can no longer push old age into the background of our awareness.
One's authentic or true self embraces strengths, and shifts away from pleasing others. This is especially pronounced for women, who often shape an earlier life identity around caring for others, both at home and in a traditional career. In New Passages, Gail Sheehy paraphrases the question so many midlife women posed to her: "Am I going to confine my real self forever in some dark corner?"
For many people, engagement might mean focusing on the needs of the larger community now that grown children no longer require attention. As we age, we also become concerned about leaving behind a personal legacy in the form of a lasting community contribution, like fundraising for a new library, or planting trees in a local park.
The secret in the search for meaning is to find your passion and pursue it. This might mean rediscovering an interest or skill that you had earlier in life, or going back to school, or changing careers. This is the time of life when we look back to see what we have done, and decide if there is a dream left unfulfilled. Even those who have hit every marker and grabbed the gold ring may be unsure of the best to use this vital later stage of life.
There are effective and fun techniques that can assist you in charting a new course at midlife. Weve shared some of what the field of Positive Psychology offers, but many of the most valuable experiences will be those that come directly from your own explorations. Only you can plan your "beautiful day"; only you can recognize your everyday blessings; only you can choose what memories to savor and share.
The process of clarifying your personal vision can take you to places your imagination has yet to discover. The key is to really understand who you are, your personal sense of lifes meaning, and the ways you experience pleasure and satisfaction.
Where to Begin?
Step One: Make the commitment to enhancing your happiness and get help if you need it. Positive Psychology offers brief, easy assessment tools that can provide feedback on your level of happiness and trained therapists or coaches can also help you to better understand your current situation.
Step Two: Identify your Signature Strengths, the activities that bring you pleasure, and work on understanding the role of meaning in your life.
Step Three: Structure a daily routine that includes activities that utilize your strengths, enhance your sense of pleasure and engage your personal sense of lifes meaning.
Step Four: Get help with Steps 1,2, and 3 if you need it. These simple steps can unearth bad habits, organizational weaknesses, or personal blocks that cant be overcome alone.
You can have pleasure, engagement and meaning in midlife and beyond. Just follow the Positive Paving Stones:
Use your strengths every day.
Build optimism.
Enhance resiliency and perseverance.
Practice gratitude.
Foster your sense of engagement.
Excavate your life's meaning.
by Kathleen Walsh and Stephanie Spak