Live Well as You Age with These 4 Tips to Reset Your Mindset
We now have evidence that the brain is malleable. What this means is by learning new skills, changing current behaviors, and modifying lifelong habits for better health, you can halt cognitive decline as you age — even into your later years.
Live Well As You Age with These 4 Tips to Reset Your Mindset
You’ve done it before - picked up a new hobby, learned a new skill for work, or started a new morning routine. It’s not always easy to learn something new or change an existing behavior, especially as you get older. All humans are actually hardwired to resist change, but the younger generations generally find it easier to change than those of us in our prime time.
The reality is that getting out of your comfort zone, learning something, and adopting a new behavior (or two) is actually good for your brain health and has been shown to increase happiness. There is evidence that the brain is malleable. What this means is by learning new skills, changing current behaviors, and modifying lifelong habits for better health, you can halt cognitive decline as you age - even into your later years.
The story of decline in aging you’ve been told isn’t true. Successful aging requires a
change-is-good mindset, the desire to learn, and a progress, not perfection attitude.
Get Started with these four mindset reset tips listed below.
Create a Gratitude Mindset
A gratitude journal is a wonderful way to reset your mindset. By focusing on what you are grateful for, you'll open yourself up to experiencing an abundance of emotional, social, professional, and health benefits.
If you’re already in the practice of writing down what you’re grateful for, try taking your journaling a step further. Make one of your points of gratitude everyday descriptive about someone else and what they've done for you, so that not only are you grateful for your own life, but you also recognize the people in your life and how they contribute to your success and wellbeing. Then challenge yourself to spread gratitude to improve someone else's day.
Send the person you recognized in your journal a note to let them know how grateful you are for them and the impact they have had on your life. Think of the lives you can impact by committing to sending just one message a day!
Adopt a Fun Mindset
Rebecca’s high school boys had their high school finals coming up in one week. She realized that her freshman would be experiencing high school finals for the first time and might be feeling added pressure.
When she asked him how he was feeling about finals’ week, he replied, “I am so excited; preparing for finals is fun.”
Fun and finals weren’t the two words she expected to hear in the same sentence, but she was glad to hear he wasn’t stressed and overwhelmed.
Fun was his mindset which was making the process of preparing enjoyable and exciting.
What if you took this approach and reset your mindset when you had something stressful coming up in your life? What if, instead of an automatic response of being overwhelmed, you looked at a stressful event as something fun to be excited about? What if you focused on the process of learning being fun and took the pressure of the results off yourself?
Give it a try. A reset mindset towards fun can help change your perspective quickly and your life may even feel more fun!
Build an Intentional Mindset to Change for Good
Like many of you, we started 2021 by setting intentions and a word as our guide for what we want to give attention to over the next 12 months.Transitioning our desired behaviors into lifelong habits is part art, part awareness, daily work, and a whole lot of science.
A place to start is with proven strategies or ‘how tos’ on changing behavior for good.
We all have patterns of behaviors that we fall back on when we're feeling vulnerable, helpless, angry, stressed or alone. These can be choices that feel more comfortable than sitting still with our emotions. In reality, the only thing that behaviors done mindlessly do is cast a shadow inhibiting our ability to live wholeheartedly. These mindless behaviors give us a false and fleeting sense of soothing and comfort.
One reason we advocate for sitting still and going inward is the process helps you be mindful about the intentions behind your behavior choices. There are no checklists to identify mindless and comfort behaviors, but self reflection allows you to identify them for yourself.
Here is one question you can ask yourself that may help.
Do my choices comfort and nourish my spirit and contribute to my ability to live inside out and flourish, or are they a temporary respite from life?
Be intentional and identifying red flag personal behavior patterns to help you stay mindful on the path to reaching your goals. For example, if you automatically reach for the sweets after dinner, try going for a short walk instead.
Being intentional is a mindset. Intention can create awareness around habitual behaviors and help you create change for good.
Seek a Joyful Mindset
Aging well and flourishing after 50 doesn't require a lengthy to do list or lofty goals.
Focus on the joy in the journey!
Do things that nourish you from the inside out.
Here is where we have found joy the last few months:
Participate in gentle movement like yoga or meditation
Walk, ski, or snowshoe in nature
Have a conversation with a friend
Enjoy a wholesome meal with family or friends
Read a thought-provoking book
Listen to an intriguing podcast
Have a conversation with someone who holds a differing view-point, listen, and seek to understand
Plan a staycation
Enjoy the extra time at home to do a puzzle or play a game
By resetting your mindset to focus on the pleasure found in the moment versus what you’re not able to do right now, you’ll discover the joy in so many new experiences in your life. Plus, it can help you positively navigate your life during these stressful times. It’s certainly helped us.
Discover a YOU-First Mindset
Does the recommendation of putting yourself first make you cringe just a little bit? For many of us it certainly does — especially for women.
Stay with us here. As we’ve aged, we’ve grown tired of trying to live up to someone else’s expectation of who we should be, how we should act, and what we should look like as we age. For many of us, these external expectations create stress in our lives and have become an unrealistic burden that we’re trying unsuccessfully to live up to.
The reality is you get to decide and write your personal story. And, in doing so you will soften your mind, have greater clarity, and calmness as you evolve closer to your truer and more authentic self.
This is hard work. Society will tell you the goal is to be ageless, instead focus on loving yourself as you are and live age free.
How to begin? Go inward daily. Set your intentions. Do frequent check-ins to catch yourself if you get off track. Live. Love. Flourish.
At Rumblings, our philosophy is this...we must reset our mindset in order to live the life of our dreams.
By focusing on gratitude, intention, joy, and YOU, you can reset your mindset to flourish as you age!
Rumble On!
Rebecca and Karyn