“Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.” – Eartha Kitt
Worry and anxiety are associated with aging. These increases in the elderly can occur for very logical reasons. The elderly have to cope with increasing loss of friends and family, deteriorating health, as well as concerns regarding finances on fixed incomes. All of these are legitimate sources of worry. But, no matter how reasonable, the increased worry and anxiety add extra stress that can impact on the elderly’s already deteriorating physical and psychological health. So, clearly ameliorating the worry and anxiety could be highly beneficial to the well-being of the elderly.
Cognitive decline is also a problem with aging. There are reductions in memory ability, crystalized intelligence, reasoning and problem solving, attention, and processing speed that normally occur even with healthy aging. These changes can be slowed by reducing stress, improving health, and staying mentally active. One way to do this is with contemplative practices. Indeed, a variety of these practices have been shown to be helpful with the mental and physical changes associated with aging (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/aging/).
In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for older adults with worry symptoms and co-occurring cognitive dysfunction”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4136987/
Lenze and colleagues tested the ability of a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program to reduce worry and anxiety and the mental decline in individuals over 65-years of age who had significant difficulties with worry and anxiety. They found that the MBSR program produced improvements in both cognitive abilities and worry and anxiety. In particular, the MBSR program improved memory ability, verbal fluency, speed of processing, and the ability to screen out interference during processing. They also found a large, clinically significant reduction in worry and anxiety severity and a large significant increase in mindfulness after the MBSR training in the elderly participants. Further they found that the participants continued to practice mindfulness techniques six and twelve months after the endo of formal training.
These are very promising results and suggest that mindfulness training might be an effective program to assist with successful, healthy aging. It has been shown that mindfulness training reduces the physical and psychological responses to stress (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/stress/). This by itself could be responsible to the positive effects of MBSR on the elderly. But mindfulness practice has also been shown to reduce worry (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/worry/) and anxiety (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/anxiety/) directly, which could also account for, the results with the elderly. This, however, may be a subcategory of mindfulness effects as mindfulness has been shown to improve emotion regulation in general (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/emotions/). Finally, mindfulness training has been shown to help protect the aging brain from deterioration (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/age-healthily-protect-the-brain-with-yoga/) which might be the primary mechanism for the reduction in cognitive decline in the elderly. Regardless of the mechanism mindfulness training should be recommended to assist the elderly in aging healthily.
So, beat increased worry and decreased cognitive ability with mindfulness.
“No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else.” – Katharine Graham
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies