Can We Side-Step Age-Related Alienation?

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Alienation with age is more than just loneliness and isolation, it’s an active process that can result in being effectively removed from society.

  • Today’s main feature looks at how this happens, and what can be done about, to ensure a continued healthy personal and social life.

• Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise, now with their latest most advanced device yet!

• Today’s featured recipe is full of fiber, polyphenols, and protein—these versatile little snacks can be eaten alone or served as part of a buffet; great for warm summer nights!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

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Psychology Sunday

When The World Moves Without Us…

We’ve written before about how reduced social engagement can strike people of all ages, and what can be done about it:

How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

…but today we’re going to talk more about a specific aspect of it, namely, the alienation that can come with old age—and other life transitions too, but getting older is something that (unless accident or incident befall us first) all of us will definitely do.

What’s the difference?

Loneliness is a status, alienation is more of a process. It can be the alienation in the sense of an implicit “you don’t belong here” message from the world that’s geared around the average person and thus alienates those who are not that (a lack of accessibility to people with disabilities can be an important and very active example of this), and it can also be an alienation from what we’ve previously considered our “niche” in the world—the loss of purpose many people feel upon retirement fits this bill. It can even be a more generalized alienation from our younger selves; it’s easy to have a self-image that doesn’t match one’s current reality, for instance.

Read more: Estranged by Time: Alienation in the Aging Process

So, how to “un-alienate”?

To “un-alienate”, that is to say, to integrate/reintegrate, can be hard. Some things may even be outright impossible, but most will not be!

Consider how, for example, former athletes become coaches—or for that matter, how former party-goers might become party-hosts (even if the kind of “party” might change with time, give or take the pace at which we like to live our lives).

What’s important is that we take what matters the most to us, and examine how we can realistically still engage with that thing.

This is different from trying to hold on grimly to something that’s no longer our speed.

Letting go of the only thing we’ve known will always be scary; sometimes it’s for the best, and sometimes what we really need is just more of a pivot, like the examples above. The crux lies in knowing which:

• Is our relationship with the thing (whatever it may be) still working for us, or is it just bringing strife now?

• If it’s not working for us, is it because of a specific aspect that could be side-stepped while keeping the rest?

• If we’re going to drop that thing entirely (or be dropped by it, which, while cruel, also happens in life), then where are we going to land?

This latter is one where foresight is a gift, because if we bury our heads in the sand we’re going to land wherever we’re dropped, whereas if we acknowledge the process, we can make a strategic move and land on our feet.

Here’s a good pop-science article about this—it’s aimed at people around retirement age, but honestly the advice is relevant for people of all ages, and facing all manner of life transitions, e.g. career transitions (of which retirement is of course the career transition to end all career transitions), relationship transitions (including B/B/B/B: births, betrothals/break-ups, and bereavements) health transitions (usually: life-changing illnesses and/or disabilities—which again, happens to most of us if something doesn’t get us first), etc. So with all that in mind, this becomes more of a “how to reassess your life at those times when it needs reassessing”:

How to Reassess Your Life in Retirement

But that doesn’t mean that letting go is always necessary

Sometimes, the opposite! Sometimes, the age-old advice to “lean in” really is all the situation calls for, which means:

• Be ready to say “yes” to things, and if nobody’s asking, be ready to “hey, do you wanna…?” and take a “build it and they will come” approach. This includes with people of different ages, too! Intergenerational friendships can be very rewarding for all concerned, if done right. Communities that span age-ranges can be great for this—they might be about special interests (this writer has friends ranging through four generations from playing chess, for instance), they could be religious communities if we be religious, LGBT groups if that fits for us, even mutual support groups such as for specific disabilities or chronic illness if we have such—notice how the very things that might isolate us can also bring us together!

• Be open-minded to new experiences; it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of “I’ve never done that” and mistake that self-assessment for an uncritical assumption of “I’m not the kind of person who does that”. Sometimes, you really won’t be! But at least think about it and entertain the possibility, before dismissing it out of hand. And, here’s a life tip: it can be really good to (within the realms of safety, and one’s personal moral principles, of course) take an approach of “try anything once”. Even if we’re almost certain we won’t like it, and even if we then turn out to indeed not like it, it can be a refreshing experience—and now we can say “Yep, tried that, not doing that again” from a position of informed knowledge. That’s the only way we get to look back on a richly lived life of broad experiences, after all, and it is never too late for such.

• Be comfortable prioritizing quality over quantity. This goes for friends, it goes for activities, it goes for experiences. The topic of “what’s the best number of friends to have?” has been a matter of discussion since at least ancient Greek times (Plato and Aristotle examined this extensively), but whatever number we might arrive at, it’s clear that quality is the critical factor, and quantity after that is just a matter of optimizing.

In short: make sure you’re investing—in your relationships, in your areas of interest, in your community (whatever that may mean for you personally), and most of all, and never forget this: in yourself.

Take care!

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Recipes Worth Sharing

Green Paneer Flatbreads

Full of fiber, polyphenols, and protein, these versatile little snacks can be eaten alone or served as part of a buffet; great for warm summer nights!

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

Complete Guide To Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting – By Dr. Jason Fung

When it comes to intermittent fasting, the plethora of options can be daunting at first, as can such questions as what fluids are ok to take vs what will break the fast, what to expect in terms of your first fasting experience, and how not to accidentally self-sabotage.

Practised well, intermittent fasting can be a very freeing experience, and not at all uncomfortable. Practised badly, it can be absolutely miserable, and this is one of those things where knowledge makes the difference.

Dr. Fung (yes, the same Dr. Fung we’ve featured before as an expert on metabolic health) shares this knowledge over the course of 304 pages, with lots of scientific information and insider tips. He covers the different kinds of fasting, how each of them work and what they do for the body and brain, hunger/satiety hacks, lots of “frequently asked questions”, and even a range of recipes to help smooth your journey along its way.

The style is very well-written pop-science; it’s engaging and straightforward without skimping on science at all.

Bottom line: if you’re thinking of trying intermittent fasting but aren’t sure where/how to best get started, this book can set you off on the right foot and keep you on the right track thereafter.

Click here to check out The Complete Guide to Fasting, and enjoy the process as well as the results!

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Wishing you a fulfilling Sunday,

The 10almonds Team