Dealing With the Fear and Regrets of Aging
Here was her question:
What are books for someone with a fear of getting older? I feel scared of aging and having the feeling that time is slipping by and I haven’t really “lived” yet.
–and here’s my response:
- Fearless: Creating the Courage to Change the Things You Can.
- Crazy Good: A Book of Choices
- The Story of You (and How to Create a New One)
- Time Warrior: How to Defeat Procrastination, People-Pleasing, Self-doubt Over-Commitment, Broken Promises, and Chaos.
One of the themes you will pick up from Chandler, if you choose to invest in his writing, is the idea of avoiding “time travel.” In other words, avoid living in the past or the future.
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. The main resident of the past is regret; the main resident of the future is fear. Neither can exist in the present moment.
I’m going to take a wild stab here and assume that you are moving through the mid-point of life i.e mid-40s to late 50s. That’s when these types of uncomfortable questions begin to surface. Why am I here? Is this all there is? Does anybody know I’m here? Do I matter? Etc., ad infinitum.
The thought choices you are making are something that is under your control. We can’t control all the circumstances we encounter but we have total control over how we respond to those circumstances. You are creating fictitious circumstances in advance and allowing that to create fear (false expectations appearing real).
One of the circumstances you can’t control is that you will be older tomorrow than you are today. But you can control how you deal with that. You may be surprised that research has determined that the lowest point of happiness for most people is in the late 40s and the happiest periods are when they are in their 60s, 70s, 80s.
Most fear is manufactured
Your fear of aging is an example of a manufactured thought that has a weak basis for existing. It may be based on your observation of people who have experienced health issues in later life. Those people aren’t you and it’s not healthy to project their situations into your world.
Your health in your later years is heavily influenced by the decisions that you make from this point forward. Substitute your fear with action and commit to doing the things that will grant you a better chance of avoiding the things you fear. Diet, exercise, continuous learning, and social engagement are essential components of that doing.
It’s helpful to remember that time can’t be managed. It’s fixed into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. We can only manage ourselves within the context of inflexible time. That’s why “time travel’ out of the present moment is so wasteful and unhealthy.
One of the gifts that we are all given is imagination. Fear suppresses imagination. Fear generates worry which is the grossest misuse of imagination possible.
Resurrect your giftedness
You were gifted at birth with a level of talent and uniqueness that, like most, has been tamped down by meeting the conformity that is expected of us by our culture.
Let me share a quote from another favorite author, Seth Godin, from his book “Linchpin”:
“Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear that means nothing. The difference between fear and anxiety: anxiety is diffuse and focuses on possibilities in an unknown future, not a real and present threat. The resistance is 100 percent about anxiety. Anxiety is an internal construct with no relation to the outside world. ‘Needless anxiety’ is redundant because anxiety is always needless. Anxiety doesn’t protect you from danger, but from doing great things. It keeps you awake at night and foretells a future that’s not going to happen. Fear is about staying alive. There’s not a lot of genuine fear here in our world. Anxiety, on the other hand, is dangerous paralysis. Anxiety is the exaggeration of the worst possible what-if, accompanied by self-talk that leads to the relentless ‘minimization of the actual odds of success’.”
Suppose you accepted the fact that the days ahead of you are an opportunity to dust off that uniqueness and put it to work doing something you are really good at and that you really enjoy doing and that makes a contribution to what the world needs.
Do that, live in the present moment and you won’t leave space in your mental bandwidth for fear and worry.
Today’s “take away” is TIME TRAVEL!! A great analogy of being in the NOW!
I am more and more realizing how good an upbringing I had. My Father went overseas in WWII soon after I was born, and I didn’t meet him for 8 years.My mother was a practical nurse,and took in those too sick to stay home, and too poor to go to the Hospital. Most were Seniors, and I had a lot of long conversations with them as a kid.I did get lots of hints about life, some great ideas, I learned about operations, fatal sickness, and miraculous recovery.And an optimistic outlook on the world.
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