Thoughts and Suggestions from an Aging Psychologist.

Carrying around a heavy burden is tiring and adds to our perception of stress. Stress affects our thinking, emotions and physical being. Stress is likely to build up when we anticipate the need to make a change, experience the need for change or the actual change itself.

The anticipation of needing to make a change is often couched in a cloud of fret and worry until it becomes a genuine stressor. The truth is that the way we think about the need itself (to make a change) comes to define how we label it, whether as a Hassle, Challenge, or Threat. And these labels clearly affect how we feel and respond. Can we alter the label? Indeed, we can.

It can be a small need for change, such as replacing a light fixture, or a huge one, such as a move to a new country. On a “stress scale” of 1 to 10, the need for change reflects how we think about it, how we appraise it, and where we assign it on the scale. The more skewed on the scale, the more likely for consensus. For example, if you are heading out on an errand on a chilly day, you reach for a scarf but the scarf you had in mind is not available, you substitute another scarf easily. Most would… Stress: 1. If however, your neighborhood has been severely damaged in a storm, the immediate aftermath rates a stressful 10, again most would agree.

As we move to the middle of the range, however consensus is less likely to be reached. We all know people who have had to respond to multiple stressors and yet remain able to function well. And there are others known to us who “fall apart” at small needs for change.

How we label the stressor relates, in most instances, to our personality. We all know people who maximize stressors and those who minimize them.

Question: Nature or Nurture?

Answer: Most likely, both

In large part this reflects how we think about the stressor, and how we label it, whether as a hassle, challenge, or threat. Threats are experienced as Unfair, Unexpected, and Dangerous. Threats contribute to a heavy stress burden. Challenges are more directly connected to the need to step out of our comfort zone where automatic thinking and behaving prevail. Challenges afford us the opportunity to grow and try on a new thought or behavior. Hassles are just that: The everyday little nuisances and annoyances that are irksome but not threatening. We know how to manage these.

Separate from how it is labeled, the need for change often emerges out of an acute event, or at the direction of others. When the need is time sensitive, it is less possible to suppress or put off. Consider, for example, these frequently occurring catalysts for change in older age:

• A major life-altering illness that requires a change in one’s living situation.
• The loss of a partner who has been “making up for” the other partner’s diminishing functional ability.
• Sensory loss/changes that affect the individual’s social, vocational, or recreational life (what I refer to as the “living landscape”).

Managing the actual change refers to Adaptation (A topic worthy of a post of its own).

How one responds to the need for change in large part depends on the history if there depends in large part on the individual’s personality style and on their history and relationship to change.

As I see it, there are three major change styles: Preparers, Responders, Resisters.

• Preparers are those who will think about what they will do at a certain time or under certain circumstances, and plan accordingly.
• Responders are those who will make changes, but on an “as needed” basis.
• Resisters are those who insist on carrying on “as is” even when doing so makes no sense and is often outright dangerous. These folks can be tough on families.

As a clinician, it was always a red flag for me when someone would tell me at, say, age 80 that: “I might be 80, but I’m just the same as I was at 40.” (It made me wonder what they have been doing for 40 years to defend against having been “touched” by the experience of living.)

Activities for Your Journal

Think of a mid-range stressor (5 on the scale)

• What can you think (“say in your head”) to raise it to a 8?
• What can you think (“say in your head”) to lower it to a 2?
• What is your relationship to change? Are you a Preparer, Responder, Resister? What do you think happens when long-term partners enter into older age with different styles in their relationship to change?

In the next post the focus will be on Attitude.

Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash.