How to reframe your beliefs about aging

Do you have "screen apnea?" Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone coined this term in 2007 after noticing she'd developed an unhealthy habit while answering emails: She held her breath. Body Electric host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Stone about this phenomenon — and gets insight from James Nestor, author of "Breath," on how to reset our breath and relieve screen time stress. Binge the whole Body Electric series here. Sign up for the Body Electric Challenge and their newsletter here.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

It's hard to find time for anything with a newborn at home. And in the months after having a baby, intimacy with your partner may fall to the wayside. But sex and relationship experts say that maintaining your intimate relationship with your partner is a worthwhile challenge. In this episode we'll talk strategies for reconnecting with your partner, exploring your desires, and expanding your ideas of sex and intimacy.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

For decades, health experts have relied on body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight to height, to classify people as underweight, normal weight, overweight or obese. But sometimes, you need more than two numbers to understand your health. For example, BMI can't tell you how much of your weight is fat versus muscle. That's why a growing number of researchers and physicians prefer other metrics instead. NPR health correspondent Allison Aubrey breaks down the history and shortcomings of BMI, and shares other methods to get a fuller picture of your body.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

There are a lot of misconceptions about sleep. Sleep scientist Rebecca Robbins and her colleagues looked into common myths about sleep to help everyone get a better night's rest. This episode originally published Janaury 9, 2024.

Want better sleep? Sign up Life Kit's Guide to Better Sleep, our special newsletter series. When you sign up, you'll receive a series of emails over one week with tips you can try that very night to prioritize and improve your sleep. Sign up at npr.org/sleepweek.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

The summer's first major heat wave has arrived. Our bodies do have natural ways to dissipate heat, but when temperatures get extreme, sometimes they just can't keep up. In this episode of Life Kit, learn how to keep cool, hydrated and safe in extreme heat.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Intimidated by grilling? Cooking over an open flame can do that. In this episode, learn the basics from which type of grill to choose, to how to maintain a fire and create different temperature zones, to tips on tools and safety. This episode originally published May 24, 2022.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Should you merge your finances with a significant other? Keep them separate? Or something in between? Financial therapist Lindsay Bryan Podvin breaks down different ways to handle your finances with a partner and how to keep communication open and honest no matter what financial plan you pick.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

With graduation season here, our friends at NPR's All Songs Considered asked listeners to tell them about songs that bring back memories of the final days of high school, when they said goodbye to old friends, left home and struck out on their own. Join NPR's Robin Hilton and Stephen Thompson as they reflect on graduation through song.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Every year, more than 350,000 people go into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital setting in the United States. CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, can help double or triple survival rates. In this episode, we'll explain the basics of this emergency procedure so you can feel empowered to help in a life-or-death situation.

Sign up for Life Kit's newsletter

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

It's easy to stop noticing what we love about our lives. Even the most passionate relationships, stimulating jobs and exciting cities can lose their sparkle. Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot, author of the new book Look Again, explains how to fall back in love with life's small joys. For more episodes from Life Kit, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Instructional Associate Professor of Gerontology Paul Nash joins Professor George Shannon for a conversation on the impacts of ageism, intersectionality and LGBTQ+ issues in aging, and the importance of talking about sexual health with older adults.

Quotes from the episode

On stereotypes and the impacts of ageism

Well, there are some huge implications when it comes to ageism. So when we look on an individual level, we know that those people who have internalized ageism, so when they've acquired ageist attitudes across the life course, and then they reach older age themselves and they start to internalize those negative perceptions. We know that people that do that tend to walk slower, they tend to be more unstable on their feet, more likely to fall. They also have reduced cognitive functioning. So we actually start to see these stereotypes as we call it embodied. So we call it the stereotype embodiment theory, and we know that older adults have this more negative opinion of aging and being older themselves also have an average life expectancy that is about seven and a half years, less than those people that have a positive attitude about aging.

When we look at society, we know that older adults make a huge contribution to society. We talk about billions of dollars a year in things like informal caregiving, even in terms of paid work, but also within the volunteer sector as well. So older adults make a continued service to society and to the economy, but it's often something that is not really discussed this often. So it's not really met. And when we start to prejudice against old people, we actually discriminate against their engagement in society. And as such what we're doing is actually making things an awful lot worse for ourselves. So what we need to do is start to actively embrace older adults and their diversity and understand accurate perceptions of aging rather than these stereotype myths that are widely held.

Ageism is essentially prejudice against your future selves. So if we set up an ageist society, now when we read later life for ourselves, then we're going to be living and growing old in that age of society. So we need to start to challenge that younger people need to appreciate that actually having no wrinkles having gray hair or whatever, having wrinkles and gray hair is not a bad thing. Being older is not a bad thing. When we start to see all these anti-aging serums, well, that's kind of a fallacy. It's not going to stop you from aging. Every moment that we're alive, we are aging. Therefore, really the alternative to aging is death. And I don't think many people would like to wish that upon themselves either.

When it comes to the wider social problems and the stigmas and things that I think we need to try and do is we need to be very much aware of our own language. And language, as you know, is incredibly powerful. So for example, we might see ageist stereotypes in greeting cards, and we will have a bit of a giggle about that, but, well, that reinforces the stereotypes. That adds to the issues that older people think that well, okay, I'm 60, I'm 70 I'm 80 as well, I must have cognitive impairment. Well, indeed, what we need to do is start to challenge these stereotypes. We have this assumption, or we paint this mental image in our head that all older people are going to be frail. All older people are going to have cognitive impairment. That's just not true. The majority of older adults, even the age of 80 are not going to be living with cognitive impairment. It's a disease state. Yes. We understand that people who, as they age are more likely to develop dementia, but the majority still don't.

On intersectionality and LGBT issues in aging

We know that the majority of older adults within the LGBT community are likely to be single. They're also less likely to have a biological family, so children of their own. And they're also more likely to be estranged from their own family, which has led really to the development of what we call family of choice, which is really where people surround themselves by friends and friends basically take that role of family within your own life. But that can be kind of challenging unless we have intergenerational family or intergenerational families of choice, because it may, be for example, that a group of people at the same age all start to require support and help at the same sort of times.

We have to be very, very conscious of this. And then as I mentioned before, with that intersectionality, when we look at how racism and sexism and homophobia has developed across the last 50 years, we can start to understand then why, for example, gay women of color, and especially trans women of color are subject to the most forms of discrimination, which leads to problems in terms of accessing services, because they don't have faith in healthcare services, in support services, in any formal structure. So we have to make sure that there are targets and health messages. We need to make sure that we are removing some of these intersectional barriers so we can try and aim for a more equitable society.

One of the problems that we have within the LGBT community is that there are very few quote-unquote safe spaces. And these often revert around bars around nightclubs, around places, for example, that you might meet with loud music and as an older adult, that might not necessarily be your ideal situation, especially if you're living with cognitive impairment, if you're living with a visual impairment or indeed issues with hearing as well. So we find that older adults often feel slightly isolated from these particular groups, which leads to larger issues with their social network, having reduced social networks and indeed self-isolate. And we start seeing then the problems around social isolation and loneliness that you mentioned earlier, George. And these are huge issues, not just within the LGBT community, but within the older adult population as well. But before we go down that rabbit hole, it is worth mentioning that older adults are not the most lonely in society.  Actually, that is something that we can pass off to the younger generation, which arguably is partly down to that social comparison with social media.

On the importance of talking about sex and older adults

One of the problems that we've got and this really pervades through research as well, is we have this wide-standing assumption that older adults don't have sex. So as soon as you reach 50 ok and say, you're done, you never have sex again. We know this to be untrue, but research and mostly policy also stopped collecting data about older adults and their sexual health and their sexual behavior as well. So there's a lot of data that we just don't have on this population. So when it comes to sex and sexual health, what we need to do is make sure one, we're engaged in the older adult population and saying, well, we know you're having sex, but let's make sure we can do it in a safe way.

We also need to make sure that sexual health screening is available for older adults because we have targeted interventions for youth groups,  for hard-to-reach communities, but we don't have sexual health screening that goes around residential care, for example. And there's no reason why we build that. We also have to be very, very aware that older adults have different relationship styles. So gone are the days where every older adult is in the same relationship that they were in when they were 20 years of age. Indeed,  now we're seeing increased divorce rates. We're seeing open relationships, polyamorous relationships, the same as we're seeing across other age groups as well. So we have to be very aware that for example, condoms, aren't just there to prevent pregnancy, but they're also there for sexual health. And we can take that across to, for example, HIV, where we see now that over 50%, nearly 60% of all those people living with HIV are older adults. And within this population, those are people over the age of 50. And that's been a real challenge, both in terms of healthcare providers also in terms of policy.

So really what we need to do is open our minds and address some of these ageist assumptions that we have around older adults, and actually start to work with older adults as well, rather than making these assumptions about this homogenous group, which is exactly the opposite. It's the most heterogeneous group that you're going to get and actually work with them to understand some of these intricacies and understand some of these challenges that have been faced. So again, what we can do is try to make sure that these health messages are targeted and available for these specific groups.

If we make these assumptions, the old people don't have sex well, we're automatically cutting them off from research or automatically cutting them off from health services. So really, I think one of the key lines is something that we used very, very widely in the UK. When working with older adults, we should be saying nothing about us without us. We should have that participating in inclusion work with older adults. Don't make assumptions around them and what aging actually entails when actually we've got these experts in the field, as it were, that are largely ignored from social policy and from research.

You may have heard the voice of today’s guest before … but these days she’s using it to echo a different message, inviting everyone to Reclaim Your Right to Grow Old!
Once dubbed “the most heard voice in America” by New York Times, Kathleen O’Brien was the voice of directory assistance throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. If you dialed 411 at any time from a landline, it was her voice you heard. And while technology and times have changed over the decades, with an abundance of education, research and a career portfolio under her belt, at the proud age of 72, Kathleen has a timeless message of wisdom to share as author of her new book, “Reclaim Your Right to Grow Old: How to Immerse Yourself In, Be Curious About, and Celebrate Life’s Most Important Stage.” In her book, Kathleen takes a deep dive into societies misguided attitude towards aging and highlights all of the wonders that lie ahead for those who dare to grow old.
Reclaim Your Right to Grow Old is filled with what might seem like surprising advice in today’s seemingly overwhelmingly anti-aging culture. Kathleen offers many messages including why fear can be a great motivator, why she believes we should be proud to reveal our age, her views on the marketing machine behind the beauty and wellness industry and how that is impacting our views on aging as well as respect for older adults and even seeing time and death as your ally. She won’t tell you to age gracefully – but she is all about Aging GreatFULLy and even celebrating your eccentricities!
It’s a must-listen power-hour of enlightYOUment you won’t want to miss! You can connect with Kathleen O’Brien at www.GrowOldBeHappy.com where you can also purchase her book, Reclaim Your Right to Grow Old, also available on Amazon, or your favorite booksellers.
Thank you, amazing Aging Rebels, tuning in from around the world, we so cherish you listening to the show! We pride ourselves in being The Listener’s Show! Thank you Feedspot for recognizing the Aging GreatFULLy show as a top show on Aging worldwide three years in a row! If you enjoy this episode, please share it with your friends and family and know that we tremendously appreciate your positive show reviews too! Remember, you rock and you Role model! To connect, share, stream, download the show, visit www.holleykelley.com or check out our official host page at www.CTRNetwork.com/holleykelley.

In dieser Folge diskutieren Uta und Isi gemeinsam mit Eugenia Lagemann, Managing Director bei fischerAppelt & Herausgeberin des "Teengeist" Reports darüber, was die Gen Z von der Arbeitswelt erwartet - und wie sich das von anderen Generationen unterscheidet.

Man hört immer wieder, dass die jüngeren Generationen weniger arbeiten wollen. Aber stimmt das? Und wenn ja - und das automatisch schlechter?

What does it mean for a society to be truly inclusive? And why is aging left out of that conversation? These subjects are at the heart of my discussion with the model, producer, and pro-aging advocate Karen Williams. Karen was discovered by a photographer in a Toronto airport and began modeling at 13-years-old. She considered herself to be on the periphery, with lots of jobs for Seventeen and brands like Clairol.  At 5'9", she wasn't considered tall, and there wasn't a Kate Moss exception at the time. She admired many of the other Black models from afar but never had the opportunity to work with them because she was never hired as a runway model. Through it all, Karen remained a student and continued to model until she completed graduate school. From there, she went on to have several successful careers.

At age 54, Karen was lured back to modeling by her former agents, who saw a gap in the marketplace. WIth stunning gray hair and an eye on the industry, she has a platform through which she can talk about how the US, and other countries, have made ageism one of the last 'ism' to be dismantled. And to make a case for positive aging advocacy. After all, it is a privilege to grow older.

During this episode, we question why there isn't a Black, Latin, Asian, or Indigenous version of Carmen Dell'Orefice. Why the beauty industry is reluctant to ban terms like anti-aging (even though the beauty bible Allure did), why tackling aging could positively impact our country's infrastructure, how we lump together all people over a certain age (when we don't do that for younger generations). Karen also brings up the idea that older women are rendered invisible and question how hiding factors into that reality. We discuss the stigmas and fears attached to going gray, why fashion and beauty companies seem reluctant to embrace consumers of a certain age, and why some of them are more interesting in performative support than actually being allies.

One way Karen used her advocacy is to tell stories of women over 40 via the "I Am Conversations", a digital interview series she produced and led with photographer Angelika Buettner as part of the I Am Movement. This episode is a rich conversation that should not be missed.