How does one age well?
Aging well includes a lot of factors and while elderly people can find it challenging to maintain good health and well-being, many of us let issues pass by as a natural course of action. As a caretaker or close family member, it is your responsibility to look after the elderly at your home. Due to boredom and overthinking many times, they might not want to reach out to you. It takes a toll on one's mental and physical health. And if an elderly person is reading this, you have to ensure that there is some indulgence in physical activities on a daily basis.
That can be walking, going to the nearest part, or doing yoga poses instructed by an expert. Whatever your mantra and whatever suits you well can help the aging process more than you can think. Being lazy is relaxing but anything extreme has never been beneficial for anyone. Regardless of your age group, your health should be your highest priority. A strict routine must eradicate the present and underlying issues in the body. How to age well? A lot depends on taking care of yourself. Below are some tips for old age people to maintain good health and well-being: People around you have a huge impact on your well-being.
Focus on your and your family's health through regular exercise, meditation, and yoga. Undergo annual health checkups to know your baseline health status. Get an Annual Cancer Screening done to help detect cancer at precancerous or early stages when it is curable. Ensure a comfortable and dignified life for yourself & your parents with serious illness, by making supportive and palliative care available for them. Palliative care improves the quality of life of elderly people by relieving their physical, psychological, spiritual & social problems so that they can live a dignified life for years to decades. Does old age increase existing complications in the body?
Old age can increase complications and make even the simplest ailments troublesome. Don't wait till life-threatening diseases lead you to fatal outcomes. Minor issues like the flu and the common cold in old age can progress and become complex infections like bronchitis, pneumonia, or sinus. Handling these with decreased immunity is not easy and it takes months of careful planning to maintain your overall health. Older cells do not function properly and given the fact that in some organs, new cells are not replaced with the dead ones, there is a serious decrease in number here. In the liver, kidneys, testes, and ovaries the number of cells decreases as we age and it is a known fact that when the number of cells is really less, the organ cannot function properly.
It further leads to organ failure and other complications in the body that become difficult to deal with in old age. Importance of good health and well-being Maintaining your health and well-being includes staying fit, making healthy food & mental choices, getting an adequate amount of sleep, staying away from harmful substances, and socializing with loved ones. Making minute changes to your routine can go a long way. Even if it is not about losing weight, regular physical activity can help encourage happy aging.
Furthermore, facilities like palliative care can ensure complete healing and help elderly people to cope with the issues they face on a daily basis. From musical sessions to spiritual ones, palliative care centers heal the patient with a holistic approach be it at any stage of the disease.
(The writer is the Founder of Dharamshila Rahat Supportive and Palliative care center.)