Joy, Contentment, and Anti-aging
The secret to joy and happiness isn’t really a secret at all. It comes when we learn to live a balanced, unshackled life, which is what happens as we grow older. As we age, we lost things like mental sharpness, clarity, strong bones and vitality. But we gain the one thing most people desire deeply – happiness.
What is the connection between joy, contentment, and anti-aging?
Social psychologists explain the changes we go through in mindset as we age as a shift from promotion motivation to prevention motivation. The former is when we’re young and have goals that depend on what we can gain from life.
The latter is when we make our goals with as little risk and loss as possible to keep our lives running smoothly and make everyone around us happy. We realize our responsibilities have increased and that others are depending on us more. We also want to be surrounded by the things we worked so hard to acquire.
It could also be that we start accepting who we really are, without succumbing to media’s idea of whom we should really be or what we should look like. Finding that feeling of self is actually quite a relief. As the philosopher, William James puts it, “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
And that serenity translates into happiness which is far from putting flowers in your hair and singing all day long. It means having a clear sense of reality, acceptance, and freedom from all the restrictions society forces on us.
But being happy isn’t just for the sake of feeling good. Its benefits go much further than that. Experts have proven that happiness makes us healthier. Happy people get sick less often because they have a strong immune system.
Also, according to a study carried out by John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, happy people heal faster if they’ve suffered an injury because their body’s determined to heal itself.
Plus, their positive outlook on life is a contributing factor as well. Another researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen, infected people with the cold and flu virus. He discovered that happy people get sick less often and if they do, they show fewer symptoms than those who not as cheery.
Another advantage to living a contented, joyful life is that it gets people to be more productive. A study was carried out on 2 separate groups of people; one group was shown a funny film prior to completing a series of mental questions, while the second group was not shown any film or a film that was neutral, rather than funny.
The first group did almost 12% better than the second group. This goes to show that when “feel good” hormones are released by the brain, they give a jump-start to actually get some work done.
An important conduit for the joy we have in our lives is the people we surround ourselves with. Research shows that those who were in warm, loving relationships suffered less emotional and physical pain. They also live longer, happier lives. This could be because they take care of health by eating right, exercising and avoiding smoking and drinking in excess. They also have a strong social support system. Good relationships that make us feel secure, happy and content not only protect our bodies but our brains as well. Those in unhappy relationships suffered more emotionally and physically. Loneliness and resentment are as potent as alcoholism or drugs.
“Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains,” says Robert Waldinger. “And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time.
Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories.”
There are many contributing factors that determine our levels of happiness for anyone being – gender, ethnicity, education, health, wealth, and family history.
Yet the good news is joy comes with age, no matter what we lived through when we were younger. It’s a time of lost innocence, a sense of hope and belief that has been seasoned with time, and a contentment and happiness that has evolved and grown with time, just like you.