Positive Ageing & Resilience Training Guy Robertson Director - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Guy Robertson Director Positive Ageing Associates

Positive Ageing & Resilience Training

Positive Ageing & Resilience Training

Delivery

Guy Robertson Miriam Akhtar

Major Life Events

• Retirement
• Relationship breakdown
• Becoming a carer
• Bereavement
• Acquiring a long term health condition

Major life events – can trigger an emotional process (a transition) which generally results in a significant change in key areas of life.

Transition

Emotional process

* Sense of purpose - people's motivation and meaning in life * Identity - how people feel about their role and place in society * Beliefs - what people believe to be true or important * Capabilities - people's talents and abilities * Behaviour - actions the person takes in their day to day life * Environment - living arrangements or where people carry out their day to day activities

Impact

What is Resilience?

* Resilience is the process of negotiating, managing and adapting to significant sources of stress or trauma. Assets and resources within the individual, their life and environment facilitate this capacity for adaptation and ‘bouncing back’ in the face of adversity. Across the life course, the experience of resilience will vary.”

A Definition

* Resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary * Resilience is about thoughts, behaviours and actions and can be learned by anyone * Being resilient doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t experience difficulty or distress. Emotional pain and sadness are common * There is great potential for growth, healing and insight from traumatic experiences

Ideas about resilience

* MITIGATE RISK * Identify emotions in self * Control and regulate emotions through mental skills * Think accurately and flexibly about causes and consequences of adverse events * Build positive emotion * Deploy an optimistic explanatory framework * PROMOTE WELLBEING * Know ones strengths * Know what strengths from past might serve well in future * Have a sense of purpose and meaning in life * Experience present moment awareness * Incorporate a sense of gratitude into every day life * Notice and Savour the world around and day to day experiences * CONNECT SOCIALLY * Build strong connections with others * Ask others for help when required

Learnable Competencies

Core Techniques

Ageing

Myth 1 – Ageing as a decline

* At age 65, people in the UK can expect to live in good health for around 60% of their life after 65 (85 women; 83 men) * Somewhere between 65%-77% of 65 year olds report their health as ‘good or fairly good’ * Even ‘oldest old’ (85years and over) – 80% rate their quality of life as ‘good or excellent’ – 80% need little or no care

Myth 1 – Ageing as a decline

Myth 2 – Ageing as unhappiness

Older people are happier

Myth 2 – Ageing as unhappiness

* In general people get happier as they age – most unhappy are 40-55 year olds

* Source ONS 2016

Why are older people happier?

Why older people are happier

What percentage of older people end up living in care homes?

• 96% of older people do not live in a care home
• Even 85+, 84% do not.

What percentage of older people live with dementia?

• Only 1.7% of 65-69 year olds do
• Even with the oldest old (85-89) where prevalence is

greatest, 82% do not have dementia

Myth 3 – Dementia and care homes

Dementia prevalence

Age Range % of pop with Dementia 65-69 1.7% 70-74 3% 75-79 6% 80-84 11.1% 85-89 18.3% 90-94 29.9% 95+ W 41.1%; M 29% Source: “Dementia UK Update”, Alzheimers Society, 2014

* “Clear and compelling evidence” that happy people tend to live longer and experience better health * Optimism has been shown to explain between 5-10% of the variation in the likelihood of developing some health conditions * Subjective well-being is estimated to add between 4 to 10 years to life compared with low SWB

Myth 4 – Illness beyond control

* A genetic predisposition is not the same as a prediction * Research with twins shows that genes only account for 25% of longevity * Most is in our control – lifestyle and attitudes

Myth 5 – Lifespan predetermined

New Metaphor

Wellbeing

5 Ways to Well- being

Change your thoughts and change your life

You feel the way you think

Thoughts & Feelings

Activating event Belief Feeling Behaviour

Actions, Beliefs & Consequences

What happens What you think How you feel What you do

Consequences

Choice

“One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last 20 years is that individuals can choose the way they think.”

Martin Seligman

A mindful approach to later life

Mindfulness

“Paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgementally” Jon Kabat Zinn

Mindfulness can help greatly in later life by:- * Slowing down time and enhancing our experience of the time we have * Enabling us to avoid rumination or the obsessive thinking associated with unhealthy feelings * Giving us the space to spot ‘thinking errors’ * Enabling us to deal better with pain * Helping us to be more relaxed * Stimulating greater appreciation of the beauty around us * Increasing our cognitive functioning

Mindfulness and Later Life

* Awareness * Thoughts * Concentration * Pain

Key elements

Awareness

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making

• ther plans.”

John Lennon

“The present is the only time any of us has to be alive - to know anything – to perceive - to learn - to act - to change – to heal.” Jon Kabat Zinn

Present Moment

Intensity of the Present

Thoughts

“It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts, and that they are not ‘you’ or ‘reality’.”

Jon Kabat Zinn

Thoughts are not Facts

Concentration

Physical effects

“Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls…” (Lazar et al 2006)

* Mindfulness may reduce cognitive decline associated with normal ageing * “…concentrative meditation could be a potential candidate as an adjustment therapy for attentional rehabilitation in people with dementia.” Hu et al (2011)

Cognitive Resilience

Pain

* An estimated 60%-75% of people over 65 report at least some persistent pain * Mindfulness can be extremely helpful with pain:-

* Average pain ‘unpleasantness’ levels can be reduced by 57% * Improves mood and quality of life in chronic pain conditions such as fibromalgia, lower back pain, IBS, MS and cancer

Managing Pain

• 1. Insula (related to sense of connectedness and

empathy) has been shown to be energised

• 2. Increases in positive mood & wellbeing directly

related to increased daily awareness

• 3. Reduced mortality, particularly due to

cardiovascular illness and stress

• 4. Reduces depression by up to 50% in those who have

had 2-3 previous episodes

General Evidence Base

Data from Williams & Penmann – “Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world”

M

From – “The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness”

Positive Emotions

Gratitude

What is good in your life? What are you grateful for? What has gone well?

Is the glass half full or empty?

You can learn optimism…

Sense of Purpose: the cornerstone of resilience

In later life, meaning is often related to:-

• Family (e.g. grandchildren)
• Making a positive contribution to society (e.g.

volunteering)

• Maximising our personal development (e.g.

learning new skills)

• Artistic or other creativity
• Spirituality
• Legacy
• Pleasure (e.g. travelling)

Possible elements

Eudaimonic Wellbeing

• Study of over 9,000 people over 65
• Found that those with high scores on ‘meaningfulness

and sense of purpose’ were 30% less likely to die over the study period (8.5 years)

• They lived on average 2 years longer than those in the

lowest wellbeing group “…shows that the meaningfulness and sense of purpose that older people have in their lives are also related to survival...”

Sense of Purpose

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. Victor Frankl

Health Benefits

Those who express clear goals or purpose in life live longer and healthier:-

* “A higher level of purpose in life was associated with a substantially reduced (57% less) risk of mortality at 5yrs follow up.” * “People scoring in the top 10% on sense of purpose measure were about 2.4 times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease than those in the bottom 10%” * “Those who score lower on eudaimonic wellbeing in mid 50’s were seven times more likely to be depressed in their mid 60’s”

Lessons from Okinawa

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” * Mark Twain

Life Review

“Where have I been and how does that affect where I want to go?” “Experience doesn’t make people wise. It is reflection on experience that makes us wise”

Mary Catherine Bateson

Jane Fonda clip.

Develop a life plan for your later years

• Planning can significantly increase your chances of

getting what you want “Luck is opportunity meeting preparation”

Thank you!

guyrobertson@positiveageingassociates.com www.positiveageing.org.uk