Live Your Best Life After 60: Tiny Tweaks, Big Impact for Health and Happiness

Wellness habits to begin in young adulthood

Ipshita Guha
Modern Women
7 min readFeb 19, 2024

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Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels

Time never stays standstill

People say high school and college are your best years. You are carefree and zestful. The world looks promising. You have all the time ahead. Your minds are filled with ideas, concepts, goals, and wishes.

Things begin to subtly change as you move from college or university life to a career. The first brush with the “real-real” world and before you know it you are sucked into a rabbit hole falling faster than Alice.

Relationships, commitments, living-in or marriage, kids, loss of parents, success, betrayal, and disappointments at work, friends moving away — all these happen as you navigate through your 20s to 40s. When you do take a breather, you realize a big chunk of time has passed. You have been playing catchup all through this while. Running after one shiny object to another.

If you are not mindful of certain things in your 20s to 40s, your old age might end up being lonely, painful, and even pitiful. You don’t want that.

This post is inspired by what I have been observing in some elderly women around me — mothers of friends and relatives too. Some are octa and nonagenerians living healthily with vigor and a smile on their faces while others hardly in their early-70s are living in a metaphoric prison — fearful and dithering at every stage. Wobblying through life, merely existing not living.

So, let’s talk about monitoring and recalibrating some things to make the third and final part of your life enjoyable, satisfying, and graceful.

You gotta act before it's too late

In a state of balancing and juggling multiple responsibilities and interests, you often end up neglecting yourself. Some things are taken for granted, and others you shove under the carpet believing that they are non-issues. Women are more prone to this.

By the time you are in your 40s, dear old perimenopause comes knocking at the door playing with our hormones making them jump up and down like a yo-yo. Yes, everyone ages at one point.

Life is mostly long.

The advancement in technology and medicine ensures you live longer than your average ancestors. 80 to 90 years are common unless there is some unfortunate event of ill-health.

You have to make some conscious choices, take some deliberate actions, and live a part of your life in a way that keeps you both mentally and physically healthy.

Stop being judgmental

Everyone has faults including you. Learn to live with different kinds of people. Adjust, adapt, appreciate.

Get off your high horses and make some friends. Good friends with whom you often hang out. Your work and family are priorities. They do need you but when you need them, they may not be around. Not because they don’t want to but because everyone has a life. Unlike you, they will choose themselves first.

If you are down with a fever, it’s one of those friends who will come around with a pot of chicken soup.

There are two quite old ladies in the apartment complex where I live. One of them is frail while the other is reasonably steady. Every morning the latter waits for the former in the lobby. They both go for a walk in the complex hand in hand, smiling and chatting away. It’s a beautiful sight and I hope I have someone like her when I am at that age. All of us might need someone like that with age.

Do you have such friends?

Practice, practice, practice

You must have heard of neuroplasticity. No? Read here.

Our brain can adjust and change. It means if you practice something regularly your brain remembers how to do it and can perform the task effortlessly. If you stop doing a task, your brain will become resistant to it. You will become dependent on someone else for help.

House help is quite common in Indian households. Some families have two-three of them to do the dishes, do the laundry and fold them, cook, and clean the house.

You may be able to afford them but you also become severely dependent on them. I know of such women who become jittery if the maid decides to play hooky or is genuinely sick.

At some time, your mind is convinced that they cannot perform any of those tasks adding to your stress if the house help is sick or on leave. My relatives who have continued to do their chores are the ones who are smiling and living a good life in their 80s. God bless them.

Do the boring stuff. Every day. Making the bed, doing the laundry, going to the grocery store. The ability to do it on your own will keep your confidence primed.

Eat well and have one meal a day alone

Everyone talks of nutritious meals, eating healthy, organic, and whatnot. All that is true and you know it. You probably eat healthy or you don’t.

Nutrition affects our physical and mental health. Gut health is connected to brain health. Hopkins says it too. Anxiety, depression, and cognitive capabilities are some of the conditions dependent on your diet.

What you might not be doing is keeping yourself updated with information on nutrition, food value, and recommended dietary allowances for different age groups.

Meal times are important for a family but do yourself a favor. Try and have at least one meal alone in peace. Savor the food, and eat mindfully.

Train your brain to enjoy the meals in solitude instead of thinking how lonely you feel eating by yourself. This habit will be helpful in life when you are not alone by choice but due to circumstances.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ~ Aldous Huxley

One of my acquaintances eats random food in tiny portions because she is unable to handle loneliness. Her brain is fixated on the lack of people at the table instead of savoring the food. She has severe muscle loss and is wobbly while walking, therefore, continuously requiring help and support. There are signs of early onset of dementia.

Be a bare minimum of tech-savvy

After my father passed away, the entire responsibility of managing my mother’s finances came to me. Though she can use a debit card at a merchant’s outlet, withdrawing cash from the ATM is still a daunting task for her. My mother is lucky she has got me around.

What about people who do not have children or do not live with their children?

Pay the bills on your own. Don’t pass it to someone else just because you can’t handle the tech or the details. Push yourselves. Learn it. It’s not rocket science.

In this age of scams, frauds, phishing, and click-baiting, becoming tech-savvy is a survival skill one must have and hone.

It’s all about a mindset.

If you are interested and aware, you can do it. My mother knows how to order stuff on Amazon and pay for it. She also knows never to give any details to anyone online even if she is threatened with her bank account being frozen.

Walk, read, grow plants, bake, or sing

Do a thing for your body, a thing for your mind, and a thing for your soul. Every day. Walk, read, bake, sing, dance, meditate. Do something on your own. For yourself.

Because you need it.

Everyone and their mother preaches teaches, and tells the importance of walking if not exercising vigorously. There has got to be an iota of truth in this unless you think everyone is copying the other.

Walk because your body needs it, and so does your brain. Even your spirit because when you go outside, the change of scenery recharges you. Regular walking habits outside on the road, pavements, etc., will protect you from falls. It’s all a matter of habit.

My grandfather and granduncle used to walk five kilometers every morning till very old age. One lived past the 80s the other lived till 95.

The habit of reading is a must. It can be either reading or listening to an audiobook or podcast. It means you are absorbing something, assimilating it, analyzing, and extracting some information for yourself whether to act upon or just for entertainment. This is one habit that I deliberately maintain in preparation for my old age.

Loneliness in their old age is the biggest fear of many. It is also a possible reality of life. If you don’t plan and prepare to handle it with a multi-pronged plan in advance, it can engulf you. Eat you from inside and make you hollow. One of the best ways to tackle it is by developing hobbies and habits to keep your body and mind engaged.

Sing, bake, grow flowers or food, or participate in voluntary activities to keep yourself engaged shifting the focus from your immediate family to a wider community.

Don’t forget you matter as much as others do

Connections.

As human beings, our craving for connections, association, and relations is lifelong. Often this need shifts our focus on everything but us.

Work, family, children, tasks, and chores are there and you have to deal with them. I know it. I am a woman and I experience it daily.

No one has to be or should be a full-time daughter, wife, and (or) mother. You should carve out some time for yourself. To learn to live alone and enjoy your solitude. This deliberate practice can protect us from the fear of remaining alone.

My 85YO aunt lives in a big house all by herself. Sometimes there is a house help sometimes not. When I ask her how she manages her time alone, she quips — “Oh, I have too many things to do.

If you don’t take care of yourself, how will you do all the other things you think you should do? Make self-care a priority from the early days so that the golden period is indeed resplendent and not shrouded in a grey mist or fog.

You should have some time for you too. Just you.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. ~ Buddha

Ipshita Guha is an ambivert. She aspires to be a ghostwriter for solopreneurs, SMB owners, C-suite, and corporate executives. She hopes to vicariously live the second half of her life through those exciting lives. She also writes about Refining Mindset and other stuff on Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, and her website.

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Ipshita Guha
Modern Women

In quest of living my unlived life | Linkedin:/ipshitabasuguha | Twitter:@ipshitaguha | Insta: @theipshitaguha