When you’re young, stress is all around you. You’re struggling to land the right job, pay the rent and find and maintain healthy relationships.
It’s easy to think that once you retire, you’ll enjoy stress-free living. Older folks have the life experience and wisdom to put everything in perspective, right?
Actually, seniors face many stressors. Even if they’ve managed to save for retirement, they may still fret about outlasting their savings.
Sources of stress for retirees include a grab bag of fears. There’s the potential loss of cognitive function, independence and loved ones. Fear of moving from a longtime home, getting a grim medical diagnosis or becoming a caregiver to an ailing partner can also stoke anxiety.
Another cause of stress often flies under the radar: fear of slipping and falling.
“It’s a specific, late-life worry,” said Dr. Jordan F. Karp, professor of psychiatry and department chair at University of Arizona College of Medicine. “Fear of falling can lead to fear of walking and leaving the house,” which in turn can breed social isolation.
Stressing out about falling makes sense when you look at the numbers. Every year, those over age 65 report about 36 million falls. Roughly three million of them go to the emergency room.
These stress triggers are hardly irrational for many older people. It’s reasonable to worry about declining health, diminishing quality of life and the loss of friends and family.
For those who experience mild to moderate symptoms of stress, such as irritability and fatigue, there are steps that can decrease its adverse impact. Practical, solution-oriented thinking helps.
“It starts with careful planning,” Karp said. “You want to engage as many resources as possible to get the help you need.”
If you’re worried about falling, for instance, you can enroll in exercise classes to improve your balance and gait, remove tripping hazards such as rugs and install grab bars in the bathroom. If you fear dementia, you can learn a new language or musical instrument (or any activity to enhance brain health), socialize more and watch your diet.
It also helps to examine the type of stress you’re up against. Acute stress can result from loss of a spouse, moving to a new home or suffering a serious medical event. Chronic stress, by contrast, flows from ongoing conditions such as loneliness or struggles with poverty or chronic pain.
“Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a source of stress in older adults,” Karp said.
While acute stressors wreak havoc in the short term, they can sometimes subside over time as we adjust to a new normal. But problems worsen when layers of stress feed on each other.
“If you think of additive stress, if you’re in chronic pain, it can be much worse if you don’t have enough money or you’ve lost a spouse,” Karp said.
He urges seniors to reduce the cumulative burden of stress by taking a two-prong approach. First, ask your primary-care physician about lifestyle changes. Examples might include optimizing your medications and combating cognitive decline with new hobbies or daily habits (crossword puzzles, memory games, etc.).
Second, enlist friends, family and caregivers to help alleviate stress. They can serve as accountability partners to motivate you to stick to a new, healthier routine.
“Because of the increased prevalence of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults, they may need more frequent reminders or a coach to engage in mindfulness exercises, relaxation training techniques and other activities that address the systems in which they live,” Karp said.
As stress intensifies, it becomes harder to manage. Common diagnoses among older people include generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), depression and panic disorder.
Among those retirees who experience severe stress, it often goes untreated. Researchers have found that only one-third of seniors with GAD get treatment for it.
Medical providers might propose cognitive behavioral therapy as an option, especially if stress causes sleep loss. This treatment can address entrenched patterns of self-defeating behavior and negative thoughts.
You can also take your cue from Robert De Niro. As a restless retiree in the 2015 movie “The Intern,” he uses tai chi to decompress.