Dec 17 2008
Your Emotional Set Point
As we age, emotional health becomes more important than ever. After all, your emotional state is your constant companion throughout your life and should remain fairly consistent from your youth through your senior years. Assuming your brain is stable and well, the mental outlook you have at sixty- five can be healthier and more positive than the one you had at twenty-five, since you have the added benefit of life experience. Or it could be worse, if you allow yourself to fall into negative emotional habits. It’s really up to you. One of the keys to this emotional wellness is balance between positive and negative, hope and realism, doubt and faith. You should be able to treasure memories of the past, while being able to let go completely of lingering pain and resentment.
However, this is not usually as easy as it sounds. As Verne Kallejian, Ph.D., writes, “Unfortunately, we have neither the philosophy nor the rituals in Western civilization to facilitate emotional health in the aging process. Very few life experiences prepare us to deal with the potential problems of aging. Nothing can easily replace the self-esteem of an important job or easily replace the friendships that are terminated by illness, death, moving to a new environment or other unexpected events.”
As we age, the inevitable losses and changes of living can tilt our moods toward the negative. The death of a friend or loved one breeds loneliness and reminds us of our own mortality. Retirement, if the void is not filled with productive hobbies or volunteer work, can make us feel as if we have lost part of our identity. Failing health can cause anxiety or depression and contribute to one of the most harmful aspects of age: isolation. If a person lacks a proper sense of perspective or the cognitive tools to identify and change defeatist, dark thought patterns, it is easv to see how that person could, with age, become unpleasant and unhappy.
But as we age, destructive emotional patterns, resentment, and solitude are not inevitable. Current psychological theory holds that all of us possess “set points,” lite conditions that must be in place for our minds to feel a sense of well-being. You decide what conditions make up your set point and what emotions to associate with those conditions. For example, if your whole world has been work. YOU might associate retirement with uselessness and decay. In the remainder of this chapter, YOU will find specific-exercises that will help you avoid these very dangerous pitfalls. And through the process of BEST, you will discover a sense of identity and purpose that will truly satisfy you.