You eat vitamins, do sports, save money. But when it comes to aging, even this may not be enough. “You need to involve your brain a little,” says geriatrician Eva Topinková in the iReceptář podcast. According to her, your own psyche can eventually catch up with you.
You can play the audio version of the interview here:
Most of the time we don’t want to think about him. We think it’s far. Or that there is no point in solving it. But it will come at some point, and it may be sooner than we think. “Forget that old age doesn’t affect you, don’t displace it,” warns Eva Topinková, head of the Department of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine of the 1st Faculty of Medicine of the University of Prague and the General Faculty Hospital in Prague, in the podcast. “You’d better expect that it might be bad, but also work to make it not bad.”
It affects everyone
Or at least almost all of us. Statistics speak inexorably, and according to them, about eighty percent of us will live to old age. So there is a fairly good chance that you will be among those four fifths. “Do some math,” says the geriatrician. “Consider how old and in what state of health your parents and grandparents lived. You can start to follow that.”
He advises taking life as it comes, dividing it into individual stages and ignoring the less pleasant ones. It is reasonable to prepare not only mentally and physically, but also economically, to count on housing that will be comfortable and safe. So that you can be independent for as long as possible.
Accept the changes
In the end, the most difficult thing may not be coping with old age as such, but with what it brings with it. Decreased mental and physical performance. Diseases. The fact that you can be referred to someone else. “But you also have to deal with the fact that you suddenly don’t go to work, you lose the structure of the day, you are not so-called needed,” explains the expert. “And of course also with physical changes, because the silhouette of a young person is simply different from an old one.”
Hard work
How to approach it? Unfortunately, there is no universal advice. “Some people can do it on their own, but someone can be anxious, experience great psychological discomfort, which is connected to the very expectation of what is to come,” warns Professor Topinková. If this is also the case for you, it is certainly good not to close your eyes to fear.
Try to take it as a task, a mission for which you need to prepare. All means of support are allowed including help or perhaps better a coach. In short, someone who will help you understand that old age is not a problem, but a natural part of life. And that she can be beautiful, regardless of external circumstances.
