As time goes on and you continue to age, your immune system becomes worse and worse. When you’re still a baby, you have a pretty poor immune system, but that gets fixed within a few years and after you get adequately vaccinated.
However, once you start transitioning from being an adult to being a senior, that immune system continues to slow down more and more. One of the reasons your immune system doesn’t work as well with age is that your production of white blood cells is slowed down.
Your body continuously produces these cells because they naturally die off and get recycled regularly, but as your production of them slows down, there won’t be as many overall to replace the ones that die.
This leaves you with fewer cells to fight off incoming diseases than you would’ve had when you were younger, making it harder to stave off illness. Some research has found that you may have to get revaccinated after a certain age in order for them to retain their effectiveness.
Vaccines work by essentially giving your white blood cells something to practice on, a very small dose of the disease that they fight and then remember, so that next time they see it they identify it as a threat and take it out swiftly.
As you age, this “knowledge” doesn’t quite get passed down as well through cells, and eventually they might “forget” that a disease they’ve encountered is an enemy. Another issue that your body may encounter with age is an increase in autoimmune diseases, meaning that your body begins to attack itself.
This occurs for a variety of reasons, but it means that your immune system begins to go after healthy body cells that are just doing their job, which can have both light impacts and serious ones.
When it comes to the parts of the immune system that are working properly, they tend to work less well with age. The white blood cells that do go to fight off infections and viruses will do so with less ferocity than they used to, meaning it takes a lot longer to get rid of an illness than it would have when you were younger.
Without the proper speed of an attack, the disease might get a foothold much easier and might have an easier time spreading and overtaking certain parts of the body. It’s important for your longevity and quality of life to do everything you can to bolster your immune system as you age.
8 Ways To Prevent Mental Decline In Your Older Years
There has been a lot of research over the years about the best way to keep a healthy brain as we advance in years. There has been a lot of focus on the health and lifestyle decisions we make that could prevent mental decline and even dementia.
There are plenty of steps you can take to maintain your cognitive function and beat the mental decline.
1. Get Organized
Living an organized life will make it easier to remember where things are- everything should have it’s place. So, when you arrive home from a long day put your keys in the same place, keep your handbag or wallet in the same spot, and the same goes for the everyday items you use. It’s easy to remember where things are when you always keep them in the same place.
2. Concentration
The ability to concentrate declines as we age. It is important to decrease or eliminate distractions to improve your ability to concentrate on the task before you. Seniors need to work harder to shut out distractions. Such as when you open the refrigerator door and you have completely forgotten why you are in there or walking through the grocery store and cannot remember what you came to get. This occurs because something else popped into your brain just as you reached for the handle. Be sure to take a list when going to the grocery store. Too many choices can create distraction and cause you to forget what you came for or make it home with items you really did not need.
Short term memories are particularly susceptible to slipping away due to distraction. So, start making an effort to focus and concentrate now.
Studies have shown attention training can alter brain activity, so the aging population can learn to block out distractions in order to improve concentration. There are a growing number of activities, from crossword puzzles to Sudoku, promoted as ways to keep our minds young, Attention training is indeed a way to reduce older adults susceptibility to distracting stimuli and improve concentration.
3. Challenge Yourself
Find new ways to challenge your mind. That means playing word games, challenging a loved one to a game of chess, leading an active social life, and learning a new skill such as a language, cooking or playing an instrument.
Not only will you feel better about yourself, but your brain will get an excellent workout. The social aspect of this is also important, so try to get a lot of your game challenges in person or use a game that has a chat function that allows you to communicate with the person you’re playing against.
According to Alzheimers.net, one of the most effective ways to prevent dementia is by learning a new language.
4. Manage Stress
Short term stress may leave you more focused, sharper, and able to pay more attention. However, chronic stress has the opposite effect and it can interrupt your ability to form memories and recall information.
Healthy stress management is imperative.
5. Eating Habits
Your diet is vital, which means getting plenty of vitamins and minerals. Ensure you’re loading up on antioxidants and brain foods like folic acid and omega-3 fatty acids. Your diet can improve your brain health.
6. Exercise
Getting exercise provides your circulation with a healthy boost and even improves your cholesterol levels, both of which can benefit your cognitive abilities and circulation.
It isn’t just your body that needs exercise – so does your memory. You can do that by playing memorization games (you’ll find there’s an app or two for that). A great place to start is by finding a good brain training app that you can use daily – from there you can invest in other apps that offer word games (even Scrabble is a great choice) and number puzzles.
Change it up every once in a while, so you don’t get used to the same tasks.
Your brain needs variety.
7. Sleep
Your brain processes your day while you sleep, it’s when it consolidates memories and reboots. So, you can do your cognitive function a major favor by getting plenty of sleep each night.
Create healthy routines around bedtime to prepare your body to catch seven hours.
8. Weight
Maintaining a healthy weight is important, additional weight puts pressure on your heart, contributes to hardened arteries, which just makes it harder for your heart to function properly.
Learning good habits to prevent weight gain
Obesity often leads to diabetes, which has its own role in your heart health and the health of your nerve cells. So, it makes sense then that people carrying more weight experience steeper mental decline.
This may be due to a lack of blood flow in smaller vessels creating essentially, mini-strokes that go completely undetected. The damage is cumulative, thus affecting our capabilities progressively.
You run into people all the time whose chronological age makes them technically, “old age” but whose physical appearance, attitude, and posture make them seem decades younger than their birth certificate would indicate.
On the other hand, you see people who are only 40 to 50 years old that already seem ready for retirement and senescence.
What makes the difference between these two classifications of people?
Many people are overlooking the power of the mind when it comes to the aging process. Those who continue to lead active lives with many social contacts and intact relationships with loved ones often carry the mindset that they are still young. They participate in sports, go dancing, eat out, and enjoy their bodies long after others have given up.
Attitude is everything when it comes to getting older. If you grew up in an era where “old age” happened when a person reached the age of 50 years, you will already feel you have arrived at old age upon your fiftieth birthday.
You tend to turn down opportunities for physical and social activity, increase the times you are sedentary and stop challenging your cognitive mind. When this happens, you truly do lose what you don’t use and you physically and emotionally age much faster than those who maintain physical, cognitive, and social activities well into the age where many others feel just too old to participate in these activities.
How do you get into the mindset of feeling young again?
It’s probably never too late to do this. You first need to recognize that age is just a number and that there are people much older than you who are doing things you may consider “too old” for them without difficulty. Look at people who seem and look younger than their years would otherwise say.
These are people who have refused to give into the meaning of the calendar and who continue to participate in youthful activities, bearing in mind that taking care of their body takes precedence over everything else. They are mentally alert, curious about life, and haven’t given up trying new things.
Compare these people with those who chronically complain about aches and pains, step back from fun and challenging activities, and prefer being sedentary to being more active.
These might be people who decide that they are too old to give up bad habits that contribute to the aging process, such as smoking and drinking alcohol, and have given up the meticulous care of their bodies that it takes to look and feel young.
What kind of person do you want to be?
The difference truly is in your mindset. If you decide that your body is a temple and continue to care for it, challenge it, and respect it, you will have no difficulty seeing yourself as young and vibrant.
Your risk of stressful life diseases will be less and you will feel less stressed in life when you carry yourself better and think of yourself as younger than your chronological age. If instead you dread your birthdays and see the passing of the years as a year closer toward death, your motivation and determination to feel and look young will be diminished and you will reflect that mindset in the way you present yourself to others.
If your ancestors lived long and healthy lives, take solace in knowing that you probably will, too, and you can carry the mindset of youth throughout your middle-aged years and older aged years.
Even if your ancestors did not live long and healthy lives, know that medical advances that focus on prevention and management of chronic diseases are on your side so that you can continue to feel and be young—well into your older years.
Never forget that age is just a number, and it does not dictate, “how one should feel” or “how one should act” at 50, 60 or even 90.
