Boomerstress: Managing the Unique Stresses of the Boomer Generation

Boomerstress

Managing the Unique Stresses

of the Boomer Generation

David Pargman, Ph.D.

Idyll Arbor

39129 264th Ave SE

Enumclaw, WA 98022

360-825-7797

idyllarbor.com

Idyll Arbor, Inc. Editor: Sand Swenby

© 2017 Idyll Arbor, Inc.

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During the preparation of Boomerstress my brother Stanley passed away. It is to his memory that I dedicate this book.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Stress and Anxiety

2. Stress Reactions

3. The Changing Body and Mind

4. Managing Stress and Anxiety

5. Learning to Relax

6. Health and Wellness

7. Using Mindfulness to Manage Stress

8. Stress and Exercise

9. Finances and Retirement

10. Relationships — People Need People

11. From Your Parents’ Child to Their Caregiver

12. Coping with Retirement

Epilogue

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Urska Dobersek, my graduate assistant at Florida State University (and now Dr. Dobersek), whose assistance in manuscript preparation and organization of referenced materials and citations were of great help in completing the book. And of course, a very special thanks to Marsha Pargman whose support, commentary, and advice over the years have been invaluable sources of motivation. She continuously served as both first mate and navigator as Boomerstress rode the swells and turbulence on the long journey to the final product.

Introduction

Boomers are men and women born soon after the end of World War II, when a huge boom in births occurred worldwide. Boomers face significant challenges. Many of their problems are unique to the boomer generation. And some boomer issues are also faced by people at other ages. Unique stressors or not, many boomers are not ready to deal with aging and retirement. These stressors and issues lead to what I call boomerstress.

Right now, boomers are approximately 60 to 70 years old. They are healthier and live longer than previous generations. In the US about 10,000 men and women turn 62 every day. One result of longer life is more years of daily stress and anxiety. Rare is the boomer — or, for that matter, any person — whose day is completely free of stress and anxiety.

Many boomers’ stressors are different than earlier in their lives. Teenagers don’t have elderly parents living in distant nursing homes to visit and attend to. Teenagers don’t have unemployed adult children who have returned home. Elementary-school kids don’t have to worry about making mortgage payments, paying the rent, or making costly home repairs. Toddlers don’t have to earn money and cope with workplace stress.

The boomer years are a time when some of your old stressors don’t bother you as much because either you no longer care so much about them or they may have disappeared. You no longer wake at two o’clock in the morning to feed the baby and change the diaper. You no longer lie awake in bed because your teenager has not yet returned from a date. Now you are more likely to dwell on your changing and changed body, health, and wellness. Your thoughts are filled with retirement issues, such as financial security and caring for your elderly parents who may no longer be able to live on their own. You may be thinking about the loss of old friends and the demands of making new friends. For the most part, boomers’ stressors are unique and cause stress that is more than a mildly irritating thorn in the side. And some stressors must be faced and resolved immediately or they may damage relationships and wellbeing — and may even result in serious illness. But there’s good news — when managed well, stress can have a positive effect on your life.

In this book I point out that during the boomer years and beyond, we constantly keep company with physical, social, and psychological stressors. What’s most important is that such potentially harmful boomerstress can be successfully managed — and sometimes even made to completely go away!

In this book you will find tips to help you successfully cope with stress and anxiety, as well as information to help you think through and find solutions to specific problems caused by boomerstress. In the first four chapters I specifically cover stress and anxiety. Chapter 1 talks about the difference between stress and anxiety. Chapter 2 describes and discusses stress reactions, and how important managing them is in taking care of stress and anxiety. Chapter 3 reviews the changes in your body and mind that occur as you age. Chapter 4 reviews aspects of health and wellness, including many tips on managing your daily routine well. Chapter 5 talks about specific ways to manage stress and anxiety. Chapter 6 discusses the importance of learning to relax — you might be surprised how many boomers still don’t know how to relax in a healthy way — and provides specific relaxation techniques. Chapter 7 describes mindfulness and two of its forms, yoga and meditation. Because I am so convinced of the importance of regular exercise as a way for boomers to maintain a good life — after all, I wrote all about this in my book Boomercize — Chapter 8 is devoted to a review of exercise in managing stress and maintaining health and wellness.

The rest of the book provides information about various situations that are commonly encountered in boomerhood and beyond. Chapter 9 talks about the financial part of retirement — how to be sure you can afford to retire. Chapter 10 reviews the importance of relationships in your boomer years. It also provides tips for managing the stress that relationships may cause as you move into retirement and beyond. Chapter 11 brings forward the many issues involved in caring for aging parents. Chapter 12 emphasizes the importance of making a good adjustment to retirement.

I hope that you will use the information in this book to chart your course to a happy retirement — and beyond!

1.

Stress and Anxiety

It would be wonderful to completely avoid stress and anxiety. To try to do that, you would have to live in a bubble. But that probably wouldn’t keep you free from stress and anxiety. Stress and anxiety are part of life. But they can be managed so they don’t take over your life.

Although many people, including professionals, disagree on exactly what stress and anxiety are, most agree that stress is any specific thing or situation that puts pressure on you and/or your life situation. When you are stressed and/or anxious, you lose that physical and psychological balance that your health and wellbeing depend on.

Either stress or anxiety can cause physical or psychological symptoms. The good news is that you can get yourself back into balance. If you successfully manage your symptoms of stress and/or anxiety, you notice that your inner balance comes back. You know this because of how you feel in your body and emotions — and even by what you see in the mirror.

All agree that stress and/or anxiety, regardless of the cause, can have a powerful effect on your life, especially on your health and wellbeing. All agree that before you can manage stress, you have to notice its effects on you. And to do this, you have to know what to look for.

What is Stress?

Physicists and engineers use the term stress to refer to the amount of energy or force put upon an object. They also regard stress as the amount of pressure that something can withstand before it breaks or can no longer do its intended job. So how does this apply to you and your life? It has its effects on your physiology. Physiology is that part of biology that is concerned with the proper chemical function of your body’s cells, organs, and organ systems.

In the 1920s Dr. Walter Cannon coined the word homeostasis to refer to the concept first defined by physiologist Dr. Claude Bernard in 1865. Homeostasis refers to the tendency of your metabolism — all your body’s cellular activities, including those that create and use energy— to actively regulate itself to maintain a stable balance of its features. For example, your body naturally keeps its temperature steady, blood sugar levels within a healthy range, and levels of waste products low. Thus, homeostasis is the internal balance that your body maintains. The notion of balance is important to remember in order to understand the effects of stress on you as well as what to do about stress.

The famous physician and physiologist Dr. Hans Selye was one of the first to study human stress. He defined stress as a state of physiological imbalance. Dr. Selye maintained that if for any reason your homeostasis is knocked out of kilter, you become stressed. He defined a stressor as anything inside or outside you that provokes an imbalance in you. The causes of stress may be psychological, social, or physical. More often than not, your remarkable human qualities help you regain balance quickly and usually automatically. You don’t even need to think about it! Your body can usually handle stress on its own — but not always. Sometimes you have to become aware of the stress and help your body out by making different choices. And sometimes you need to get help from others.

Much of the rest of this book talks about the many ways to do this. Perhaps the most important part of Dr. Selye’s work was finding that no matter what the stressor is, your body’s response to stress is always the same. It doesn’t matter if the stressor is your son-in-law losing his job, a grandchild falling ill, your sprained shoulder, or a fender bender. All of these things create the same stress response. The reaction is exactly the same no matter the stressor.

Adaptation to Stress

When Dr. Selye applied what he called the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) to humans, he set the stage for not only understanding human stress responses but also doing something about them. In GAS he defined three stages that occur after you encounter a stressor — whether it is a good stressor, such as good sex, or a bad stressor, such as an illness.

Stage 1. Alarm

During the alarm stage, the stressor calls your body to action. Your body gets ready for fight or flight. The fight-or-flight response was first observed by Dr. Cannon. He felt that humans are genetically wired to respond defensively to what we perceive as a stressor. You do this automatically for your own protection. Your sympathetic nervous system is in charge of arousal and activation. When you encounter a stressor, it amps up and circles the wagons. Think of the alarm stage as the uh-oh, I’m in trouble, I better go on guard stage. It’s the bugle call preparing you for action, to defend yourself against stress. This is the stage where stress hormones are released — more on that in Chapter 2. And what is very important to know is that the better your physical fitness, the less severe your alarm reaction will be, and thus the easier it will be to manage. More about that in Chapter 4.

Stage 2. Resistance

The resistance stage is when your physiology returns to a more balanced setting, towards homeostasis. Certain blood chemicals, as well as heart rate and blood pressure, remain high for a while, but on the outside you appear to be settling down and responding appropriately to the stressor. Although your body is still on guard for trouble, things seem to be under control. All of your systems are on alert, but at a lower level than in the alarm stage.

Stage 3. Exhaustion

Exhaustion occurs if the stressor keeps coming or becomes stronger. Then stages 1 and 2 are retriggered. As your inner balance takes a hit again and again, your body tissues — your cells and organs — are likely to be damaged. And you might actually die — if the stress is high enough and lasts long enough.

Aging and Your Stress Response

As you age, you become less able to cope with stressors. For example, your blood vessels become less flexible and their walls become thicker. Their width narrows and causes higher blood pressure, which puts stress on the specialized groups of your body’s cells called tissues and organs. Your sympathetic nervous system — that part of your nervous system that responds defensively and dramatically to stressors in Stage 1 — becomes more quickly and deeply fatigued than when you were younger. In other words, your ability to restore balance in Stage 2 diminishes as you get older. Thus you are more likely to move sooner and harder into destructive Stage 3.

Role of Judgment in Your Stress Response

In the 1960s psychologist Dr. Richard Lazarus raised an interesting idea about stress. He stated that when your body responds to something bothersome or troublesome, you immediately ask, Can I cope with this? Can I deal with this challenge? Dr. Lazarus noted that if you decide that you can’t manage the situation or solve the problem, you become stressed. His understanding emphasizes the judgments you make about your abilities. So, when you decide that you can successfully meet the threat head on, your stress response has very little chance to get going. And Dr. Lazarus added that if you think you are coping but you really can’t, your stress response will not kick in right away or will stay low temporarily — but down the road you may have to pay the piper.

He said that when you realize that all along you were wrong and that you really can’t cope with the stressor, that’s when you will develop a stress response — a stress reaction. And these responses may be so strong that you become very upset — you may lose your temper and become verbally or even physically aggressive. You may yell, scream, throw things, and maybe even physically harm others — not a good situation, plus it only makes your stress worse.

Stress versus Anxiety

Remember that stressors are specific events or situations. And stressors cause stress reactions. Although the signs and symptoms of anxiety and stress are often the same, I believe that anxiety is much different from stress. I view anxiety as a form of fear — something vague and poorly defined. And you can be stressed and anxious at the same time. So you could be uncomfortable because of pressure from a specific stressor plus have anxiety about the stressor as well as about life in general.

Imagine that you are in the dentist’s waiting room before your grandchild’s check-up. The little one is upset and starts to whine and snuffle. He tells you that he wants to go home right now. He doesn’t want to see the dentist. Why? He can’t quite explain it. And so, good grandparent that you are, you try to reason with him. You say, You like the dentist. You’ve always had fun at the dentist’s before. You liked having your teeth cleaned and you know that the X-rays don’t hurt or take very long. So, what’s the problem? The child doesn’t answer the question. He insists that he wants to leave. He’s troubled, but he can’t tell you why. And your thoughtful attempt to calm him did not work. Your grandchild is anxious — he feels a vague fear, not a specific fear due to a clear and identifiable stressor.

Some scientists believe that stress and anxiety are the same because