You pick up a book or go to the kitchen to follow a recipe, and you find you’re struggling to keep your mind on it. Even getting from one household chore to another takes more effort and time.
Aging sneaks up on us and adds more minutes to the hours and exposes how much we use the cognitive, physical and emotional reserves to do things that used to be mundane. Here are ten age related changes that make living harder.
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Reading for pleasure becomes more tiring
You pick up a book and start reading, but after a bit your mind wanders. It’s become a lot more difficult to follow along than it used to be. That’s confirmed by studies of adults 65-75 years old: normal eyesight and reaction times, but slower memory, concentration, and mental processing speed.
Reading is more than recognizing words. It involves remembering characters, skipping paragraphs, tracking plot developments. Your brain works hard through this mental task until you become fatigued.
Everyday movement patterns lose variety
Daily activities of Europeans aged 65 and over have been studied in relation to aging. The research reveals that daily routines of older adults tend to become less complex as they age. Typically, an older adult engages in a smaller number of activities per day and switches between tasks less frequently. This decreased variability has been linked to worse cognitive performance, intellectual function and poor well-being of the aging adults.
Losing steadiness bit by bit
Older adults don’t fall because they’re losing their balance more often. It’s that the effort to stay balanced changes. It’s less stable-feeling to walk on uneven surfaces like cobblestones, grass or cracked sidewalks. Steps are slower, more deliberate. In one study of 20-to-69-year-olds, researchers discovered that side-to-side balance begins to degrade with age before a person actually begins to fall.
Even cooking ordinary dinners can feel like too much
Cooking a meal is more than just following a recipe. There are many things that you must do at one time: stirring, measuring, tracking where you set things, perhaps cleaning up along the way. You are also focused on heat, aroma and timing. When you start losing strength or hand steadiness and your memory begins to slip, the task of preparing your family meal becomes comparable to making a huge feast.
Brain stamina doesn’t last as long
It’s not that older adults don’t like to talk or don’t like to learn, far from it. In fact, older adults often enjoy these more than they once did. It’s stamina that wanes. Listening intently, remembering details, or following multiple lines of argument in a group conversation requires more work than it used to.
Research shows that age-related declines affect our ability to maintain vigilance and update working memory with new information. And when these abilities are challenged in social or otherwise mentally demanding situations, they leave us more exhausted, even if we still enjoy these situations.
Overall physical activity drops, even small movements
A 2014 study looked at whether total daily activity in older adults decreases faster than structured exercise. Researchers followed 519 community-dwelling seniors from Chicago in the Rush Memory and Aging Project. Participants wore activity trackers for up to ten days to measure both leisure and everyday movement.
The results showed that overall daily activity drops significantly with age. This includes non-leisure movements too, like cleaning, climbing stairs, or moving things around the house.
Slower recovery from interruptions
This could be a phone call, someone asking a question or going into another room and forgetting why you went in there. Any sort of distraction, makes it more difficult to get back on track. Research has demonstrated that older adults are less efficient at “interruption recovery.”
Old memory tricks don’t work as well
You go into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and stop. Wait, what am I doing here again? Small moments like this begin to happen more and more as you get older.
We create checklists, we write sticky notes, we make habits out of fixed routines to support our remembering of the things we need to do. But as we get older, the parts of attention that help us notice cues and update memory grow weaker. Research shows these skills decline with age, which means even small changes, like a new phone or a different doorknob, can throw us off and lead to forgetfulness or mistakes.
Easier to get distracted when multitasking
Doing two things at once, both mental and physical, becomes harder as we age. It’s more difficult, for example, to carry your groceries and balance a big bag, or watermelon, while carrying on a conversation. UC Riverside conducted an experiment that found older adults, compared to younger ones, had more trouble with blocking out distractions while engaging in a physical activity.
Harder to pick up fine details
You grab a letter and squint at the fine print. A distant sound is barely noticed. Nothing seems particularly alarming at the doctor’s office, but in daily life, it’s different. Specialists link these alterations to both the eyes and ears as well as the brain requiring more time to concentrate and process information.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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