Getting older doesn’t have to mean a life without companionship, mental stimulation, good health, and purpose. With just a little motivation and effort, there are a variety of actions people can take now that will contribute to a joyful aging process throughout their lives.
It is never too early or late to start working toward a healthy and meaningful retirement, no matter your current lifestyle. Daily routines are crucial components of a healthy lifestyle—leading up to and during one’s senior years. Read on to discover the ins and outs of daily routines, ranging from their typical components to their various benefits for seniors.
Why a Consistent Daily Routine Is Important for Seniors
Seniors face challenges unique to their life stage. Isolation, decreased mobility, inconsistent schedules, lack of stimulation, constrained budgets—when allowed to fester, these problems can burden seniors with unnecessary stress, limitations, and damaging influences. However, consistency helps seniors overcome these challenges by grounding their days with regular and positive practices.
It’s critically important for seniors to develop routines that provide the structure to set daily expectations, form good habits, and dedicate time to self-care. Maintaining a daily routine helps seniors avoid slipping into unhealthy patterns. Still, it can also help them minimize the potential adverse effects of aging—loneliness, boredom, and decreased physical and mental activity.
What Should a Senior’s Daily Routine Look Like?
While negative aspects of aging can make some doubt the possibility of a relaxing and rewarding retirement, this life stage comes with many underemphasized advantages. For example, retirement gives seniors the freedom to pursue whatever hobbies and interests strike their fancy. The same applies to their daily routines. While the essential components of a daily routine should generally stay the same, seniors can shape the specifics of their day-to-day schedule based on what they enjoy.
Seniors’ daily routines should contain some essential elements: exercise, healthy eating, socialization, mental engagement, and rest. However, they can choose which form these activities take according to their interests. For example, if they enjoy reading, joining a book club could be a great way to invest time in their hobbies while satisfying their need to socialize. Enjoy going on walks? How about playing a sport like golf or tennis? The benefits of a daily routine that provokes joy include improving physical and mental health and increasing the likelihood that seniors will stick to their routine in the long run.
The Benefits of a Daily Routine for Seniors
It can be difficult to believe that something as simple as a daily routine plays a significant role in creating a pleasurable retirement. Daily routines can help seniors and those close to retirement develop better habits and a satisfying schedule despite current daily habits. Read on to see how the importance of daily routines manifests itself in seniors’ overall well-being, relationships, and acuity.
Attitude
Taking on life and aging with a positive attitude is a fundamental cornerstone of a high-quality lifestyle. Do you take on life’s challenges with zeal or dread? Are you active or sedentary? Do you nurture relationships and pursue hobbies, jobs, or volunteer activities?
Daily routines give a senior’s life structure and purpose that necessitates neither. With purpose comes striving for a healthy mind, body, and, importantly, attitude. Daily routines can provide seniors with a renewed focus, everyday joys, and occupation, boosting their moods and improving their outlook.
Adaptability
Your ability to adjust to the changes in yourself and the world around you is an important skill. Darwin has always been right about one thing—those who best adapt to change are best at thriving. The one thing you can count on in life is that change will be constant. Therefore, prepare to do your best to manage in a positive way changes to your body and mind, your loved ones and relationships, your career and activities, and the world around you.
When the world around seniors transforms, a daily routine is essential. Daily routines create stability in an environment of continual change, helping seniors adapt to incremental changes and major life shifts. Reliable staples in daily schedules allow seniors to remain grounded during transitions.
Relationships
A person who nurtures and seeks to build new relationships is more likely to enjoy a higher quality lifestyle. We give and take from our relationships with significant others, our families, friends, and colleagues—they help give our lives purpose. Being connected is part of being human. It is important to stay socially engaged as we grow older, whether through in-person interactions or from afar.
Even when relationships change over the years, seniors should continue to build new relationships throughout their lives. Daily routines create built-in windows for social interactions, ensuring that seniors make time for meaningful relationships. These routines can satisfy their socialization needs and feed a spark for life.
Activities
An object in motion tends to stay in motion. So, an active lifestyle consisting of hobbies, work, volunteering, family, friends, culture, and nature is more meaningful and healthy than being a couch potato. One of the continuities among people who live long lives is that their lives continue to have meaning even as they age.
Staying engaged in activities through a busy daily routine will allow seniors to bring meaning to others and themselves. Luckily, there are several ways seniors can occupy themselves in their retirement and add exciting activities to their daily routines. Many people continue working or take on a second career in later life. Others find fulfillment by pursuing hobbies, volunteering, learning a new skill, or getting more involved with their family. Though seniors have significant flexibility when choosing activities for their daily routines, all paths will lead to an active and meaningful life.
Diet
We are what we eat. The food and drink we ingest impact our health and quality of life. A diet high in fats, sugars, and salt not only causes obesity but also promotes cardiovascular problems. Vices such as soda, alcohol, tobacco, and drugs can negatively impact longevity. Maintaining a daily routine that sets aside time for preparing healthy meals and drinking sufficient water makes it easy to maintain a consistently healthy diet.
Seniors should create a routine that involves staying well-hydrated, eating leafy vegetables, legumes, grains, and proteins. At the same time, unhealthy items such as sweet treats, alcohol, and salty snacks are enjoyed in moderation. When healthy eating and drinking become a habit after being ingrained in a senior’s daily routine, this has proven to improve quality of life and increase life expectancy.
Exercise
As we age, all of our bodies undergo constant change and challenges. Exercise is the key to keeping your body (and mind) sharp through this ongoing process. It is important to incorporate exercise into a senior’s daily routine—improving their strength, balance, flexibility, and constitution as they age. Embedding regular exercise in a daily routine will increase a senior’s longevity and contribute to mobility, independence, health, and happiness throughout the rest of their lives. As these areas become harder to maintain as they age, a daily routine of exercise and movement will mean a better, healthier tomorrow.
Sleep
One component of a daily routine that many people take for granted is rest. The amount of sleep a senior receives directly impacts their body, mind, and attitude. The optimal daily routine will set aside at least eight hours for sleep. However, the importance of daily routines for a proper sleep schedule does not stop with establishing a consistent bedtime.
Daily routines prevent the development of bad habits that get in the way of a good night’s sleep. Several factors can conspire to prevent sleep: what we ingest (caffeine, sugar, alcohol), how we manage stress, how active we are, and how soon we put down that book or turn off that screen. Daily routines help seniors develop the discipline to resist these detrimental habits and adopt better ones to help them manage their sleep schedule and combat the negative impacts of fatigue and exhaustion.
Mental Sharpness
As we age, it is not uncommon for memories to dull slightly, but this is not a guarantee for everyone. There are numerous measures people can take today to keep their minds as sharp as possible throughout their lives. The benefits of a daily routine include creating the structure and incentive to remain physically active, socially engaged, well-fed, and rested. These aspects of overall well-being play an essential role in strengthening a senior’s mind over the years of potential mental slowing. In addition, setting aside time for challenging themselves through “brain exercises” will improve a senior’s problem-solving skills and keep their mind engaged. Seniors can incorporate these brain exercises into their daily routines. For example, reading, writing, math, word games, puzzles, and strategy games such as cards and chess can help exercise the brain.
Conclusion
Aging can be physically, financially, and emotionally challenging. But, with awareness and self-care, it does not have to be the end of a senior’s passions, health, and love of life. Daily routines enforce good lifelong habits and provide seniors with the consistency to adapt to disruptive life changes. When having no schedule threatens an aimless existence with nothing to do and no places to go, daily routines can renew a senior’s joy and purpose.
However, this investment in a senior’s well-being is just that—an investment. Establishing a more active daily routine can come with a significant price tag. Whether adding social engagements, hobbies, or exercise to their days, seniors will find that many of these activities require purchasing new equipment, supplies, instructional classes, or even membership in social or sports clubs. For seniors living on a fixed retirement income, the prospect of these high costs may generate serious concern. Finances can cause many retirees undue stress, detracting from any gains made by a healthier lifestyle.
To truly incorporate wellness into their lives, retirees should release the weight of financial stress if possible. Fortunately, seniors are not without options to supplement their retirement incomes and help bear financial weight. Life settlements have helped many seniors rid themselves of the financial burdens which cause stress and threaten healthy lifestyles.
This unique solution entails selling a qualifying senior’s active life insurance policy in return for an immediate payoff. Every year, seniors allow as much as $100 billion in life insurance policies to lapse without getting out any of the money they put into their insurance. A life settlement is a tax-advantaged vehicle that allows seniors to recover a generous portion of their life insurance death benefits in the form of cash they can use towards any daily routine expense.
By submitting your policy for review through our life settlement calculator, you can discover how much you could make in the policy sale to put towards your daily routine. To see if you qualify for a life settlement and learn more about your daily routine financing options, contact the experts at Retirement Genius today.
