Joan Lunden’s Tips for Aging Gracefully

Hi I’m Joan Lunden, journalist, author, health and wellness advocate, and I am so excited to share my new book with you. It’s called Why Did I Come Into This Room? A Candid Conversation About Aging.

I was so inspired to write this book, because I was experiencing all the things that come along with aging. And what I wanted to convey in this book was not to just let aging and life just happen to you, but to understand what are the top predictors of good health in your later years and longevity.

And they are social engagements, staying engaged in life, having a sense of purpose. A reason to get up every morning, and get out of bed and get dressed, because you’re looking forward to something. And finally social connections. If you don’t feel that you have a lot of social connections, then start working on them today. Because building those social connections, that is incredibly important, in order to retain our cognitive thinking, and in order to just stay generally healthy and happy.

Happiness is contagious. So if you understand the importance of smiling to people as you walk into a room and of kind of laughing with life, that then gets you a reciprocal engagement back. This is what we should be thinking that our older age will be, because if we do, then we can guide ourselves into that kind of a happy, fun, engaging life where we stay active, where we have friends, where we’re doing things that make us feel good, and that make us feel self fulfilled. That’s the kind of later years that I want you to engage in.

I thought it was important to talk about working on ourselves, our inner selves, our soul. And that really comes to not reacting to everything in life. Non-reactive behavior is something you really have to work on, but I felt it was important to talk about. Because it’s not really about what happens to us in our life, it’s about how we react to everything in our life. And the other thing that’s so important is letting go, you know, and I think as you grow older, you give yourself permission to let go, of some of the things that we’ve stressed about over the decades, that aren’t important in our lives. And you really wanna spend the latter years enjoying yourself.

I mean, this is where you have permission to enjoy yourself, and do all the things you never got a chance to do. So it’s important that you learn how to let go of all the little stuff that has happened in your life.