My neighbor Helen has been knitting for as long as I’ve known her. She can follow complicated patterns, fix a dropped stitch without thinking twice, and tell you exactly which yarn is worth buying.

But lately, her hands have been bothering her. After twenty minutes or so, she has to put her knitting down. Sometimes she picks it up again later. Sometimes the unfinished project stays in its basket for days.

What bothers her most isn’t having to take breaks. It’s that something she used to do almost without thinking now requires so much effort.

Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar. A full round of golf has become more tiring. Gardening leaves you exhausted before you’ve finished half the work. Or an instrument you’ve played for years no longer feels quite as comfortable in your hands.

The difficulty itself can be frustrating. But so can the realization that something you’ve always enjoyed might need to change.

Why a hobby means more than we sometimes realize

We tend to describe hobbies as ways to relax or occupy our spare time. Yet anyone who has spent years painting, playing music, gardening, or making things knows there’s considerably more to it.

You’ve developed skills and preferences. You know which details matter, which shortcuts work, and how to recognize a job well done. There’s satisfaction in being competent at something simply because you’ve spent time becoming good at it.

And there’s the pleasure of having an interest that’s entirely your own.

The American Occupational Therapy Association recognizes leisure as one of the meaningful activities that shape our daily lives, alongside work, relationships, and other responsibilities.

So when a familiar hobby becomes difficult, the frustration isn’t necessarily about the activity alone.

A golfer might miss the friendly competition and the regular Saturday game. Someone who loves sewing might miss the creative challenge as much as the finished garment. And a gardener might miss the satisfaction of creating something beautiful.

It’s worth recognizing what an activity gives you before deciding what to do when it becomes harder.

Does the activity really have to end?

Not necessarily.

Sometimes the difficulty comes from something that can be changed: an uncomfortable workstation, equipment that’s poorly suited to your needs, or sessions that have become too long.

Sometimes changing physical abilities or health conditions call for a different approach.

Persistent pain, stiffness, vision changes, weakness, or balance problems deserve medical attention rather than being dismissed as inevitable signs of aging. Sudden weakness, difficulty speaking, or abrupt vision changes require urgent medical evaluation.

But when health concerns have been addressed, a favorite activity may still have room to evolve.

Helen, for example, doesn’t necessarily need to stop knitting simply because she can no longer enjoy an hour-long session. The right changes might allow her to continue doing something she loves, even if she has to approach it differently.

Of course, that raises another question.

How do you decide what to change without losing the very thing that made the hobby enjoyable?

The answer depends on what you love about the activity, which parts have become difficult, and what you’re willing to do differently. Sometimes it also means accepting that a new version might bring a different kind of pleasure.

For Plus members, let’s look at three ways to adapt a favorite activity, a simple exercise for finding what matters most, and what to do when even a thoughtful adaptation doesn’t feel quite right.

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The heaviest part of laundry day might be the basket you pick up before you’ve even switched on the washing machine.

Then come the small demands we hardly notice until they start to bother us: reaching into the drum for a forgotten sock, wrestling a wet towel into the dryer, gripping a large detergent bottle, and bending over a bed to fold clothes. A routine you’ve followed for years can gradually become more tiring than it needs to be.

The good news is that you probably don’t need an entirely new laundry room. A few adjustments to where things sit and how you move them can make a surprisingly useful difference.

Start with less laundry at once

There’s a catch to owning a generous laundry basket: sooner or later, you’re tempted to fill it.

If one big weekly wash leaves you exhausted, try smaller loads spread over the week. A half-full basket is easier to manage, and fewer clothes are easier to lift out of the washer, especially when they’re wet. In an Arthritis Foundation collection of readers’ laundry tips, several people mention doing smaller loads rather than letting everything pile up.

You might also save a step by sorting clothes where you take them off. Two modest hampers can mean no more emptying one enormous basket onto the floor to separate lights and darks. If you live with others, sharing the sorting and putting-away work makes sense too.

None of this requires buying anything. It just replaces one demanding laundry day with a few manageable steps.

Let the basket roll, when it can

Carrying a loaded basket often means holding it away from your body while navigating doors, corners, and furniture. A wheeled hamper can take much of that carrying out of the journey.

One example is the Sterilite Ultra Wheeled Hamper, which has wheels and a retractable handle for use on smooth floors. It’s a sensible type of product to consider if your laundry room is on the same level as your bedroom. Before buying, check the width of your doorways and whether rugs or thresholds will interrupt the route.

Wheels don’t solve stairs. If you have to carry laundry between floors, keeping a second basket near the washer and moving small amounts at a time may be a better approach. Always leave yourself a clear view of the steps and a free hand for the rail.

And remember that a bigger wheeled basket can still become a very heavy basket if you fill it to the top. The goal is to move less weight, not simply to move more of it on wheels.

Change the height, not your back

Think about how many times you reach down to a basket on the floor: while loading the washer, moving things to the dryer, sorting the clean load, and folding.

Try putting the basket on a stable table or stand at a comfortable working height. That may remove a surprising number of repeated bends. Keep the surface close enough to work without stretching or twisting, and make sure the setup cannot tip.

If the washer itself is the problem, the right adjustment depends on your machine. A top-loader may require a long reach into the drum; a front-loader may require repeated bending. A lightweight reacher grabber can help retrieve an occasional sock or other small item from a stationary, switched-off machine. Choose one whose trigger is comfortable for your hand, and never use it to drag out a heavy bundle of wet clothes or stretch beyond your balance. Example: FitPlus PowerGrip reacher, 32-inch.

For some homes, a sturdy elevated laundry cart can be useful because it keeps the basket up off the floor while allowing it to move around the room. Look for a comfortable basket height, a stable frame, wheels that lock securely, and enough space around the washer. Example: rolling laundry basket on a raised frame, with locking wheels. A stable table you already own may do the same job for free.

If reaching into a front-loader remains difficult, ask the appliance manufacturer about a compatible pedestal rather than improvising a platform. Appliance stability and installation matter more than gaining a few inches.

Give your hands fewer awkward jobs

It’s easy to overlook how much handwork laundry involves. Detergent caps, heavy bottles, wet jeans, small clothespins, and repeated gripping can be particularly bothersome when your fingers are stiff.

Start with the detergent. A smaller bottle or easy-pour dispenser may be easier to manage than a large economy container, even if buying the biggest size seems like the sensible choice. Example: refillable detergent dispensers with labels, 2-pack. If you refill a small dispenser, label it clearly and keep detergent securely stored. Pods must stay in their original child-resistant packaging and out of reach of children.

If you hang laundry outdoors, consider pegs with broader grips or designs that don’t require such a strong pinch. Try a few before replacing an entire set: a peg should be comfortable to use and secure enough to hold the clothes.

When transferring wet laundry, gather heavier pieces with both hands and keep them close to your body. If a garment is too heavy or awkward, move smaller amounts instead of tugging at the whole load.

The aim isn’t to avoid using your hands. It’s to stop asking the same small joints to do the hardest version of every job. If pain, numbness, or weakness is persistent or worsening, a healthcare professional or occupational therapist can help assess what is going on and suggest appropriate adaptations.

Make the last half of laundry day easier

Laundry isn’t finished when the dryer stops. There’s still folding, hanging, ironing, and putting everything away.

Try folding at a table rather than bending over a low bed. Sit in a supportive chair if that’s more comfortable. And ask whether every item really needs the same careful treatment. Towels can be folded simply; casual shirts may go directly onto hangers; some clothes won’t need ironing at all if you remove and hang them promptly, according to their care labels.

A particularly practical suggestion from the Arthritis Foundation’s readers was to hang suitable clothes instead of folding them. It removes a whole series of repetitive movements.

Finally, pay attention to where the clean clothes go. The things you use often deserve easy-to-reach drawers and shelves, rather than the highest cabinet or the bottom of a deep cupboard. Your laundry system includes storage, not just the machines.

Three changes to try before buying anything

For your next load, try just three experiments: wash a smaller amount, raise the basket onto a stable surface while transferring clothes, and fold or hang everything at a comfortable height.

Then notice which part felt easier. If carrying is still the problem, a wheeled hamper might earn its place. If it’s retrieving the final sock, a reacher may be enough. If the basket keeps ending up on the floor, a proper raised stand could help.

Good equipment should solve an inconvenience you’ve actually noticed. There is no prize for collecting laundry gadgets, and no reason to replace a perfectly good routine beyond the parts that no longer serve you.

A cleaner, easier laundry day may be less about doing everything differently and more about removing a handful of unnecessary struggles.

What should we make easier next?

I’d love to turn this into a regular series of practical articles about everyday tasks, with useful ideas and tools that genuinely make a difference.

Vote above, and if there’s another household task you’d like us to tackle, you’re welcome to suggest it in the comments.

Adlai Stevenson used those words in a speech in 1952. The expression had appeared before, but its appeal is easy to understand.

We hear a great deal about living longer: longevity research, the habits of centenarians, promising treatments, and the possibility of extending our healthy years. Longer lives are a remarkable achievement of modern medicine and public health.

But imagine being offered another ten years. What would you want those years to contain?

Perhaps you would like to keep traveling, playing tennis, enjoying your grandchildren as they grow up, or living in a home you love. Maybe you want time to pursue interests you once had to put aside. Or simply the freedom to choose how to spend a day.

Those wishes depend on more than being alive. They depend on having the abilities, opportunities, and choices that make participation in life possible.

The World Health Organization defines healthy aging in terms of maintaining the abilities that enable well-being in later life. Importantly, those abilities reflect more than our medical condition. They are shaped by our physical and mental capacities, the environments we live in, and how the two interact.

That is a broader, and more humane, way to understand aging well.

A person can live with arthritis, use a walking aid, or need help with some daily tasks and still have a rich, satisfying life. Likewise, someone in excellent physical health may struggle because of isolation or circumstances that limit their options.

There is no universal picture of successful aging. What matters is how well our capabilities and circumstances support the life we want.

Three parts of that picture deserve particular attention.

1. Your Health and Capabilities: What Your Body and Mind Allow You to Do

The body and mind influence how we move, feel, learn, and manage everyday life. But the foundation of healthy aging is wider than regular exercise or the absence of disease.

Moving with confidence

Much of an ordinary day relies on movements we barely notice: getting out of a chair, carrying shopping bags, climbing stairs, or turning to greet someone.

When those movements become difficult, the effect can extend beyond the task itself. A person who feels unsteady might begin avoiding unfamiliar streets; someone who struggles with stairs may turn down an invitation.

Strength, endurance, mobility, and balance each play a role. The CDC recommends that adults 65 and older combine aerobic activity, muscle-strengthening exercise, and balance work.

The most useful activity often depends on what you want to keep doing. Gardening may call for strength and mobility; exploring a new city may require stamina and steadiness. Suitable training can help, and so can adapting an activity when pain, illness, or disability changes what is comfortable.

Feeding and resting the body

Nutrition and sleep have their own important roles. Adequate, varied food supports health, including the muscles and bones that help us stay capable. The National Institute on Aging offers guidance on nutritious eating in later life.

Yet eating well is not simply a matter of knowing what to put on a plate. Appetite, dental health, medication, food prices, and the practicalities of cooking for one can all affect what is possible.

Sleep is similarly personal. Poor sleep can interfere with concentration, energy, mood, and the activities we look forward to. While sleep patterns commonly change with age, persistent exhaustion should not be dismissed as inevitable. Pain, stress, medications, and sleep disorders can all contribute, sometimes making professional advice more useful than another bedtime tip.

Keeping the mind and emotions in the picture

Cognitive health is about more than remembering names. Attention, judgment, language, and the ability to learn help us manage finances, make decisions, and navigate unfamiliar situations.

Thinking abilities can change with age, but curiosity and learning remain worthwhile throughout life. Reading, discussion, classes, and new skills can all keep us intellectually engaged. What they cannot promise is immunity from dementia; claims about a particular puzzle preventing it go beyond the evidence.

Emotional health matters just as much. Anxiety, depression, grief, and prolonged stress deserve attention rather than dismissal as ordinary features of getting older. Aging well does not mean feeling positive every day.

And there is the practical side of prevention: managing chronic conditions, reviewing medications, and keeping up with appropriate vaccinations, screenings, and vision or hearing checks. None of it sounds especially glamorous, but it can protect everyday function.

Together, physical, cognitive, and emotional health form an essential foundation. They do not, however, tell us what makes life fulfilling.

2. Relationships and Purpose: What Makes the Days Meaningful

Someone might exercise regularly, eat well, and have no major health problems, yet feel that their days lack companionship or anything particularly engaging.

That is a reminder that good physical health, valuable as it is, does not answer every question about a good life.

Relationships that fit your life

Friendships and other relationships offer affection, understanding, conversation, humor, and support. Some connections are woven into routines so familiar that we only notice them when those routines disappear.

Retirement can mean losing daily conversations with colleagues. A move can separate us from old friends. Changes in health or the death of someone close can reshape an entire social world.

Research summarized by the National Institute on Aging links loneliness and social isolation with poorer health outcomes. But being alone and feeling lonely are not the same thing.

Some people enjoy large social circles; others prefer a few close relationships and plenty of time to themselves. We explored why a smaller circle can be enough in You Don’t Need a Bigger Social Life — Just the Right Few.

The point is not to reach a target number of friends. It is to have the kinds of connections you want, and opportunities to maintain them as life changes.

Curiosity, purpose, and contribution

Purpose can sound like another assignment: reinvent yourself, start a project, find a calling.

But meaning does not have to be grand. It might come from tending a garden, studying history, helping a neighbor, painting, mentoring someone, or following a subject that never stops being interesting.

Interests also change. What felt rewarding at forty may not hold the same appeal at seventy, and there can be pleasure in discovering something new.

The WHO’s framework includes the ability to contribute to society, which is easy to overlook when discussions of later life focus mainly on what people need from others.

Older adults are not only recipients of care and assistance. They also bring knowledge, creativity, companionship, and experience to their families and communities. Having opportunities to contribute, without being expected to give more than one wishes or can manage, is part of being able to participate in life.

Of course, these opportunities depend on more than motivation or good intentions. They also depend on the world around us.

3. Environment and Autonomy: The Part We Often Forget

Consider two people with similar physical abilities. One has safe sidewalks, shops nearby, accessible transport, and a community center within easy reach. The other needs a car for almost everything and finds local walking routes difficult.

Their health may be much the same. Their possibilities for everyday life are not.

That distinction sits at the heart of the WHO’s work on age-friendly environments. Our surroundings can support the abilities we have or make them harder to use.

A home that helps rather than hinders

We get used to the way our homes work, including the inconveniences. But a house that suited us twenty years ago may benefit from small changes: better lighting, safer steps, accessible storage, or easier-to-use handles.

In Ten Small Changes That Make a House Easier to Live In, we explored practical improvements that can make everyday tasks more manageable.

For some people, occasional help, different equipment, or a change in living arrangements may be more useful than trying harder to do things the old way. Adaptations are not necessarily concessions. They can be ways of preserving options.

Resources and access

Financial security is another part of healthy aging that wellness advice often overlooks.

Nutritious food, suitable housing, healthcare, transport, and social activities are not equally accessible to everyone. Financial pressure can restrict choices even when someone is doing everything possible to look after their health.

A rewarding life does not require wealth, but adequate resources and access to essential services matter. So do communities and public policies that accommodate different incomes, abilities, and circumstances.

It is unfair to place the full responsibility for aging well on individuals when some obstacles are structural.

Independence is not doing everything alone

We often equate independence with managing every task without help. Yet someone who arranges assistance with cleaning may have more energy for the activities she loves. Someone who stops driving after dark may continue enjoying evenings out through other transportation.

In each case, receiving help can preserve a person’s ability to decide how to live.

That ability to make choices, express preferences, and have those preferences respected is central to autonomy. It matters whether someone is fully mobile, living with disability, managing a chronic condition, or relying on daily support.

Being involved in decisions about your own life can matter more than performing every task yourself.

How the Three Parts Come Together

Imagine a person who loves singing in a community choir.

Her health may help her attend rehearsals. Learning new music engages her mind. Friendships make the gatherings enjoyable. But she also needs transportation, a welcoming group, and a place she can access.

If walking becomes difficult, a change in venue or a suitable ride could allow her to continue. The answer may involve her environment rather than her fitness.

That is why healthy aging cannot be reduced to a checklist of personal habits. Our abilities, relationships, and surroundings continually shape one another.

So Where Should You Start?

After considering all this, it would be easy to feel there are even more things you ought to be doing. That would miss the point.

Try starting somewhere more personal:

What would you like to keep doing, enjoying, or experiencing five or ten years from now?

Perhaps it is traveling, working in the garden, spending time with family, pursuing a hobby, or making your own decisions about everyday life.

Then ask what would help make that possible.

If you are feeling less physically capable, suitable strength or balance work might help. If fatigue is limiting your days, sleep or a health concern may need attention. If connection is missing, you may want to make space for different relationships. If the real obstacle is transport, housing, money, or access to help, naming that matters too.

The right next step might be a habit, medical advice, a practical adjustment, or support from someone else. You do not have to improve everything at once, especially in areas where life is already going well.

More Life in the Years Ahead

Bodies change. Circumstances change. Even carefully made plans may need to change with them.

Aging well is not one ideal lifestyle or a permanent state of perfect health. It is the ongoing possibility of doing, choosing, learning, connecting, and participating in ways we value.

For one person, that might mean adventure and travel. For another, a familiar neighborhood, creative work, close friendships, and a home that feels right.

The details will be different for each of us, and they may change over time.

What does aging well mean to you, and what would you most like to preserve in the years ahead?

Leave a comment

I can’t believe it’s November already.

I seem to say some version of that every year, usually around the time the shops start preparing for Christmas. January still feels like a fairly recent conversation, summer seems to have come and gone in a hurry, and suddenly we’re discussing holiday plans again.

The strange thing is that individual days don’t necessarily feel short.

An afternoon waiting for an appointment can last an eternity. A rainy Sunday with no particular plans may seem to have more hours than you know what to do with. Yet step back and consider the whole year, and the months appear to have folded into one another.

How can time move slowly while we’re living it, then seem to have passed so quickly when we look back?

And why does that feeling become so familiar as we get older?

There’s a popular explanation you may have heard. When you’re ten, one year represents a tenth of your life. When you’re seventy, it’s a much smaller fraction. So, the theory goes, each year naturally seems shorter.

It’s a wonderfully tidy idea. The trouble is that it doesn’t tell us much about how people actually experience time. We don’t appear to carry around a running calculation of what percentage of our lives the current year represents.

The research offers a more interesting picture.

Does time really speed up with age?

In 2005, researchers Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff asked 499 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, about their experience of time.

Their results broadly supported the familiar impression that time passes more quickly as people grow older. But there was a catch: the relationships between age and perceptions of time were relatively modest. Age accounted for no more than about 10 percent of the differences in participants’ answers.

That leaves an enormous amount of variation unexplained.

Some younger people feel that their lives are racing by, while some older people don’t. Even the same person may find that one month disappears and the next seems unusually long.

A later study by Steve Janssen, Makiko Naka and William Friedman makes the story more intriguing.

The researchers asked 868 people how quickly the previous week, month, year and ten years seemed to have passed. They found no significant age-related difference in the shorter intervals. The age effect appeared only when participants looked back over ten years.

What did matter for the shorter intervals was something more immediate: time pressure.

People who felt pressed for time tended to report that recent weeks, months and years had passed quickly. I find that particularly interesting because we tend to associate this feeling with getting older, even though someone juggling work and family may experience it just as strongly as a person who has been retired for a decade.

None of this means aging has no effect on our experience of time. The studies don’t settle that question. But they make one point difficult to ignore: the feeling that time is accelerating isn’t simply a matter of turning another year older.

It also has something to do with how we experience our days and what remains in memory afterward.

We have two different experiences of time

Imagine spending an afternoon with someone whose company you enjoy.

You settle into a conversation, wander from one subject to another, perhaps have lunch and then another cup of coffee. At some point you glance at the clock and discover that three hours have passed.

You might say, quite sincerely, that you have no idea where the time went.

Now imagine an afternoon spent watching the clock because you’re waiting for something unpleasant. Three hours is still three hours, but it can feel very different.

Psychologists distinguish between judging time while it’s passing and estimating its duration afterward. Researchers often call these prospective and retrospective judgments.

When we’re absorbed in an activity, we may pay little attention to the clock. When we’re waiting, the minutes can become conspicuous.

Looking back is a different task because we can’t replay every minute of an afternoon, much less every day of a year. Instead, we reconstruct the period from whatever remains available in memory.

A holiday, a family gathering, the arrival of a new neighbor, a medical appointment, a good book or an unexpectedly enjoyable evening can give a stretch of time a recognizable shape.

Other days are harder to retrieve individually. They may have been satisfying, productive or perfectly pleasant, but they simply don’t stand out as separate episodes when we remember them.

That doesn’t mean ordinary days are less valuable. Familiar routines give us comfort, stability and the freedom not to make hundreds of decisions every day. There is a great deal to be said for a life in which you know where the coffee is, which chair you like and who you’ll see on Thursday afternoon.

But the time we live through and the time we reconstruct from memory aren’t quite the same thing.

If a year seems to have disappeared, is there anything we can do to make the next one feel more substantial when we look back?

There’s no scientifically proven trick for making time move more slowly. But research into memory offers a few clues, and they lead to some practical experiments worth trying.

In the rest of this article, we’ll explore why some months are easier to remember than others, then try a simple ten-minute review and a practical way to give the month ahead a few meaningful landmarks. No packed calendar or elaborate journaling routine required.

And with Plus, you’ll also get the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.

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One of the nicest surprises of writing We Get Better With Age is discovering what happens to an article after I send it out. Sometimes a reader replies with a question or tells me about an experience of her own. Occasionally, someone disagrees with me, which can lead to an interesting conversation.

But a few weeks ago, I heard from a reader who had taken things considerably further.

His name is John Bennett. He’s almost 84, a retired engineering professor living in Virginia, and he’d been using WGBWA articles to lead a weekly discussion group at a local lifelong learning institute.

I was thrilled. Here was a room full of people getting together to discuss subjects we’d explored in the newsletter, bringing their own experiences, questions, and opinions to the conversation.

John began sending me updates about the classes. I learned which subjects interested participants, where the conversations went, and what they wanted to explore next. He even sent me a list of topics the group had suggested, including several I hadn’t written about yet.

The more John told me, the more I wanted to share his story with you. When I suggested writing about the group, he was enthusiastic about the idea and generous with the details.

And I think there’s something in his story for all of us.

A professor who never stopped learning

John spent 29 years at the University of Connecticut, working as an engineering professor and academic administrator. Teaching was a large part of his professional life, although he has always preferred the word facilitating.

He likes getting people involved, asking questions, and encouraging them to explore different ways of thinking. His university classes included group activities, and he frequently reminded students that engineering approaches could be useful well beyond engineering problems.

After retiring, John and his wife moved from Connecticut to Virginia to be closer to their daughter and her family.

He became involved with the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield, which offers continuing education and social activities for adults aged 55 and older.

John began facilitating courses there, including one called Engineering Your Life, which explored how engineering thinking could be applied to everyday decisions.

Then his daughter introduced him to We Get Better With Age.

He enjoyed the articles, subscribed, and started sharing them with family and friends. Before long, he saw an opportunity to turn that interest into something more.

He proposed a course built around discussing the newsletter. The Institute accepted, and the first sessions began in September.

John found something he enjoyed reading, recognized an opportunity to share it, and put his experience to work in a new setting. He was doing something familiar, with different material and different people, because it interested him.

And he was still learning himself.

As John explained:

“I’m a learner and user of the things in the newsletters just as they are.”

He believes a good discussion helps everyone understand a subject better, including the person leading it. After nearly three decades at a university, he still doesn’t need to be the person who knows everything in the room.

The class that wanted more time

The group has discussed a wide range of subjects already, from smartphones, muscle loss, and eyesight to loneliness, solitude, and the difference between avoidance and acceptance.

John prepares reading material and questions, but the conversation belongs to the participants.

Sometimes the discussions are lively enough that he has trouble keeping everyone on topic. Other weeks are less successful. In one email, he described a sunny October afternoon when only ten people attended and the discussion wandered rather than developing as he’d hoped.

Anyone who has tried to organize something involving other people knows that enthusiasm doesn’t guarantee a brilliant gathering every time.

Still, the group seems to be finding something worth returning for.

One of my favorite details came when John told me the participants wanted to extend the class from 60 minutes to 90.

He checked with the Institute, but the building closes soon after their scheduled session. They eventually managed to add another 15 minutes.

These were people voluntarily attending a class, with no exam to pass and no qualification to earn, asking for more time to discuss what they’d read.

More than a discussion group

Some participants already knew one another, while others met through the course. They chat before class and in the Institute’s lounge, and some have started spending time together outside the sessions.

At one point, participants approached John and asked if they could discuss loneliness. By coincidence, he’d already chosen loneliness versus solitude for their next meeting.

When they did discuss it, they talked about the importance of socializing in different ways, having a really good friend, and making room for solitude, too.

It seems fitting that those conversations were happening in a place where new friendships were beginning.

John has made new friends himself.

Moving to Virginia brought him closer to his family, but the courses have also helped him build a social life of his own. He’s continuing something he loved about his university career while meeting new people and exploring subjects that interest him.

And the conversation doesn’t end when the class is over.

When participants suggested subjects for future meetings, John went through the WGBWA archive looking for articles that might fit. He later told me he’d done much of it the old-fashioned way, clicking through links and making notes with pen and paper.

He sent me the list, including the topics he couldn’t find anything about. I now have a few ideas for future articles, courtesy of a classroom in Virginia.

At almost 84, John is making plans for next spring. And I suspect the people in his class are already looking forward to it.

I’d love to hear more stories like John’s

John’s emails reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for almost a year.

Last December, I published Never Too Late Stories: Seniors Who Started Something New at 70+, followed by a second collection in January. I loved finding those stories, and I’ve wanted to do more of it ever since.

But perhaps I don’t need to look very far.

There are more than 22,000 of us here at WGBWA, and I’m willing to bet that many of you have stories worth sharing. Maybe you’ve discovered a new interest, made an unexpected friendship, returned to something you used to love, or found a way to make a difference in your community.

It doesn’t need to be an extraordinary achievement. In fact, I’m especially interested in the smaller things that make everyday life richer.

I think we could all use more stories about the good things happening in the world. There’s no shortage of difficult news, and I’m certainly not suggesting we ignore it. But there’s also so much kindness, curiosity, creativity, and generosity around us, often in places that never make the headlines.

I’d love to give some of those stories a place here.

So, if you have a story you’d like to share, or know someone whose story deserves to be told, please reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

Perhaps this could become a regular WGBWA feature.

And , thank you for getting us started.

You were ready to sleep twenty minutes ago. You might even have struggled to stay awake on the sofa. But now you’re in bed, you’re noticing every sound in the house, and you’re beginning to wonder whether tomorrow will be another day spent running on too little rest.

The hours before bed can influence how easily we fall asleep. But I think much of the advice about evening routines has become unnecessarily complicated. It can sound as though a good night’s sleep requires the discipline of a professional athlete, an expensive mattress, and a perfectly timed series of rituals.

Most of us have lives that are considerably less orderly than that.

Fortunately, many of the habits worth trying are straightforward, inexpensive, and flexible enough to fit around a normal evening. Here are five that deserve a place on the list.

1. Give your evening a gentler landing

Think about the difference between finishing dinner, answering a few messages, watching a lively television program, and going straight to bed, versus having a little space between the day’s activity and the moment you turn out the light.

That space is what we’re trying to create.

The National Institute on Aging recommends developing a bedtime routine, with activities such as reading, listening to music, or taking a warm bath.

You don’t need a rigid sixty-minute schedule. In fact, if trying to follow a routine makes you more anxious about bedtime, it rather defeats the purpose.

Instead, look for a natural point in your evening when the day’s demands can begin to recede. You might finish anything that genuinely needs doing, change into comfortable clothes, and spend a little time with a book or some music.

If you share your home with someone whose evening habits are different from yours, the routine can still be personal. One person can enjoy a television program while another goes upstairs to read. The point isn’t to impose a household bedtime.

It’s to give yourself a recognizable transition.

2. Make the light match the hour

A brightly lit kitchen is useful when you’re preparing dinner. It’s less useful when you’re trying to convince your body that the day is nearly over.

Light helps regulate our internal clock, and bright light late in the evening can interfere with the signals that prepare us for sleep.

You needn’t sit in near-darkness. Switching off a bright overhead light and using a smaller lamp may be enough to make the room feel distinctly different.

Screens deserve some consideration too. The light they emit can matter, but so can what you’re doing on them. Reading a mildly interesting article is one thing; becoming absorbed in an argument or scrolling through upsetting news is quite another.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommends limiting bright artificial light during the hour before bedtime.

I wouldn’t make this an absolute prohibition on television or phones. If a favorite program is one of the pleasures of your evening, it’s worth considering how and when you watch it rather than declaring it forbidden.

And while we’re talking about light, don’t overlook the other end of the day. Natural light after waking helps reinforce the body’s daily rhythm. A better evening often begins with a reasonably consistent morning.

3. Take a second look at your evening drink

Some of the things we associate with relaxing aren’t particularly helpful for sleep.

Alcohol is the clearest example. A glass of wine may make you feel sleepy at first, but alcohol can make sleep lighter and increase the likelihood of waking during the night. The National Institute on Aging recommends avoiding alcohol as part of a healthy sleep routine.

Caffeine is another one worth noticing. Its effects can last for hours, and people differ in how sensitive they are to it. That afternoon coffee may be perfectly compatible with sleep for one person and surprisingly disruptive for another.

It isn’t only coffee, either. Tea, cola, energy drinks, and some chocolate contain caffeine.

Then there are large evening meals and the amount we drink close to bedtime. A very heavy dinner may be uncomfortable, while plenty of liquid just before bed can mean more trips to the bathroom.

None of this means you need a special bedtime drink. If you like a cup of caffeine-free herbal tea, enjoy it. Just don’t feel obliged to buy a particular blend or supplement on the promise that it will solve your sleep.

A useful experiment is to notice what happens when you move your last caffeinated drink earlier, or change one evening habit, rather than trying to overhaul everything at once.

4. Give tomorrow’s thoughts somewhere to go

A quiet bedroom has a remarkable ability to bring unfinished business to mind.

The appointment you need to make. The message you forgot to answer. Something a friend said that you’re still turning over. An important task that suddenly feels much more urgent than it did at lunchtime.

If this happens to you, a piece of paper may be more useful than another relaxation technique.

Before going to bed, write down the things you don’t want to forget tomorrow. You don’t have to solve them. You only need to make a note of what requires your attention.

There’s some interesting research behind this simple idea. In a 2018 experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers asked 57 healthy young adults to spend five minutes writing either a list of future tasks or a list of things they’d already completed. Those writing about future tasks fell asleep more quickly.

It’s a small laboratory study in younger adults, not proof that a bedtime list treats insomnia in later life. But it offers a plausible reason to try something that costs almost nothing.

And there is no requirement to keep a gratitude journal, rehearse affirmations, or turn your bedside table into a personal-development workstation.

A simple list will do.

5. Let the bedroom do its main job

A bedroom doesn’t have to resemble a luxury hotel to be comfortable for sleep. It needs to work for the person sleeping in it.

For some people, the biggest improvement is blocking light from the street. For others, it’s reducing noise, finding comfortable bedding, or adjusting the temperature.

The general advice is to keep the room quiet, dark, and comfortably cool. But there is no single ideal temperature for everybody, and individual comfort matters.

One recommendation worth considering is to keep wakeful activities largely out of bed. If you regularly work, watch television, or spend long periods scrolling there, your bed may become a place associated with being alert rather than sleeping.

That doesn’t mean you need to rearrange your whole home. It may simply mean moving your late-evening reading to a comfortable chair, then going to bed when you’re sleepy.

And if you’re lying awake for a long time, getting increasingly frustrated, it can be more helpful to get up for a quiet activity and return when sleepiness returns than to spend the next hour trying to force yourself to sleep.

The aim is a bedroom that supports rest, not one that has passed an inspection.

When five habits aren’t enough

There is a limitation to articles like this one, and it’s important enough to say plainly.

Good sleep habits can help, but persistent sleep problems are not necessarily the result of poor habits.

Pain, medication side effects, menopause symptoms, sleep apnea, restless legs, and other health conditions can all affect sleep. Loud snoring accompanied by gasping or pauses in breathing, severe daytime sleepiness, or sleep difficulties that continue despite changes to your routine are good reasons to speak with a healthcare professional.

And if you’re dealing with chronic insomnia, there is an established treatment beyond general sleep advice. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, is recommended as an initial treatment by the American College of Physicians.

You don’t need to keep collecting bedtime tips indefinitely when the problem deserves a more specific assessment.

A more complete way to work on your sleep

These five habits are useful starting points, but they don’t answer every question about sleep after sixty. Perhaps your main problem isn’t falling asleep at all. Perhaps it’s waking much too early, feeling exhausted despite a full night in bed, or wondering which changes are normal and which are worth investigating.

That’s why we created Sleeping Well After Sixty, a practical guide that goes beyond the evening routine.

It explains why sleep can change with age, how the body clock works, what to consider when the mind won’t settle, and how everyday habits interact with sleep. There are also sections on medical causes worth checking, along with printable tools to help you understand your own sleep patterns.

Explore Sleeping Well After Sixty

You don’t need to change all five habits tonight. Choose the one that seems most relevant to your own evening and see whether it makes a difference over time.

Sometimes that will be enough to improve a routine. Sometimes it will help you discover that your sleep problem needs a different kind of attention.

Either is useful information.

It has two halves. In the top one, a small figure stands facing left, toward an arrow labeled “the past,” saying “I should have…” In the bottom one, the same figure has turned around. It faces right, toward “the future,” and it’s saying “What if I…” Above it, a short instruction: when you find yourself thinking the first, try asking yourself the second.

It’s a very simple drawing. It’s also, more or less, where this month has been heading.

This month, we’ve been looking at the feelings that come with change.

We started with the exhaustion of not knowing what’s going to happen. Then we looked at why someone else’s good news can sting more than we’d like to admit. And last Sunday, we asked what anger might be trying to protect.

Today, we’re looking at the feeling that often arrives afterward: regret.

What regret sounds like now

After a big change, regret tends to arrive in full sentences.

“I should have sold the house while we both could still enjoy the move.” Or the opposite: “I should never have sold it.” “I should have taken the trip while my knees still worked.” “I should have pushed the doctor harder.” “I should have called my sister before it got this awkward.” And after a death, the hardest ones: “I should have said it. I should have been there that night.”

Some regrets are about decades, not days. The years spent worrying about money that turned out fine. The career you stayed in because it was safe. The way things went wrong with a son or a daughter, and you’re still not sure exactly why.

The usual advice is to let go and look forward, which sounds lovely and helps very little at three in the morning. Regret at this stage of life can carry an extra weight: the fear that it’s too late to do anything about it.

What regret is pointing at

Researchers who have studied regret for decades have noticed something that changes how it looks: people often feel particularly strong regret in parts of life where they still perceive opportunities to do something differently. Psychologists Neal Roese and Amy Summerville gave this pattern a memorable name: “Opportunity breeds regret.”

That doesn’t mean every regret can be repaired. But sometimes the regret that keeps returning points to something you still want — and perhaps something you can still do about it.

Your sister might still be someone you could call. A class you never took might still be available. A trip you postponed could possibly happen in a smaller, different form. And sometimes the original opportunity really has passed, but what mattered about it hasn’t disappeared.

Some doors really are closed, of course. Losses don’t become manageable simply because we turn them into questions about the future.

So this Sunday’s question is not how to stop regretting. It’s this: which of your “I should haves” can still become a “what if I,” and how can you live with the ones that can’t?

What You’ll Find Below

The trouble with regret is that not every “I should have” can become a “what if I.”

Some doors are still open. Others have closed, and no amount of wishing will change that. The difficult part is knowing which is which — and what to do next.

Below, we’ll explore:

• How to tell which regrets might still lead somewhere.

• A short exercise for turning regret into a possible next step, without pretending every loss can be fixed.

• What research suggests about living with regrets that cannot be undone, plus words for reaching out when another person is involved.

And with Plus, you’ll also get the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.

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In a section about living alone, I had included a short reminder about keeping your phone nearby and setting up its emergency features. It seemed like a small detail in a much bigger conversation. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized those few settings deserved some attention of their own.

Most of us carry our phones everywhere. We use them to take photographs, read the news, check the weather, and keep in touch. Yet some of their most useful features are ones we may never have opened.

Two are particularly worth knowing about: Emergency SOS, which provides a shortcut to calling emergency services, and Medical ID, which makes selected medical information available from your locked phone.

Both are free. And both are worth setting up before you have any reason to need them.

Having a way to call for help is only half the story

In 2008, researchers at the University of Cambridge published a study in the BMJ following 110 people over the age of ninety.

They recorded 265 falls over a year. Most occurred when the person was alone, and many participants had difficulty getting up without assistance.

One finding was particularly striking: in 80% of falls where someone was alone, unable to get up, and had access to a call alarm, the alarm wasn’t used.

These were people in their nineties, and the findings shouldn’t be treated as predictions for everyone in their sixties or seventies. But they illustrate a practical distinction that matters at any age.

Having a way to summon help is useful. Knowing where it is, being able to reach it, and being willing to use it are separate questions.

I was reminded of this when my father fell in his garage.

I wrote about the experience in June, including the forty minutes he spent on the floor while his phone sat on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t seriously injured, fortunately, but the experience prompted a much larger conversation about safety and independence.

He now wears a smartwatch that can detect certain falls and help call for assistance. That earlier article explores what those watches can and cannot do.

A phone offers another option, provided it is charged, nearby, and accessible when needed.

Two features worth setting up

The first is Emergency SOS.

On supported smartphones, you can use a combination of physical button presses to begin an emergency call without first unlocking the phone and manually dialing the number. Depending on the device and its settings, the phone may also notify designated emergency contacts and share your location.

The second is Medical ID, sometimes called Emergency Information on Android.

This allows you to make selected medical details accessible from your phone’s lock screen. Someone helping you may be able to find important information without knowing your passcode.

These features serve different purposes. One helps you contact emergency services. The other helps someone assisting you find information you have chosen to make available.

Neither requires a paid subscription, though the available features depend on your phone, software and location.

Where to find them on your phone

If you have an iPhone:

Open the Health app, tap your profile picture and select Medical ID. You can enter or update your medical details and emergency contacts, then enable Show When Locked if you want that information accessible in an emergency.

Next, open Settings > Emergency SOS. Review the available ways to start an emergency call, including the side-button shortcuts, and check which options are enabled.

Apple’s guides: Set up Medical ID · Set up Emergency SOS

If you have an Android phone:

Look in Settings > Safety & emergency. On supported models, you can add emergency information and contacts and configure Emergency SOS.

On Google Pixel phones, the Personal Safety app provides additional settings. Samsung Galaxy phones have their own emergency options, including an SOS shortcut using the side button on supported models.

The names and locations of individual settings vary, so use the instructions for your specific phone: Google Android · Samsung

If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough, I also recommend this free guide to setting up Emergency SOS on iPhone and Android by Paul Wilczynski of TheSeniorTechie. Paul writes about technology for older adults in a refreshingly practical, straightforward way, and his guide is a useful companion if you’d like a little more help with the settings on your particular phone.

And remember that connectivity, battery life and regional availability affect what these features can do.

What belongs in your Medical ID?

Imagine someone trying to help you who knows nothing about your medical history. What information would be genuinely useful?

Start with the essentials: current medications, important medical conditions, allergies and emergency contacts.

If you take medication regularly, check that the information is accurate. A list you completed two years ago may no longer reflect what you’re taking today.

Consider whether there are communication details someone helping you should know, such as hearing difficulties or a preferred language. Depending on your phone, you may have space for additional information.

You don’t need to turn your Medical ID into a complete medical autobiography. The goal is to make the most relevant information easy to find.

There’s also a privacy decision to make. If you enable access from the lock screen, other people who physically have your phone may be able to see those details. Choose what you’re comfortable sharing and review it periodically.

The people on your emergency list

Your phone may be ready to notify someone. But is that person ready to receive the notification?

This is the part of the setup that deserves a conversation.

Ask the people you’ve chosen whether they’re comfortable being your emergency contacts. Make sure the phone numbers are correct, and explain what you would want them to do if they received an alert.

Distance matters, too. A relative living across the country may be the right person to coordinate decisions, while a nearby friend or neighbor may be better placed to check on you quickly.

You may want both.

It’s also worth reviewing who has a spare key, how someone could reach you if you didn’t answer the phone, and whether your contacts have the information they would need to help.

None of this requires an elaborate emergency plan. Often, a short conversation now prevents uncertainty later.

The decision worth making before an emergency

There is one other lesson in that Cambridge study.

Some people who had alarms didn’t use them even when they needed help getting up. The reasons varied, including practical difficulties and reluctance to summon assistance.

It’s easy to understand why someone might hesitate. An unexpected medical event can be frightening, and accepting help may bring questions about independence that a person would rather avoid.

But there is a considerable difference between choosing how you want to live and having to decide whether to ask for help while injured or unable to get up.

It may be useful to talk about that distinction beforehand, with someone you trust.

A phone can make contacting help easier. It cannot make that decision for you.

A useful thing to do this weekend

Open your phone’s emergency settings and look at what’s already there.

Check your Medical ID or Emergency Information. Make sure your contacts are current. Find out how Emergency SOS works on your particular device, without placing a test emergency call.

Then tell at least one person that you’ve added them as an emergency contact.

You may discover everything is already in place. Or you may find an empty screen you’ve never noticed before.

Either way, it’s a worthwhile few minutes.

If you enjoy the combination of useful information, thoughtful perspective and practical ideas we publish at We Get Better With Age, Plus membership helps support this work and gives you access to our paid articles and member benefits.

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You stand up to put the kettle back on, and for a second the room goes gray at the edges. It feels a bit like the end of a long movie, when the lights come up too slowly. Your hand finds the arm of the sofa without being asked. You wait. It passes.

Maybe this has happened before, and you haven’t thought much of it. After all, it clears in a few seconds. It can seem too minor to mention.

It does happen to a lot of people. It is also worth mentioning.

What happens in that gray second

When you stand, your body has to adjust your blood pressure quickly enough to keep blood flowing to your brain. For some people, the adjustment is slower or the drop is larger than it should be. The result may be a brief wave of dizziness, blurred vision or that gray feeling.

The medical name is orthostatic hypotension, also called postural hypotension. Cleveland Clinic describes it as a significant drop in blood pressure on standing, usually measured as at least 20 millimeters of mercury in the top number or 10 in the bottom number. It can occur after sitting or lying down and becomes more common with age.

Not every fleeting dizzy spell is orthostatic hypotension. Dehydration, medications and several other health conditions can cause similar symptoms. That is one reason not to diagnose it for yourself simply because it goes away quickly.

Why it deserves more than a shrug

The important question isn’t only why your vision dimmed. It’s whether you’re safe in the moment that follows.

The CDC’s brochure on postural hypotension explains that a drop in blood pressure on standing can increase the chance of falling.

Falls are already common among older adults. About one in four adults aged sixty-five and older reports a fall each year, according to CDC data.

If you’re lightheaded, even a few steps toward the kitchen or the stairs can be risky. The sensible response is to stop moving and sit or lie down somewhere safe until the feeling passes. If the problem keeps happening, tell your clinician rather than simply changing your routines to avoid standing.

When it is more than a gray second

Brief dizziness deserves a mention to your doctor, particularly if it is new, recurrent, worsening or started after a medication change. Fainting or a fall should prompt medical assessment, even if you soon feel better.

Some symptoms call for immediate emergency care. If dizziness comes with chest pain, severe difficulty breathing, sudden weakness on one side, trouble speaking or other possible stroke symptoms, call emergency services rather than waiting for an appointment. If you remain extremely dizzy, cannot safely stand or do not recover, seek urgent help.

For a mild spell that clears when you sit or lie down, make a note of when it happened and arrange to discuss it with your clinician. You don’t have to wait for a fall to bring it up.

When it tends to happen

In The Twenty Seconds Between Your Bed and the Door, I wrote about another risky moment: getting up to go to the bathroom at night, when you’re still half-asleep and may be unsteady. Sitting on the edge of the bed before standing is a useful precaution.

But postural dizziness isn’t limited to the nighttime. The CDC lists several situations where symptoms can appear:

• when standing or sitting up suddenly;

• in the morning;

• after a large meal or alcohol;

• during exercise or after straining on the toilet;

• when you’re ill, dehydrated or feeling very anxious.

Very hot baths and showers can make symptoms worse for some people, too.

Read that list with your own day in mind. You may notice a pattern you hadn’t connected to standing up.

The pills in the cabinet

Sometimes these spells begin around the time a medication is started or its dose changes. That can be surprisingly easy to miss when the medicine was prescribed for a perfectly good reason.

The CDC lists some water pills, blood-pressure medications and antidepressants among possible contributors. It also mentions diabetes, certain heart or neurological conditions, dehydration, anemia and long periods of bed rest.

That doesn’t mean any one medicine is necessarily the cause. But if the spells started after a new prescription, tell your clinician exactly when. Bring a list of medications, including over-the-counter ones.

And don’t stop or reduce prescription medication on your own. A clinician can review whether the dose, timing or treatment should change.

What to do in the seconds after you stand

Most of the CDC’s practical advice costs nothing, although which steps are appropriate for you depends on your health and mobility.

Get up in stages. From bed, sit up first, rest on the edge of the bed, then stand. From a sofa or chair, move toward the front of the seat, put your feet flat on the floor and rise slowly. There’s no magic number of seconds that works for everyone.

Move a little first. Gently flex your ankles or open and close your hands before standing. If you’re steady once upright, light leg movements may help before you walk away. If you feel dizzy, sit back down rather than trying to march through it.

Give yourself something stable to hold. A fixed counter or properly secured handrail is better than furniture that might slide or tip.

Don’t walk while dizzy. Sit or lie down safely and wait for the symptoms to pass. If you feel faint, get assistance and seek medical advice, especially if this is new or recurrent.

Make standing tasks easier. Sitting for some kitchen preparation, dressing or washing can reduce long periods on your feet. In the bathroom, consider whether stable grab bars or a suitable seat would be safer than an improvised stool.

Drink enough for your circumstances. Dehydration can contribute to low blood pressure, but people with heart, kidney or other medical conditions may need fluid restrictions. Follow your clinician’s advice rather than forcing yourself to meet a generic number.

Avoid very hot showers or baths if they make you lightheaded, and take your time getting out.

Some people are advised to sleep with their head slightly raised. That’s a question to discuss with your clinician rather than a universal fix.

The simple habit to remember: don’t rush your first steps. Pause, make sure you’re steady, and only then move.

A week of writing it down

If the problem is mild and you already have a nonurgent appointment arranged, a short record can be useful. Don’t delay medical assessment for a week just to complete it if you faint, fall or have symptoms that concern you.

Keep a note on your phone or a card by the sofa. Each time it happens, write down the time, what you had just been doing, how long it lasted and whether anything changed recently.

For example:

“Tuesday, 1:30 p.m. — stood up after lunch; vision dimmed for a few seconds.”

“Thursday, 7:15 a.m. — dizzy getting out of the shower.”

“Saturday, 10 a.m. — symptoms began after medication was changed.”

Those details are often more useful in an appointment than trying to remember how often you felt “a bit off.” They can help a clinician decide what to investigate.

The three-minute test worth asking for

There is a straightforward clinical assessment for checking whether your blood pressure drops when you stand. It’s called measuring orthostatic blood pressure.

The CDC’s STEADI instructions describe the procedure: rest lying down for five minutes; measure blood pressure and pulse; then repeat the measurements after standing for one minute and again after three minutes. A drop of at least 20 mm Hg in the top number or 10 mm Hg in the bottom number, or symptoms such as dizziness, is considered abnormal during the assessment.

This should be done with appropriate supervision, particularly if standing makes you feel faint. A routine blood-pressure measurement taken while sitting won’t necessarily reveal a problem that happens when you stand.

You can ask:

“I’ve been getting dizzy when I stand up. Could we check my blood pressure lying down and then standing?”

Bring your medication list and any notes about when the symptoms started. It’s a simple question, and you deserve a careful answer.

If a symptom gets dismissed as “just your age,” I also wrote about ways to ask for a more complete explanation in Why “Acting Your Age” Is Bad Medical Advice.

The next time you stand, there is no need to race to the next room. Take a moment, notice how you feel and steady yourself before you set off. And if that gray second keeps visiting, bring it up with your doctor.

If this was useful and you’d like to back the work, becoming a Plus member is how. You’ll also get access to the full archive, Sunday deep dives, and a new Fun Pack every month.

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If you’ve heard a doctor say some version of that, about the knee or the tiredness or the thing you came in about, you probably know the feeling that follows. You nod. You thank them. And somewhere around the parking lot, it arrives: heat in the face, a sentence you wish you’d said, a mood that sits with you for the rest of the afternoon.

That feeling is anger. It tends to get called something else at this point in life. Frustration. Being tired. Being “a bit short today.”

I’ve written before about what to do when a doctor attributes a concern to your age instead of investigating it. But today, I’m interested in what happens after you leave that appointment.

Where it shows up

A big change brings anger with it, and most of it has nowhere obvious to go.

The body is one source. The knee that carried you through forty years now decides which stores you go to. Grown children are another, when your daughter starts explaining your own finances to you in the voice she uses with her kids. Then there’s the insurance notice that raises the premium again and explains nothing. If you’re caring for a husband who’s ill, the anger can land on him, over something small, followed a second later by guilt. And if you’ve lost someone, it can land on them: for going first, for leaving the paperwork in a mess, for not going to the doctor sooner.

Then comes the second part. You’re expected to be pleasant about all of it. An angry man past seventy gets called stubborn. An angry woman gets called difficult, or bitter, or “not herself lately.” So a lot of women do what they’ve done for decades: they swallow it, smooth it over, and get on with the day.

What anger is for

Researchers who study emotions across the lifespan describe one useful function of anger: it can arise when something important to us seems blocked, unfair, or out of our control. Sometimes it gives us the energy to try to change the situation.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment. Anger can point to something that matters to you. The doctor who won’t look properly. The daughter who’s stopped asking what you want. The company that keeps raising the price.

But it doesn’t always mean there’s somebody to blame, and it doesn’t always tell you what to do. Sometimes the thing you’ve lost can’t be restored. Sometimes you can change only one small part of the situation.

That makes today’s question more useful than a general instruction to calm down: what is your anger trying to protect, and where could it lead you if you listened to it carefully?

What You’ll Find Below

The harder part isn’t recognizing anger. It’s knowing what to do with it. Sometimes there’s something you can change. Sometimes there isn’t. And confusing the two can leave you fighting a battle you can’t win — or giving up on one you could.

Below, we’ll work through:

• What the research actually says about anger and health in later life — and what it cannot prove.

• A question that helps you separate what can change from what you may need to grieve, plus a short writing exercise.

• Words you can use with a doctor, a grown child, or someone you’re caring for — and what to do when the anger turns toward yourself or someone you’ve lost.

And with Plus, you’ll also have access to the complete archive and the monthly Fun Pack.

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He has been working on a house down the street, he says, and from up there he could see a few shingles lifting on yours. Nothing dramatic yet. But the weather is turning, and water finds its way in. He has material left over from the other job, so he could do it this afternoon, for a lot less than it would normally cost. Cash is easiest.

You have not been up on your own roof in twenty years. You have no way of knowing whether he is right.

Everything about the visit is built on that one fact.

You are not the careless one in this story

Almost every line of that doorstep conversation is on the Federal Trade Commission’s list of home repair scam warning signs. Turning up because they happen to be “in the area.” Materials left over from a previous job. Pressure to decide right now. Payment up front, or cash only.

The FTC lists home repair scams as one of its named cate…

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Yes. And the reason they exist is one most people never hear at the pharmacy counter.

After 65, the flu shot you got at 45 tends to work less well. The CDC says it without softening it: older adults can have lower protective immune responses after flu vaccination than healthy younger people. The body still answers the vaccine. It answers more quietly.

So vaccine makers built versions for that quieter answer. In the United States, the CDC and its vaccine advisers recommend that people 65 and over preferentially get one of three: a high-dose vaccine, an adjuvanted vaccine, or a recombinant one. Health agencies in Canada, the UK and Australia have landed in the same place.

Most people walk in, roll up a sleeve, and get whatever is in the fridge. Often that is the right one. Sometimes it isn’t, and the only way to know is to ask.

The week after the flu

Before getting t…

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The women whose health was worst compared themselves the most. That part surprised no one. A body that has started to let you down sends you looking sideways: at the friend who still gardens all afternoon, at the neighbor who drives herself to her daughter’s three states away.

The second finding is the one worth keeping. When those comparisons left a woman feeling she was holding up reasonably well, her mental health came out close to that of the women in good health. The effect was strongest for the women in the poorest health of all. How often they compared mattered less than what they took away from it.

The feeling that shows up during a change

October started last Sunday with the idea that change is the one thing you can count on, and with the feeling that usually arrives first: the not-knowing, which can wear you out even when nothing seems to be happening. Today’s feeling tends to arrive once the change is underway, and people rarely admit to it.

It shows up at dinner, when you’re the only one at the table without a husband and the couples order a bottle to share. Or, if your husband is the one who’s ill, it shows up when the couple you used to travel with send photos from Arizona. It comes in the Christmas card from the friend whose grandchildren live ten minutes away, when yours are a plane ride off and call on birthdays. It shows up in your exercise class, when a woman ten years older than you gets down on the floor and back up again without a hand.

A flash of something sour follows. Then, usually, a flash of shame about the sourness.

Why a big change turns it up

Comparison has a poor reputation. It gets treated as pettiness, or ingratitude, or a social-media habit that sensible adults grow out of.

The psychologist who first studied it seriously saw it differently. In 1954 Leon Festinger argued that people compare themselves with others in order to work out where they stand, and that they do it most when there’s no objective measure to check against. He also noticed that people pick someone close to themselves to compare with. A stranger’s life tells you very little about your own. A friend’s tells you a lot.

That explains a good deal about the months after a big change. Before it, you had a sense of how your life was going. Afterwards the old measure stops working. You’re newly widowed, or newly retired, or newly diagnosed, and there’s no scale for that. So you look sideways, at the people living a version of your life that seems to be going better, and the people you look at are the ones nearest to you.

A stranger’s trip doesn’t sting. Your friend’s does.

The women in that 1990s study add the second half. Comparing often is not the problem. What matters is what you take away from it, and that part is more in your hands than it feels.

The clearest picture of this I know comes from an unlikely place: the Olympic podium. A team of psychologists took the television footage of the 1992 Barcelona Games and asked people to rate how happy each silver and bronze medalist looked. The silver medalists had the better result, and they looked less happy anyway. Right after their events, the bronze medalists averaged 7.1 out of 10 and the silver medalists 4.8.

The researchers’ explanation was where each one was looking. Silver was looking up, at the gold it had almost won. Bronze was looking down, at fourth place and going home with nothing, and could think, as the researchers put it, “at least I won a medal.” Scientific American’s write-up of the study has a photo from a later podium where you can see it for yourself.

So this Sunday’s question is something other than how to stop comparing. You won’t stop, and you don’t need to. The useful question is narrower: what is the comparison telling you, and how much say do you have in where you look?

What You’ll Find Below

✅ Where people look when life gets hard — what researchers heard from women facing a serious illness, and the trap they called the “supercoper”

✅ What you envy, exactly — a short exercise that turns the sting into something you can use

✅ What to say to “at least…” — word for word, for the comparisons other people hand you

✅ “Am I a bad person for not being glad for her?” — answered straight

✅ And everything else a Plus membership carries — the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.

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It is probably in a drawer now.

The home modifications for aging in place that you will feel every day are rarely the ones at the top of those lists. They are small and cheap: lever handles, wide light switches, night lights that come on when you move, grab bars fixed into the studs, a second rail on the stairs.

Most cost under fifty dollars. Here is how to find the ones your house needs, and in what order.

What’s the problem with the usual home safety list

These lists fail in two ways.

The first is the order. The walk-in shower and the stairlift come first. They look good in photos, and they are also the most expensive things on the page.

Someone comes with a tape measure and quotes twice what you expected. You say you will think about it. The bathroom does not get done this year.

And once the big job looks like the only real fix, everything below it seems pointless. Why change a light switch if the answer is a new bathroom?

The second is the length. Twenty items, all urgent, and no way to tell which ones matter in your house. So none of them get done.

The list was written for an average house. Yours is a specific one: a five-by-eight bathroom, a landlord who does not like drilling, or stairs that are the only way to the bedroom.

Where should you start with home modifications?

Start with one evening of noticing, before you buy anything. Walk through your day in the order you live it. Take a pencil and paper, and write down every place where the house makes you work harder than it should.

You have already adjusted to the house in small ways. You take the stairs one at a time. You stopped using the top shelf. You set the grocery bag down on the step, because the key needs one hand and the knob needs the other. The house has not adjusted to you once.

Do the walk in the evening, when you are tired and the effort shows. Go where you actually go: bed, bathroom, kitchen, your chair, your door. Look for four things:

• Where you hesitate: before the tub, the bottom step in the dark, the heavy pot.

• Where you lean: a hand on the hall wall, on the counter, on the door frame.

• Where you detour: the other door because this latch sticks, the big pot washed in the tub.

• What you put off: the hall bulb that needs the step stool, the window you stopped opening.

Write down what happened (“held the counter to reach the roasting pan”), not what it means (“kitchen unsafe”). And do not fix anything on the way. Stop for one bulb and you will never finish the walk.

Sort by how often, not by how bad

Sort your list by how often each thing happens, not by how alarming it sounds. A cabinet door that needs two hands, opened eleven times a day, costs you more than a basement step you use twice a month. It is also cheaper to fix, and you will feel the difference within a week.

Then split the page into three columns:

• This week. Happens often, costs little, needs no one but you.

• This month. Needs ordering, measuring, or an afternoon of somebody’s time.

• Someday, and not yet. Real money, a trade, or a decision you have not made.

The walk-in shower can go under “someday.” It stays on the page, and it stops blocking the fourteen things you could do on Saturday.

Then pick the top item from “this week.” Just that one.

What are the most common home modifications for aging in place?

Here are ten, starting with the things you touch most often. Nearly all cost under fifty dollars, or fifty to three hundred with installation. Several need only you and a screwdriver. One is free. Each comes with one example, so you can see what to look for. For most changes, the guide gives two or three picks, with the reasons behind each one.

If you buy through one of these links, I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.

1. Lever handles instead of round doorknobs. A round knob needs you to grip and twist at the same time. A lever opens with a push of your forearm, even with a laundry basket in your arms. About half an hour per door, with a screwdriver. Example: Kwikset Casey passage lever.

2. Rocker light switches. A wide, flat panel you can press with your palm or elbow, instead of a small switch you have to find in the dark. An electrician can change every switch in the house in a morning. Example: ENERLITES paddle switches, 10-pack.

3. A single-lever faucet. One lever controls heat and flow, so you can work it with the side of your hand while holding a pot. A plumber, an hour or two. Check under the sink first: it has one hole or three, and the faucet has to match. Example: Moen Adler pull-down kitchen faucet. (I wrote more about handles, switches and faucets here)

4. D-shaped cabinet pulls. A kitchen can have forty small round knobs, and each one needs a pinch. A bar pull works even with wet hands. Measure the gap between the screws on your old knobs and buy to match. One evening’s work. Example: Ravinte bar pulls, 10-pack.

5. Night lights between the bed and the bathroom. About a quarter of falls at home that end in the emergency room happen in the bedroom, more than in any other room. Use plug-in lights that come on when you move, low to the floor, in a warm color. Ten minutes, no tools. Example: AUVON plug-in motion night lights. (I wrote about those twenty seconds at night here)

6. Everyday things between your hip and your shoulder. This one is free. Empty the upper cabinets onto the table and sort everything into three piles: every week, a few times a year, never. The first pile goes within easy reach. It is usually about a dozen things.

7. Pull-out shelves in the low cabinets. Your heaviest pot probably lives at the back of a low cabinet. A tray on drawer slides brings it to the front. Measure the opening, not the cabinet. A handy person fits one in about twenty minutes. Example: STORKING pull-out cabinet organizer.

8. Grab bars where your hand already goes. A proper grab bar holds 250 pounds, wall included, so it goes into a stud, never into drywall alone. In the shower, mount it 33 to 36 inches off the floor. Suction-cup handles look similar in the store, but they are not made to hold your weight. Example: Moen Home Care 24-inch grab bar.

9. A shower seat and a handheld shower head. The seat should be 17 to 19 inches high, like a dining chair, so you can stand up again easily. A handheld head on a six-foot hose screws onto your existing shower arm in ten minutes. A raised toilet seat brings the toilet to the same height. Example: Medline shower chair with back and arms.

10. A handrail on both sides of the stairs. With only one rail, you may be on the wrong side of it coming down. Add a second one, round enough to wrap your fingers around, 34 to 38 inches high. A carpenter can do a flight in two or three hours. Example: Promenaid handrail kit.

What about the bathroom?

Most people worry about the bathroom first, and it deserves the attention. About one in five falls at home that end in the emergency room happen there, close behind the bedroom and the stairs. What helps most is simple: something solid to hold, a place to sit, and water you can bring to you.

Stand where you step out of the shower, one foot on the mat. Let your hand reach out the way it usually does.

Look at what it lands on: a towel bar held up by two small anchors, the edge of a glass door, the soap shelf. None of them were built to hold a person.

Put a piece of tape on that spot. That is where the first grab bar goes.

Grab bars no longer have to look medical. They come in the same finishes as faucets, like brushed nickel, matte black or bronze. Some are designed as towel bars that are rated to hold a person.

Stepping over the side of the tub is the hardest move in the room: one leg up, the other balancing, both wet. Before you price a new shower, look at a transfer bench. It sits across the tub wall, so you sit down outside the tub and slide across.

Do small changes actually prevent falls?

Yes. The evidence here is stronger than for most home advice. A review of twelve trials with more than five thousand people found that changing the home cut the rate of falls by about a quarter. For people already at high risk, it was closer to two-fifths. The changes were ordinary ones: clutter, loose rugs, poor light, nothing to hold on to.

They worked even better when an occupational therapist did the assessment. That is the evening walk from earlier, done with someone trained to spot what you no longer notice.

The stairs have their own quick test. Stand at the bottom and reach out to both sides. If one hand finds nothing, put a second rail on your “this month” list.

When the big renovation is the right one

Some items will land in “someday”: the walk-in shower, the stairlift, the ramp. Sometimes one of them is the right answer. A stairlift can give you back a whole floor of your house.

But order matters. Finish “this week” and “this month” first, then look at “someday” again. It is common to find that the expensive job was not the one you needed.

When it is, do it properly. A cheap version of a big job usually goes unused. A ramp that is too steep is the classic case: the standard slope is one inch of rise per foot of length, so three porch steps need about twenty-four feet of ramp.

A House That Fits

This is what our new guide is for.

A House That Fits is the practical aging-in-place guide for small changes you can actually make. It works with the house you already have, and it does not ask you to renovate.

It is built on three moves: notice where your day costs more than it should, alter the one thing that gives it back, and keep it working.

Inside, room by room:

• What your hands touch all day: switches, handles, faucets, the key and the lock.

• The twenty seconds at night, from bed to bathroom in the dark.

• The bathroom that does not have to look like a hospital, with the measurements that matter and what to check before you trust a grab bar.

• The kitchen: the top shelf, the back of the low cabinet, heavy pans, carrying.

• The way in and the way out: doors, steps, stairs, the path, the ice, and getting in and out of the car.

• Where things live, so the house remembers for you.

• The bad day: setting up the house for your worst day, not your average one.

• Living alone, on purpose, and who knows you are all right today.

• What it costs and who helps pay, in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Canada and Australia.

• Keeping it working, with a twenty-minute season check four times a year.

The ten above are a sample. The guide covers more than thirty changes, room by room, with over a hundred products. For each one, it tells you exactly what to buy and why: usually two or three options, what each one is for, what it costs, who installs it, and what to check if you buy it somewhere else. There are sheets to print and write on, including the walk from this article, laid out room by room.

At the end of most chapters there is a small box called If someone says you should move, with a sentence you can actually say. The bathroom one goes: “I’ve got the bathroom taken care of — bar in the shower, proper seat, handheld. Come and look at it next time you’re here.”

It is $19.99, down from $24.99. You can read it on any device or print it, and it is yours to keep.

Get A House That Fits — $19.99

PS — If your subscription includes Plus + All Guides, this guide is already yours: you can download it from this page. If it doesn’t yet, you can upgrade there too.

I’m a fan of Oliver Burkeman, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Back in April I wrote about his earlier book, Four Thousand Weeks, the one built on a simple piece of arithmetic: a life of about eighty years comes to roughly four thousand weeks. That book stayed with me.

So when I picked up his next one, Meditations for Mortals, I already expected to like it. I did. But it’s a different kind of book, and the difference is the reason I’m writing about it.

How this one is built

Four Thousand Weeks makes an argument from start to finish. Meditations for Mortals is built to be lived with.

It has twenty-eight short chapters, meant to be read about one a day, over four weeks. They are numbered by day, and the ones I have read each open with a short quotation from someone else: a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, Umberto Eco. Then Burkeman takes one idea…

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Let me explain.

There’s a line usually credited to Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher: the only constant is change. He didn’t write it in those words. Nothing of his survives whole, and what reached us came secondhand. Plato has Socrates describe his idea as a river you can’t step into twice, because other water is always flowing in. A biographer writing about seven hundred years later summed him up in four words: “nothing endures but change.”

That line usually gets said to people at the start of things, a new job or a new city, when it sounds like encouragement. Later in life it lands differently. By now change has taken real things: a job that was part of who you were, and more than one person you loved. You’ve had the proof for decades.

What interests me is how people react to it. A big change has a before, a during and an after, and each comes with feelings of its own. Before, there’s the not-knowing. During, there are the feelings people tend to keep to themselves. After, there’s the looking back. Retirement, a move, a diagnosis, losing someone: the details couldn’t be more different, and the feelings are surprisingly alike.

That’s what I want to write about this month. At the end of September I said October would be about the big changes: what they take, what they hand back, and who you turn out to be on the other side. So each Sunday takes one of those feelings, in roughly the order they arrive. First what it does to you, taken seriously, and only then what it can turn into.

I’m writing about this from inside it. As I write this, my family is working out what it would mean to move to another country. My husband has been offered a job abroad, and nothing is decided yet. I’ve noticed how much room the uncertainty takes up in my head right now. I can find pros and cons for either option. It’s the not knowing that’s exhausting.

Maybe you’re carrying a question like that too. For some of you it’s the house, and whether to stay or move closer to a daughter. For others it’s driving at night, or what the doctor meant by “let’s keep an eye on it,” or a husband who lost his train of thought twice last month and laughed it off both times.

You can probably make a list of pros and cons for some of these, the way I can for mine. The list rarely settles anything, because the answer depends on things that haven’t happened yet. There’s no appointment where someone hands it to you. So you carry the question around, and it takes up room.

Why the not-knowing wears you out

Uncertainty is the first of this month’s feelings, and the hardest to explain to anyone else, because from the outside nothing is happening. In my case nothing has been decided yet. Your days may look exactly the way they did last year.

People describe a tiredness they can’t point to. Many notice that once a hard answer finally arrives, it’s easier to carry than the months of not having one. You may have seen it in a friend: the bad news comes, and she seems steadier the week after than she did the month before.

Researchers have measured this, in an experiment involving rocks, snakes and mild electric shocks, and the result explains a lot about the questions you’re carrying.

Even bad news is often easier to live with than not knowing.

You’ve also done this before, more often than you’d guess. Every big change you’ve lived through had a stretch of not-knowing in front of it: the job you weren’t sure you’d get, the move to a city where you knew exactly one person. You remember what came after much better than the stretch itself. But you got through every one.

So the question for this Sunday is different from “how do I make the not-knowing go away?” Most of it won’t go away. The useful question is narrower: why is open-ended uncertainty so tiring, and how do you live inside it instead of waiting for it to end?

What You’ll Find Below

✅ The rocks-and-snakes experiment — what happened when researchers measured stress at different odds of bad news, and why the worst number wasn’t the one you’d expect

✅ An inventory you already own — a short exercise built from the changes you’ve come through, which tells you more about the next one than any prediction could

✅ The part you can shrink and the part you can’t — how to tell them apart, and what to do with each

✅ “What if this time I don’t have it in me?” — the fear underneath all of it, answered straight

✅ And everything else a Plus membership carries — the full archive and a new Fun Pack every month.

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It comes out of you in a store without a thought, the way your birthday does. Seven and a half. Six. Whatever yours is. You have said it to so many salespeople that it has stopped being a measurement and become a fact about you, like your eye color.

For many women reading this, it's been wrong for a decade.

The foot it describes no longer exists.

Your foot changed shape

Feet keep changing long after twenty-five.

The arch is held up by soft tissue, and soft tissue gives in slowly under fifty or sixty years of standing, walking, carrying, and being stood on. As the arch lowers, the foot spreads. It gets wider across the ball. It also gets a little longer, because a flatter arch puts more of the foot on the floor.

MedlinePlus, the patient-facing service of the US National Library of Medicine, puts it in six words: feet tend to flatten with age.

At the same time, the padding thins. A cushion of fat sits under the heel and under the b…

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According to the National Institute on Aging, it is also cool enough to bring on hypothermia in an older adult. At home, indoors, in a house that feels a bit chilly. The same page notes that about one in five injuries from cold exposure happens inside the home.

So winter preparation is smaller and closer to home than it sounds. A handful of ordinary jobs, simple on a mild afternoon in late September and considerably harder once the weather has turned. Some of them become dangerous.

The same job, done in January

This article started in my own house. For the past few days we have had problems with the hot water, and a few…

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And what you do at night isn’t quite sleeping. It’s a kind of listening with your eyes shut, and it has been going on so long that you stopped calling it anything.

Somewhere inside the same stretch of months, you stopped going to the Thursday thing.

There was no decision. Nobody sat you down. There was a week you couldn’t go, and then a week you could have but were too tired to, and then enough time had passed that going back would have meant explaining where you’d been. So it fell away, the way the choir fell away, and the book you were halfway through, and the friend you used to call on Sunday afternoons.

Two notes before we start. This is for anyone whose day is now organized around another person’s needs — a husband or a wife most often, but just as often a mother in her nineties, a brother, a neighbor with nobody else. The word changes and almost nothing else does. And if you’re on the other side of this, the one being looked after, you’re welcome to stay. What follows is a close description of what’s happening to the person in the next room, including the parts they’ve decided not to tell you.

This is the last of four Sundays about where an ordinary day gets its shape. The first was about the people who used to supply yours and then stopped. The second, a body that writes the schedule without consulting you. The third, another person in the house with a rhythm of their own.

Today the last version, and the hardest one. You aren’t looking for structure. You are the structure. Somebody else’s whole day now runs on you — and there is nobody standing behind you doing the same job.

Why “make sure you look after yourself too” does nothing

Everyone says it. The doctor says it at the end of the appointment with his hand already on the door. Your daughter says it on the phone, and means it. A woman at the pharmacy says it in the voice people use for this.

And it slides straight off, every time.

It isn’t an instruction. It’s a wish said in a kind voice. There’s no size to it — look after yourself for how long, starting when? There’s no hour attached. And there’s nobody responsible for making it happen except you, who are the one person in this arrangement with nothing spare.

Worse, it arrives sounding faintly like a criticism. As though you’d been offered something and turned it down.

So you say I know, I will, and then you don’t, and the next person says it too.

What actually wears a person down

The assumption is that what grinds a caregiver down is the sheer amount of it. The hours. The lifting. The nights broken into pieces. All of that is real and none of it is small.

But when researchers went looking for what most reliably travels alongside depression in people caring for someone ill, the strongest thing they found was not the workload.

It was how much of your own life had stopped.

A meta-analysis in Clinical Psychology Review gathered 34 studies covering more than eight thousand people and looked at the link between depression and what the researchers call activity restriction — the plain meaning of which is the things you used to do and no longer do. The link was strong, and it held for caregivers as a group of their own.

The authors end on a practical note: “Assessment and treatment of activity restriction may be particularly helpful in preventing depression.”

That is a dry sentence carrying an unexpectedly large piece of good news.

It means the weight on you is not simply the illness, and not the amount of care, and not something you have to wait out until the situation changes. Part of it is a separate problem sitting alongside the caring — and separate problems can be worked on separately. You don’t have to care less in order to feel less flattened. You have to lose less of yourself while you do it.

It isn’t the hours that flatten you. It’s everything that quietly stopped.

So the question this Sunday isn’t where to find time. There isn’t any, and pretending otherwise is how articles like this one usually lose the people they’re written for.

It’s narrower, and it has an answer: which one thing did you stop doing that you’d take back tomorrow if somebody handed it to you — and who could hold one hour a week open for it, given that you can’t?

What You’ll Find Below

The rest of this Sunday, for Plus members:

✅ The hour that already exists — how to find it inside the day you have, instead of trying to manufacture a new one

✅ Why rest is the wrong thing to put in it — and what belongs there instead, according to the same research

✅ The ask that gets a yes — word for word, including the three-item list to keep ready for everyone who says “tell me if I can do anything”

✅ And everything a membership carries — the whole archive, two hundred-odd articles going back years, plus a fresh Fun Pack every month.

This month’s pack is put together differently. Four of the seven kinds are new — Memory Lane, Finish the Line, Guess the Year, This or That — and there are eight coloring pages and a thirty-day calendar that weren’t there before. Nothing in it is harder than last month’s. What changed is what it’s about: an ordinary day, back when a day arrived with its shape already on it.

Nothing below will make the caring lighter. It’s about the other half of your life, which went quiet without either of us noticing, and which can be gotten back an hour at a time.

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The part I tell less often is what happens every year now. She goes for her annual check-up. And for the days around it — the ones before, and then however long the results take — something in the house shifts. She keeps her plans, she cooks, she asks about the children. But I can see that she worries.

She knows the results will most likely come back fine, but that doesn’t make the waiting easier. The anxiety is there anyway. There is no decision to make and nothing that anyone could be doing differently.

If you have had a scan, a callback, a biopsy, a test that came back inconclusive, or simply a yearly appointment that used to be routine and somehow is not anymore, you know the kind of waiting I mean.

Why waiting wears you out

The alarm system inside you is built for action. It exists to get you moving — out of the road, away from the fire, toward the thing that needs doing. It floods you with everything required to act, and it switches off when you have acted.

An envelope that has not arrived yet offers it nothing. There is no action available. So the system fires, finds nothing to do, and fires again. That is the exhaustion people describe after a week of waiting: an alarm running with no off switch in reach.

This is also why the usual advice lands so badly. Try not to think about it. Stay positive. Worrying will not change anything. All true, all useless, because they ask you to end an alarm by deciding to. Nobody can do that. And being unable to do it becomes one more thing to feel bad about, on top of everything else.

Anyone would find this hard. Your body was never designed for an interval like this one.

Vigilance and panic feel identical from the inside

Vigilance is the thing that protects you. Vigilance noticed the change, made the appointment, described the symptom accurately to the doctor, and showed up on the day. Vigilance is finite. It has a task, it completes the task, and then it is finished.

What comes afterward feels the same from the inside, but it behaves completely differently. It rehearses conversations that have not happened. It searches, finds a number, and needs another number ten minutes later. It demands certainty from a situation that does not contain any yet. It exhausts you without protecting you at all.

After sixty the difference matters more, because sometimes the fear is reasonable. Sometimes the result is not fine. So you cannot simply tell yourself that worry is irrational, because it is not always irrational, and you know it.

The useful question, then, is this: has vigilance already done its job? If the appointment is made and the doctor knows what you noticed, then yes. It finished. Everything happening in you now is the other thing, and the other thing has no task to complete.

The late-night searching

Almost everyone does it, and almost everyone feels ashamed of doing it. Looking things up during the wait is your alarm system finding the only action available to it.

The trouble is that the action does not work. Search results hand you statistics drawn from people whose age, history and circumstances are not yours, attached to a condition nobody has said you have. The relief lasts about ten minutes. Then the next search is needed, slightly more frightening than the last.

A limit works better than a ban, because a ban you will break at eleven at night. Give yourself one look, at one reputable source, once. Then close it, and write the question you actually want answered on a piece of paper to take to the appointment. The question is the useful part. Getting it out of your head and onto paper is often the thing that lets you put the phone down.

One very easy thing you can do (takes about ninety seconds)

When the wave arrives — the tight chest, the racing thought, the sudden certainty that something is badly wrong — sit down wherever you are and breathe so that the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. In through the nose for a count of four. Out through the mouth, slowly, for a count of six or seven. Do that for about six or eight rounds.

The length of the exhale is the part that matters. A long, slow out-breath is one of the few signals you can send deliberately to a system that does not otherwise take instructions. It gives the alarm the one piece of information it responds to.

If paying attention to your breathing makes you feel worse, and for some people it does, use your eyes instead. Name five things you can see. Four you can hear. Three you can touch. Two you can smell. One you can taste. It sounds too simple to work. It works because it occupies the part of the mind that was rehearsing, and gives it something real to do.

Neither of these makes the waiting pleasant. What they can do is interrupt the spiral for a while.

The days themselves need a shape

The interval is easier when it is not empty.

Keep the ordinary outline of your days. The walk, the grocery run, the phone call on Thursday. The appointment stays on the calendar either way, and a day cleared of everything else leaves nothing in it but the waiting.

Tell one person the actual date. One person, rather than the whole family, and without opening a conversation about outcomes. Somebody who simply knows what day it is, so you are not managing everyone else’s worry on top of your own.

Decide in advance where the what if thought goes. It will arrive. It always arrives. Have somewhere to put it: a notebook, a walk, the breathing above.

And put something on the calendar for the day after the appointment. Something small and ordinary that you would enjoy. It gives the interval an edge, and it quietly tells you that you expect there to be a day after.

Other people will want to help, and a few will not know how

Word gets out that you have an appointment, and then the phone starts.

Most of it is kindness. Some of it is work — the friend who knows someone who had exactly this and wants to tell you how it turned out, the relative who asks for updates you do not have, the person who needs reassuring by you, about your own test.

Decide one sentence now, before you need it, and use it every time. I am waiting on results, I do not know anything yet, and I will tell you when I do. Then change the subject. It ends a conversation you cannot afford to keep having, and it saves you explaining the same non-news eleven times in a week.

And if somebody starts in on the story about their cousin, you are allowed to stop them. I would rather not hear that one right now is enough, and anyone worth the phone call will take it well.

When the news is real

Sometimes the result is not what you hoped, and no amount of calm will have changed what the test found. Calm was never going to do that, and any promise otherwise deserves your suspicion.

What it changes is the state you arrive in. If there is a hard conversation to have, you want to be rested enough to hear it, steady enough to ask your questions, and clear enough to remember the answers. Two weeks of no sleep does not prepare you for that. It spends you before you get there.

Nothing written here replaces your doctor, your appointment, or the care you need. It is for the hours in between, which are yours to live through either way.

If you want the longer version of this

Everything above is one piece of a larger thing — what to do with a nervous system that has been on alert for years, rather than only for the two weeks before an appointment.

That is what Finding Calm is for. It is a gentle guide to stress management, built for a body that is in its sixties, seventies or eighties, and every practice in it can be done from a chair, in bed, or in a waiting room.

There is no program to keep up with and nothing to fall behind on. It moves in three simple steps you can take in any order: notice what stress is doing in your body before it takes the day, release it with breathwork, gentle somatic practice and meditation that work in minutes, and repeat whatever turns out to work for you until you have a small toolkit of your own.

Inside there is the plain-language explanation of why stress hits harder after sixty, breathwork that calms in about ninety seconds, somatic practices so gentle they barely look like movement, meditation that never asks you to empty your mind, a chapter on what to do when the stress is other people, and a resource library with word-for-word scripts, modifications for different physical abilities, and quick-reference cards for the moments you need something fast.

It is $19.99, down from $24.99. You can read it online on any device or download the printable version, and it is yours to keep.

Get the guide — $19.99

PS — If your subscription includes Plus + All Guides, this guide is already yours: you can download it from this page. If it doesn’t yet, you can upgrade there too.

And if the wider version of this is what you recognize — the tiredness underneath that sleep does not touch — that one is already written, and it is free.

PS — My mother’s results came back, and everything is fine 🎉🎉🎉