It’s the second week of January, so a traditional time to sip on a steaming cup of self-recrimination while you finish putting away holiday decorations. Why’d you eat so many of Aunt Marnie’s cookies? Why that extra bottle of wine? So many parties with melted Brie…so little time.
Resolutions get made, then broken or ignored. Exercise machines are purchased, then used as clothes hangers. January can be a dangerous time because–and I’m going to get northern California new agey here–so much negative energy is generated from remorse after all the positive warm and fuzzies from December celebrations now decisively over. You have to clean up after the party, not just the house, but your body and your emotions, knowing that it’s a long time to the next fun and games.
Still, January can be useful. Let’s talk about how.
Diagram by Carl Richards, “It’s 2019. Want some Self-Improvement?”
The Shiny New Thing (the one without stickers…YET). Photo by kajmeister.
I bought myself a new computer (Merry Christmas to me) because the old one was doing those things they do when they get old: taking five minutes to boot up, hopping off the internet frequently for no particular reason, or just refusing to cooperate. Not quite the Blue Screen of Death, but it was coming, I was sure. I suppose I could have just wiped the hard drive, but I convinced myself a new one was needed because there were a few new bells and whistles that I wanted.
So I have spent my transitioning into 2019 with Della, the Shiny New Thing, who is frequently reminding me of how painful a process this is. Microsoft is so intrusive and buggy; Support Forums are full of bad advice or suggestions that lead nowhere. I figured out how to port over all the email history I wanted–oh, the cleverness of me! — but I broke the email on my phone, tablet, and old machine in the process and had to remove and reload, over and over.
The Stupendous Middle-Aged Brain, picture from Dreamstime.com
Of course my keys are in the laundry basket. Of course my wallet fell out of the pouch I forgot to zip. My middle-aged brain forgets the name I looked up only two minutes ago, how to fix that thing that WordPress always does, and what you just said. Last week, my wife came out of the garage with a piece of paper. “Honey, did you need this list of CDs?” Such relief! “I was frothing at the mouth looking for that! Where did you find it!” On top of the frozen bagels.
At middle-age, we lose episodic memory. More on that later, if I make myself a note not to forget to write that part. As we age, we do lose cognitive function, and we incur an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s. But our Over-40 brains also have a lot going for them, as I learned from Barbara Strauch’s fascinating book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind.
Debunking the Brain Myths: Smarter than a 25-year-old
Believe it or not, we are smarter than we were and, in some ways, demonstrably smarter than a 25-year-old. Strauch cites a number of studies that have had me crowing with pride for the last week. For example, psychologist Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University ran a forty-year longitudinal study on the mental prowess of 6,000 participants. This Seattle Study, which covered people of multiple genders, ages, and occupations, found that they performed better on cognitive tests between age forty and sixty than at any other time in their life. Continue reading “Middle-Aged Brains are Smarter Even Though We Tend to Put our Keys in the Refrigerator”
