A Piece Of My Heart

The Effect of Aging on Mental Health

Do you think or notice that getting older has an effect on mental illness?

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This is an interesting question that I don’t think I’ve ever considered. Perhaps because I have not yet experienced most of my life, the component of age hasn’t been much of a consideration. That said, I am beginning to mentally transition from a “young adult” to just a normal adult, so there are more responsibilities that I am now taking on. I think that’s where my mind is going with this entry, so let’s pursue it!

Responsibilities change as we get older. Becoming an adult means more responsibilities related to finances, a home, a car, a career, children, aging parents/grandparents, and more. Our lives progressively become more and more about providing for other people over ourselves. You may take on the responsibility of loving someone else, loving an animal, working a job, caring for a home and children, which will leave less time for caring for yourself. I am a big proponent of self-care, whatever that means to you. I am an introvert, so self-care to me means curling up alone with music, my writing, a book, and the dog curled nearby. I need this time to keep myself sane, but as we age and take on more responsibility, the time available for self-care becomes more limited.

However, I will say that as we age, we also build our support system. I mentioned intimate relationships, pets, and children as “responsibilities,” but they are also (of course) things we love and when the relationships are healthy, they help our mental state.

Another side of this though is that as we’ve grown up, we’ve also learned how to deal with more things because we’ve experienced more things. We understand that life has high points and low points, but the train will keep moving so long as we don’t jump off and the view is bound to change around the next bend. We have a longer history to compare our current hardships with. Young people, especially teenagers, get more agitated when confronted by something difficult because they do not have the life experience to see the end of the tunnel. This does affect their mental state, so in that way, age may alleviate some of those stressors, but then of course, others rise to take their place.

So far, I’ve only talked about the transition from youth to adulthood (because this is my only experience so far), but on the other end of the spectrum, there is aging into middle age and eventually old age. There are a whole suite of new stressors associated with this aging in our latter years including fears of retirement, an aging body, the compounded stresses of your children’s lives, and eminent death.

I apologize for the “all over the place” entry. I think this topic itself is “all over the place” because there are so many different angles it could be discussed from. The stresses through our lives change, and thus our mental state is affected differently throughout our aging. People deal with different stresses differently, so where someone’s mental health may be more affected by the stresses in youth, another may be more affected by the stresses that accompany old age. Our path through life is never exactly the same as anyone else’s, so I think the answer of whether age affects mental health will depend on the person.