Redefining Aging At Work: Harnessing New Insights For Lifelong Adaptability

Aging is largely what we make of it. While many of us have absorbed mostly negative perspectives on how it looks when we grow older, research in the last few decades is sharply challenging those perspectives. It also is becoming increasingly important to heed those new insights, shed unnecessary mindset limitations, and take action to ensure our ongoing adaptability to rapidly changing circumstances. This is true in our personal life as well as at work.

The workplace is rapidly transforming due to technological and demographic changes such as robotics, artificial intelligence, work-from-home initiatives and demands, labor shortages, and an aging workforce. It is crucial for both the worker and society as a whole, that we are nimble in our responses to these changes and make optimal use of the resources that we collectively and individually can marshal. Luckily, current research insights empower us as individuals to shed the limiting concepts of old and unlock, improve, and reinvent abilities and resources within ourselves that greatly increase our adaptability to change, across our lifespan.

Adaptive Body and Mind are Key

This adaptability is strengthened and maintained by keeping our physical, mental, social and emotional abilities in optimal shape. It increases our resilience in the face of a rapidly changing world, allowing us to partake instead of being forced to retire from it. Building habits that maintain or strengthen those abilities improves the odds of achieving what I'd like to call our functional longevity: living longer healthily while maintaining the abilities required to do the things that are meaningful, pleasurable, or necessary.

Inevitable Entropy versus… 

To many, maintaining or advancing your position in the workplace as we get older is extremely important.  For many people, around their 50th birthday, things seem to take a bit (sometimes a lot) more effort to get done. 

This may feel like having a bit less energy, the joints are a bit stiffer and maybe painful in the morning, it takes more effort to take out the trash, and the ability to crisply convey one’s thoughts to  -younger- colleagues seems to be less than it used to be.

In fact many of my patients have remarked that “suddenly” they went from feeling 25 years old to feeling the middle-aged person that they now realize they are. And there is real truth to that. 

Not only are they at this point often knee-deep into the stresses of family, finances, and work with 28 hours of work to accomplish in 24 hours, but also because the normal physiological changes that accompany aging have crept up on them and taken them by surprise. 

A slowing metabolism leading to greater body weight, decreasing muscle mass leading to decreased strength, changes in glucose metabolism leading to decreased energy, and all of these impacting the health of weight-bearing joints leading to increased stiffness and pain are all common processes seen around this age.

While these underlying physiological processes are largely a normal part of aging, we are not powerless in the face of them. How we deal with and optimize our bodies and minds throughout our development, and therefore influence the outcomes, is mostly under our control. 

Functional Longevity Outside and Inside the Workplace

While it would obviously be untrue to say that aging does not impact our physical, mental and often emotional abilities, it is by no means the case that aging only brings irreversible loss. In fact, some of our mental and emotional abilities improve with age, while most of our physical abilities can be largely maintained or improved by adapting longevity supporting practices and building an adaptive body and mind. Logically, we want to strive to maintain the abilities that tend to decline with age and make optimal use of those that tend to improve with age to stay maximally valuable and competitive in the workplace.

Within the functional longevity framework we have identified 3 core functional domains and a number of sub-domains that support these abilities. 

The Physical Domain includes capabilities and attributes such as strength, flexibility, endurance, VO2 max (the maximum ability to transport and utilize oxygen during vigorous activity), coordination, and balance. Virtually all jobs require some or high levels of physical ability, such as walking, climbing, lifting, squatting or maintaining a particular position or posture for an extended period of time. By performing targeted exercises we can maintain or improve those abilities. 

The Cognitive Domain includes our abilities of recall, integration of new information, creativity, verbal and written communication skills, and assessing social situations and associated appropriate actions and their consequences. One can easily see how all of these abilities are required to be successful in the workplace. We can maintain or improve these capabilities through exercise, educational activities, and lifestyle factors.

The Emotional-Social Domain supports our ability to lead others, communicate effectively, manage conflict, make decisions, and build relationships. We maintain or improve our capabilities in this domain by practicing self-awareness, soliciting honest feedback, practicing situational awareness, examining and improving our communication style, including our non-verbal communication.

Each of these three domains impacts and overlaps with the other two. Improvement in one domain almost always leads to improvement in the others. No matter where you start with your plan to improve your functional longevity, you are likely to see a ripple effect through all domains. However, you are likely to get the most bang for your buck if you at least make physical exercise an important, if not the most important, part of your approach! 

The bottom line: Aging, both in your personal and professional life is not a negative. It comes with true potential advantages and by investing in your functional longevity to help to build and maintain an adaptive body and mind, you can bring those assets to their full potential.  Whatever stage you are in, the next part of your life can be an exciting frontier.