How to help your clients cope with aging

Perhaps you've heard your Gen X or baby boomer clients talking about how they are starting to feel their age. They hold their phone a little further away, and remark that it takes just a little longer to recover from that hard workout. Once a far-off thing, retirement now feels closer and more real.

Aging, though frequently spoken about in negative terms or with overtones of worry, can actually open up a world of possibility for people. In fact, life satisfaction tends to increase in the years after midlife, when the stresses of raising children and building a career have lessened.

We've compiled some expert tips about staying healthy and happy as you age. Drop them into newsletters, share on social media or use them as conversation starters with your clients who may be feeling anxious about getting older.

1. Walk. A lot.

Harvard Health calls taking regular walks the closest thing we have to a wonder drug in this help guide dedicated to walking. You can do it almost anywhere and doesn't require any special equipment. The guide says that walking for two and a half hours a week, or 21 minutes a day, can cut the risk of heart disease by 30%. Walking could also reduce the risk of diabetes and cancer as well as lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

There are mental benefits to walking, too. Shane O'Mara, neuroscientist and author of the 2018 book "In Praise of Walking," has pages of research about how walking not only boosts mood and helps curb depression, but also helps our cognitive function. As we walk, we make "maps" of the world around us, and this helps us in numerous ways, including improving our memory.

2. Save for retirement.

In the 2019 report, The State of American Retirement Savings, the Economic Policy Institute reported that most families, even those approaching retirement, have little or no retirement savings. Retirement wealth, or the amount people have saved, hasn't kept pace with the reality of an aging population.

For someone getting closer to retirement who needs to catch up on their retirement savings, it may be time to talk to a financial professional to discuss your options. In the meantime, learn more about preparing for retirement.

3. Go for career goals now.

There is a pervasive idea that our work begins winding down as we get older. What if, instead, we realized that getting over the hump of midlife opened the floodgates of possibility for our work and our career? In an article for Forbes, executive coach Erika Andersen suggests that, "when you don't have so many things and people clamoring for your attention on a daily basis, you can think about what you'd like the rest of your life to look like. Get clear about what you love and what you're good at, and make a life that you truly want to live."

What difference do you still want to make in the world? What is possible now that wasn't possible before? What choices are open to you now? For many, getting older means having the luxury of choice for the first time. It could be a choice of job, choice of professional development opportunities or choice of building something new.

Focusing on choices — versus focusing on outdated beliefs about what it means to get older — can help someone create the golden age of their career.

4. Cultivate resilience.

New Mexico State University (NMSU) offers this quiz to test how much you know about aging, designed to dispel myths. One of the biggest myths is the idea that aging is a process of decline. NMSU suggests that instead we think of it as a process of "becoming."

NMSU cites the work of Lynn Peters Adler, founder of the National Centenarian Awareness Project. Adler has been working with centenarians for 25 years. One of the most common traits she's found among people who live to be 100 years old is resilience, or a "remarkable ability to accept the losses that come with age but not be stopped by them. Resilience means that you keep moving forward, keep springing back up from disappointment and loss, and keep standing strong.

5. Safeguard relationships with family and friends.

In surveys about what makes life meaningful, Pew Research has found that Americans are most likely to cite family relationships as one of the greatest sources of meaning and joy in life.

Whether it's a relative or a friend who has become like family, it's important that we hold on to those relationships and keep investing in them, decade after decade.