"That's Just What Happens When You Get Older" Isn't an Answer

Getting older is real. Giving up the right to ask questions should never be part of it.

Almost all of us have times when a symptom develops that starts to concern us. Like having issues with getting a good night’s sleep for instance.

I went through a stretch of this myself a few years ago. Falling asleep was never the issue. Staying asleep was. I would regularly wake up sometime between 2 - 4 am and it would take quite some time for me to fall back to sleep. However, when I mentioned it to others, even my doctor, the typical answer would be “That’s just what happens when you get older.” Like it was just a normal part of aging and I should just learn to accept it.

Something didn’t sit right with me though. Maybe it helped that I wasn’t yet willing to accept any part of the ‘getting older’ category. So the research and the trial and error began.

I learned the importance of magnesium and started taking it at suppertime or early evening. And it helped for a while. Then I learned I had to be careful of the time and what I was eating for supper as too much of the wrong food too close to bedtime would result in my digestion wanting to work while I needed to sleep.

Eventually I was able to really tune in to how my body responds and what it needs, so now when I have sleep issues come up, I start checking off the list to see what my body might be telling me until I can get back to sleeping soundly again.

What I couldn’t accept was that sleep issues were just the result of normal aging. And I was right. Sleep issues are one symptom we experience where our bodies are trying to tell us something is missing or something is off. And rather than just accepting it as a part of getting older, I got to learn for myself that I didn’t have to settle for poor sleep just because I had had a few more birthdays.

Insomnia isn’t the only thing women (and men) get handed this line about. Joint stiffness, brain fog, memory issues, high blood pressure, etc. It all gets filed under the same heading: getting older. And once something has that label, you’re supposed to just accept it. Why would you question it? You’ve already been told there’s nothing to find.

I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’m getting older, and that my body is going to make some shifts. That part is real.

But getting older and giving up the right to ask questions are two different things. “Normal for your age” gets used far too often as a stand-in for “I don’t know.” And once you accept that label, you stop looking for what’s actually going on.

So now, when something shifts or a symptom appears, I don’t ask myself “is this just age?” I ask what changed right before it started. Maybe a new habit, a new stress, new food, missing nutrients or something that I stopped doing. Tuning into my body and questioning what it might need has gotten me so many more answers and solutions than blindly accepting “that’s just what happens as we age.”

Talk soon,
Debbie