10 Ways To Love Life Even More After 40

People are finally starting to realize that midlife can be the best time of your whole life. It’s all in the approach. One of the easiest ways to achieve a blissful midlife is to rebel against some of the negative, frightening myths we’ve been taught to believe await us when we start aging.

As a psychotherapist and author with more than 20 years of experience, I've had the chance to delve into the realities and the myths of midlife—and the findings are inspiring.

When you look at the science, it quickly becomes clear that midlife is not the time of loss and invisibility we’ve been socialized to believe. In fact, it’s a time of growth, change, and enrichment. But to fully embrace these possibilities for happiness, we must first follow these essential strategies.

1. Continue to transform yourself and your life.

It’s never too late to become a better, more polished version of yourself. You can't remind yourself of this often enough.

2. Discover who you really are NOW.

Midlife gives us the opportunity, even the responsibility, to discover who we really are and what we really want—to find our true purpose in life. This is a time to pursue dreams, not to quit dreaming.

3. Feel young.

Knowing that our brains and bodies won’t fail us anytime soon can influence us to look and feel younger. It also induces the behavioral patterns of someone more youthful. A youthful attitude enables us to be more productive, feel happier, and to be more hopeful about our future.

4. Dismantle your faulty mindset about midlife, and replace it with a whole new paradigm.

Get in touch with your inner adolescent energy by rebelling against society's “It’s Too Late For Me" attitude. Reject this old, false idea and embrace the renewed and inspired life of possibilities ahead of you.

5. Resolve your regrets and move on!

Life is about failing up. Use regrets to your advantage—as a wake-up call to inject new meaning and energy into your life. Use them to create new opportunities for yourself and then move forward with confidence.

6. Embrace a “You Only Live Once” attitude.

It'll let you to see the possibilities out there for yourself. It allows you to say yes to life in a way that’s more exciting.

7. Dress for the life you want.

Use your clothes as a tool for self-empowerment. Be your own art project. Experiment with different looks. Use fashion as a way to express yourself and discover your new inner desires.

8. Determine what "having it all" means for you.

During midlife, we need to see ourselves as the successes we already are. Don’t define yourself or your success too narrowly. Own the difference you make in the world, no matter how big or small it may be.

9. Adopt a spiritual perspective.

Embracing a spiritual perspective leads to overall feelings of happiness, especially when it comes to life satisfaction. Embracing spirituality lowers depression, reduces anxiety, and lowers our stress levels. It also helps us to focus on what really matters in life, while allowing us to connect to others in a more meaningful way.

10. Validate yourself.

Midlife allows you to look no further than yourself for validation. Listen to your inner voice. Honor your own feelings and explore who you are really meant to be.

The reality is, it’s taking us all a little bit longer to grow up and with the advances of modern medicine, it’s about time we fundamentally change the way we think about and see our future. Midlife can be a remarkable time. We have a lot of years ahead of us. This is not the time to retire our goals or fade into the backdrop of life.

Our present and future happiness will depend on the choices we make for ourselves TODAY. Midlife has become a whole new life phase. It’s the perfect time to reboot our lives. You have an unprecedented chance to live the life you truly want. You’re in the driver’s seat, so go enjoy the ride.

by Dr. Robi Ludwig

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-24665/10-ways-to-love-life-even-more-after-40.html

10 Lifestyle Changes That Happen After You Start Meditating

Once you begin meditating daily, life as you knew it will begin to take on some interesting twists and turns. Old habits will break down, outdated belief systems may come into question and as a bonus, you’ll likely start sleeping like a baby.

In short, daily meditation will have positive effects on just about every aspect of your life.

Here are 10 common lifestyle changes that meditators have reported within their first year of daily practice:

1. You start waking up earlier.

Meditation enhances the quality of your nighttime sleep. As a result, you’ll generally require less sleep than you needed before you began meditating and yet, you'll feel just as rested the next day.

This means that the time you spend meditating will be refunded back to you — the time you're not tossing and turning in bed, wishing sleep was working better. The only question is: what to do with all of that extra time?

2. You’ll drink less alcohol.

Many people consume alcohol as a way of alleviating stress. If that’s you, then you may notice less of a desire to drink as much when the benefits of daily meditation start to kick in.

Alcohol, after all, is a depressant. As meditation helps you release your stress and boost immunity, the need for excessive amounts of alcohol begins to wane. Cutting down your daily consumption to just a couple of glasses of wine in a week will start to seem like the natural thing to do.

3. You have more patience.

The saying “Time waits for no man,” can cause a lot of anxiety if you feel that you aren’t quite living up to your true potential. Or maybe if you've felt like there are people in your life who aren’t as smart as you are, but they seem to be doing better than you.

Meditation helps to expand the window of perception, allowing you to see value in every experience and every relationship. After meditating, you get less perturbed and more patient around canceled plans, insensitive partners, rude customer service reps, or any other situation that may have elicited a negative response in your past.

4. You stop seeking external happiness.

Before starting to meditate, the only happiness you experienced may have come from relationships, money, or achievements. After starting meditation, happiness begins to fill you up from within. How do you know? Because as your circumstances inevitably change (i.e. your relationship ends, you lose money, you experience failure), weirdly, you'll still feel happy inside. There will be less of a need to control people, places, or situations. Why? Because you’ve tapped into the source of fulfillment, which has always resided within.

5. You can do less, and accomplish more.

Let’s do a thought experiment:

You wake up feeling tired, sick or headachy. How generous, compassionate, and open-minded are you going to be that day? Now, imagine the opposite. You wake up feeling rested, bright, and happy. How much will you get done that day, compared to the other day when you felt sick?

Rest is the basis for dynamic action. Meditation supplements the rest from sleep, which enhances your ability to accomplish more during the day while expending less energy.

6. You multiply.

Consistent meditation triggers what physiologists call the “feed and breed” response, which is the opposite of the “fight-or-flight” stress response. This literally means, you become more fertile. Many women who have had fertility challenges find it easier to get pregnant after starting a daily meditation practice.

Likewise, meditation increases testosterone in men, which helps to correct sexual dysfunctions and increase stamina. I warn the people I teach to meditate not to have one-night-stands with people you don’t care about, because meditation makes you more fertile than the Mississippi River.

7. Less "FOMO" (fear of missing out).

FOMO is a result of the acquisitive approach to happiness — the mistaken idea that happiness is coming in the future, after you achieve a certain experience. But the more you meditate, the more that FOMO begins to get replaced by more present moment awareness, which means you feel less desperation around needing to be somewhere else.

In other words, you have an inherent feeling that the party is wherever you are, and that sense of presence can be felt even while you're in dreaded places such as gridlock traffic, the DMV, or in line at the post office.

8. More YOLO (you only live once).

YOLO is a universal call to take a risk, to have an adventure, or to seize the day. What keeps you from taking bold actions in life is usually tied to internal fears or uncertainty about the outcome. These are remnants of stress accumulated in the body.

Stress has a paralyzing effect on your potential, and it can dim your sense of adventure. As stress gets dissolved through regular meditation, you find yourself naturally becoming more daring. This means it’ll be easier to quit that dead-end job or relationship, and take more chances. So get ready to start that new business, take up that new hobby, or travel around the world.

9. You begin trusting yourself more.

The heart has a gained a reputation for making you gullible. But as Deepak Chopra writes, "the heart is our center of wisdom — our internal GPS."

Mixed in with the wise guidance from the heart are the myriad fears from your head. Regular meditation activates a sort of spam filter for the negative self-talk of the mind, and allows you to detect the purest messages from your true center of wisdom. This in turn, will lead you to a greater sense of trust toward the messages emanating from your heart.

10. You can make faster decisions.

As your daily meditation practice gives you greater perceptual acuity, it will become easier to make distinctions. Whether it’s choosing between two jobs, three apartments, two hybrid cars, or which way to swipe on your dating app, having more perceptual acuity allows you to quickly diagnose which are the best options for you in the moment, and which ones are not.

This also turns out to be a huge time saver, as you will no longer need to bounce ideas off everybody else and can come to the right decision on your own.

There are many more changes that occur when you start meditating, ranging from normal to bizarre. When I teach my meditation classes, I try not to predict any specifics changes that my students will experience. I like to remind them that whatever happens will be exciting and amazing.

Please share any changes you’ve experienced from your daily meditation practice in the comment section below.

Photo Credit: Stocksy

BY LIGHT WATKINS 

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-18511/10-lifestyle-changes-that-happen-after-you-start-meditating.html