Blissed out in Natalie's Chicken Blog
Things change with aging, and even, sometimes, for the good.
University of Texas sociologists Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky found that around age 60, people begin to report "more feelings of ease and contentment than their younger counterparts." Their study "Age and the balance of emotions" appeared in Social Science and Medicine in May 2008. More about it here.
The researchers also found a shift from "active" emotions such as excitement to "passive ones" like serenity. Talking about that might be a little tricky, since it seems to require some adjusting of a cultural bias that active is good, passive is bad, and excitement trumps all. Adding to the complexity is the need to consider that positive and negative things can happen at the same time. Pub Med's abstract writer puts it this way: "In order to accurately portray the shifts in emotional tone, age may best be considered as simultaneously indicating maturity and decline."
It's not scientific, but I've found that getting older makes it a lot easier not to sweat the small stuff--and to know that most of it is indeed small stuff.
And serenity is definitely something to look forward to.
