Monthly Archives: November 2017

Midlife: Nailed it! Nails and Midlife

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At the nail salon the other day, I started wondering about aging and our nails.  I have been pondering aging for a while now – noticing the emerging lines on my face, the change of skin and hair texture and the shifting of my body, but what about our nails?  What happens there?

Nails really are an important part of our body and one we should keep an eye on.  They can be a window into our health, conditions like liver and kidney disease, diabetes and even anemia can expose themselves in the nails.

One professor, William B. Bean, actually measured his nails everyday for 35 years, his findings:  each digit had it’s own pace, and his nails slowed their growth as he aged.  So they grow slower and change in thickness.  One reason seems to be our circulation starts to change in our extremities, which leads to color changes and the thickness of the nails.  Our nails can start to change shape too.  They can start to curl, discolor and/or become brittle. According to nails magazine:

As we age, our nail physiology actually changes as part of the nail growth plate (nail matrix) begins to thin. This phenomenon results in the development of vertical ridges along the nail. Compromised circulation or less efficient blood flow to our extremities can also contribute to nail ridging. These ridges are called onychorrhexis, a clinical sign of brittle nail 

We just seems to start drying out later in life, literally.  This leads to more dead skin around the nails and can lead to brittle nails. Although my nail technician of 20 years swears that ingrown nails occur at all times and are generally hereditary, ill-fitting shoes and improper trimming to contribute to this condition.  One thing seems true though – once you get one, you seem to be more prone to them.

This is also a time when all that hard work on your feet starts to catch up with you:  tennis, running, dance – all movements in which you put pressure on the front of your feet seem to create trauma that increase the likelihood of losing toenails later in life.

Color changes too.  You can go from discoloration to yellowish to a “napoleon” look:  a line of white, pink and yellowish.

What can we do as we age to take care of our nails?  Get regular manicures and pedicures.  Pedicures especially can be helpful.   That nice massage and tapping that your technician does can help with circulation and tension that might be in the calf and foot.  The pedicure can add moisture to your feet and sloughing the dead skin off can encourage new cells to grow.

If you don’t have a good technician – who is seriously like a good hair stylist – get one.  Always observe practices in a salon and make sure tools are sterilized (I once got a bad infection from a pumice stone rubbed up against my leg accidentally during a pedicure.  Imagine how embarrassed I was in the ER with seriously ill patrons only to disclose the source of my visit to be the puss that was emerging from my leg after a pedicure – oh and BTW, when I went back to the salon to complain, the lady said “oh yeah, those things are full of bacteria – we can’t sterilize them.”  – Nice to know.  They have since been “outlawed” in salons in Georgia.)

Midlife is the time to treat your feet right.  Treat your nails not just to a fill-in and gel polish, but also to enjoying the massage and keeping an eye on how they look, grow and feel.

We will talk more about the foot in another post – totally one of the most neglected parts of our body.

It’s all good.

Midlife: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow

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So, I was at the hair stylist today (stylist is important, that will come up again) and I bemoaning the grey that was popping up.  It seems that I can’t stay ahead of it and when I color it at home, I look just so… washed out.

What does happen to our hair in midlife?  The National Library of Medicine tells us a few things that happen:

Hair color change. This is one of the clearest signs of aging. Hair color is due to a pigment called melanin, which hair follicles produce. Follicles are structures in the skin that make and grow hair. With aging, the follicles make less melanin, and this causes gray hair. Graying often begins in the 30s.

Scalp hair often starts graying at the temples and extends to the top of the scalp. Hair color becomes lighter, eventually turning white.

Body and facial hair also turn gray, but most often, this happens later than scalp hair. Hair in the armpit, chest, and pubic area may gray less or not at all.

Graying is largely determined by your genes. Gray hair tends to occur earlier in white people and later in Asians. Nutritional supplements, vitamins, and other products will not stop or decrease the rate of graying.

Hair thickness change. Hair is made of many protein strands. A single hair has a normal life between 2 and 7 years. That hair then falls out and is replaced with a new hair. How much hair you have on your body and head is also determined by your genes.

Nearly everyone has some hair loss with aging. The rate of hair growth also slows.

Hair strands become smaller and have less pigment. So the thick, coarse hair of a young adult eventually becomes thin, fine, light-colored hair. Many hair follicles stop producing new hairs.

Women can develop a similar type of baldness as they age. This is called female-pattern baldness. Hair becomes less dense and the scalp may become visible.

As you age, your body and face also lose hair. Women’s remaining facial hair may get coarser, most often on the chin and around the lips.

So, how fun is that, right?  I noticed that a lot of my friends with greying hair are going blonde.  I asked my stylist about this.  His take was that it’s tempting to tell someone to go lighter – the grey will blend in better, but if you go too light it is too harsh on the skin and will give you the effect of actually being older.

His advice?  Get DEPTH in your hair.  That is the reason I tend to look like a fisher price little person with my plastic hair on – my box color is only giving me an all over color, not any depth.

As one good Southern woman said:  “Any woman over 30 years needs short hair”.  This is not necessarily true.  I see plenty of women with short hair and it is just a blob – nondescript.   One 50+ woman bragged that with her new short haircut, she could just wash and go.  Newsflash:  She looked it.   Many of us in midlife are starting to really settle into our preferences – we have our favorite restaurant (and favorite dish AT the favorite restaurant, which we enjoy in our favorite seat with our favorite server – you get the idea), our brand and scent of deodorant, our “signature scent” and the living room furniture that our kids will be trying to sell off at an estate sale one day while hip people walk around and whisper how dated everything is.  In other words, we get into ruts.  We are creatures of habits and by midlife, our cement seems to start to harden.

When we keep the long hairstyle that was great when we were chasing kids, we run the risk of it working against us. As we get older, our hair thins out and can lose its luster and start to look flat. It can also drag your face down and actually make you look older.

The trick for long hair in midlife?  Layers. SO, this is the time to find a STYLIST.  Haircuts are one thing, hair STYLING is another.  If you are ready to trade in your longer locks for a new look – find a really GOOD stylist who can cut SHORTER HAIR.  And while it’s tempting to bring in a photo of Cate Blanchett and say – make me this!  Remember, A LOT goes in to a style that is right for you.  Face shape, head shape, how your hair grows, texture and lifestyle need to always be considered.  One more thing with short hair:  be prepared to STYLE it.  I know VERY FEW women with adorable short hair that can wake up and go.  The thing with short hair is that you can’t just throw it up in a ponytail.  If you are having a bad hair day – everyone knows it.  You must commit to at least a little bit of product and a little bit of coiffing.

This is one of my favorites:

When I was in my late 30s, and making that transition,  I went to a very upscale salon in Beverly Hills for a once in a lifetime cut and color (the price was equivalent to what I paid for my iPhone) but WOW – that really was the best cut I have ever had.  Why?  For one thing, the stylist spent about 30 minutes talking to me about WHO I WAS.  What was my life like?  where did I go?  what did I want out of my haircut (right??  I have had therapists who never asked this many questions).  At one point, he just stared at me and said:  “you know I am cutting your hair short – you have too small of a face for the hair you have now”.  After that, the stylist took an hour to cut my hair – yes, an hour and that was not because we were kicking back with mimosas (well, we were, but we were in Beverly Hills!).    It was because he would cut, step back, look, cut some more, go to a different angle, cut.  It was really how I would imagine Michelangelo sculpted.  The color was also an artist painting – one strand after another would be painted with the precision of a porcelain painter.  I looked really good.  He knew I was from Georgia, so at the end he said to me:  Go back and find a GOOD stylist who can follow the lines I left.  If they follow them, you will keep this haircut.

One bad “stylist” back in Georgia messed me up and it took years to recover and find a great stylist, which I eventually did.  I have been in good hands ever since.

So there’s the scoop on hair in midlife.  And as one of salon patrons said when we were talking about aging:  “If you ever feel you look old – just look at the arrest records – you’ll realize how good you still look.’

Nuff said.  It’s all ok.

 

 

What’s your CONATIVE style?

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I had my last day at work and it was odd.  As I related my excitement of leaving a nice, safe job with benefits and retirement, several coworkers just stared at me and scoffed looking wildly uncomfortable, others secretly confessed their desire to go too, but needed to have a concrete plan to do so.  Only one coworker said they truly appreciated my willingness to jump not knowing if the parachute would open (although she was 75 and worked part time in retirement).  I felt deflated.

But then I remembered conative styles and I wondered if that had something to do with it.

My excitement about change and ambiguity was unsettling to them.  This was not their instinct.  It was mine.  Why was I expecting them to react like I would?  And why was I looking for validation from them?  Especially in a setting which did not embrace ambiguity, innovation or spontaneity.  I knew I had always been an odd fit in this culture and this last day showed just how different I was.

Whether you are  Steering by Starlight or taking the Kolbe A Index http://kolbe index , you will hear about your CONATIVE style. Conative style is:

Action derived from instinct; purposeful mode of striving volition.  It’s a conscious effort to carry out self-determined acts.   – Kolbe report

It is NOT personality, motivation, attitude, emotions, feelings or desires.  It is not even you values (that’s AFFECTIVE STYLE – think Myers-Briggs, etc)

It is also NOT IQ, Skillset, Reason, Knowledge, Experience or Education – that’s COGNITIVE STYLE.

It cannot tell you if you are shy or a party animal, it cannot diagnose, it cannot tell you if you are a genius.  It deals with a part of the brain that DRIVES ACTION.

It’s that wiring in us that when it comes time to action, produces a natural path of effort.  So if we were given a task with no instruction, it would be our natural way which we would tackle a task.  It is your ACTION MODE

Martha Beck uses a Ring of the Nibelungs analogy to describe it. Wikipedia describes it this way:

Conation (from the Latin conatus) is any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.[1] The conative is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive.[2] In short, the cognitive part of the brain has to do with intelligence, the affective deals with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings.

The term conation is no longer widely known—it is in “The 1,000 Most Obscure Words in the English Language”, defined as “the area of one’s active mentality that has to do with desire, volition and striving”,[3] but there are several references to conation as the third faculty of the mind.

Conation is defined by Funk & Wagnalls Standard Comprehensive International Dictionary (1977) as “the aspect of mental process directed by change and including impulse, desire, volition and striving”, and by the Living Webster Encyclopedia Dictionary of the English Language (1980) as “one of the three modes, together with cognition and affection, of mental function; a conscious effort to carry out seemingly volitional acts”. The Encyclopedia of Psychology “Motivation: Philosophical Theories” says, “Some mental states seem capable of triggering action, while others—such as cognitive states—apparently have a more subordinate role [in terms of motivation] … some behavior qualifies as motivated action, but some does not”.[4]

The Kolbe A Index seems to be the one assessment out there that is measuring the Conative Style. http://www.kolbe.com/why-kolbe/kolbe-wisdom/

The Kolbe A Index rates the strength of your preference on a scale of 1-10 (10 is high) for each of four Action Modes.

  1. Fact Finder:  Their instinct is to gather and share information. The are precise, judicious, thorough, and appropriate.  Loves detail and complexity and facts.
  2. Follow Thru:  Their instinct is to arrange and design.  They are methodical, systematic.  Focused, structured, ordered, and efficient.  Planning, programming, design, predictability. Arranges
  3. Quick Start:  Their instinct is to deal with risk and uncertainty.  They are spontaneous, intuitive, flexible, and fluent with ideas.  Need challenge and change and can be impatient (ummm – YEP!!).
  4. Implementer:  Their instinct is to handle space and tangibles. They are hands-on and craft-oriented.  Like to deal with the concrete.

Another way of looking at this would be if you wanted to learn how to ski (Martha Beck uses a similar analogy with crocheting) :

• Quick Start: If you’re a Quick Start who wants to ski, you’ll probably decide to go skiing, get a few quick tips from a friend who is an experienced skier – maybe take a short lesson,  and jump right into trial and error knowing you will figure it out on your own.

• Fact Finder: You’ll spend hours researching about skiing – asking friends who ski, watching how to videos and surfing the web to find additional information before you actually go skiing.

• Implementor: You pay less attention to words than to concrete objects, so you might start a list of items that you need, even purchasing a pair of skis or skiing accoutrement – trying them all on in the living room to “get a feel” of them.

• Follow Thru: You’ll likely schedule several lessons with the best instructor you can find, and tackle the hills and slopes in the order of difficulty – putting to use the new information in a systematic way.

None of these approaches is right or wrong. In fact, the results of the Kolbe A report start with: Congratulations, you got a Perfect Score on the Kolbe A Index!

When I reflected on my last day and how it went, I could clearly see how my Conative Style came in to play.  As a Quick Start, I just took a chance that it would all work out – not having something to go to may be downright terrifying for a Fact Finder, for example.  They just couldn’t go there with me.

This gave me a great deal of insight in to why I WAS NOT happy there.  Why I was always trying to explain my “crazy” ideas or have to slow down while others chewed over minute details.   At long last, I had some clarity.  I have some confidence moving forward as a Quick Start that my instinct to just jump in and try it ok – it is me.  I will figure this Midlife thing out as I go.  And all will be ok.

Mid Life NOmentum

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I was just speaking with a friend who was saying the same things that I have been saying: things just start coming up in mid-life.  It’s as if things catch up with you and for the first time, you can’t shake them.  I think it is especially hard if you have lived the first part of your life for everyone else.   You know, where you go along to get along and you are polite and push down the anger.  I saw this quote by Ghandi the other day that said

I have learnt…to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved it transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world

This is a powerful statement.  I think so many of us take that anger of mid life: anger at ourselves getting older, anger at our dreams fading, anger at being mortal – and lash out , ignore it or even worse, continue to push it down.  I think for many of us our response mimics the fight or flight response:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response.

Yet, I will argue there is another one:  fight, flight, freeze or FOLD – I think for many they just give up at this stage.  There is a midlife NOmentum and we MUST fight through it. 

It’s hard when midlife just sneaks up on you and then one day all these feelings happen.  It’s like a switch is flipped.  But for some, I think it is more subtle, like the character of Beverly Goldberg on the Goldbergs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2712740/  – where the mother just doesn’t know how to let go.  We don’t know how to transition.  Our life is ending one cycle and shifting into a new direction – whether we like it or not.

It seems like in this time we experience unexpected events that shake up the realities we are clinging to, or feelings of restlessness or even anxiety that disrupt old patterns. It’s time to find that which we have lost somewhere along the way.

For me, it was my creative, carefree side.  The side that wrote and lived and laughed.

In Astrology, this is also called the Uranus Opposition and is explained in Erin Sullivan’s book, Midlife and Aging (see below):

The function of Saturn and Uranus, the mythic father/son conflict as we experience it in mid-life, is about resolution of conflict and the need for change, even if it is a violent or disruptive act. As a psychic complex, or a dichotomy, Saturn can act as the severing function of our creative ideas. We might be so worried about our own creativity that it never actually is given birth, but is “castrated” before any idea, concept, action or experiment is enacted! In contrast to this suppression, if Uranus has the upper hand, so to speak, then we can be too outrageous, too eccentric and simply unable to get our point across or find an acceptable median for behavior or communication.

The urge for creative experimentation and individuation at midlife can be stuffed back down inside the psychic womb, just as Ouranos stuffed the Hekatonchires back into the womb of Gaia. And, it would then take an “adamant” personal attitude toward ones’ own self to birth the inner urge for creative change.

 

How do we move forward when it all seems so painful and full of break ups and break downs?  I think we need to remember that there are also powerful break throughs waiting for us too.  Where are you in the midlife momentum?  Have you experienced any of this?

For me, I will just take it day by day.

Into the fog

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Into the unknown

When you leave a place that you have been at for some time, the sadness creeps in in ways not expected.  Maybe I am just too sentimental, but it was the little things that made me tear up.  The way a coworkers chair squeaks or the click of the front door as people came to work for the day.

I started to notice how people came in for the day.  Some just shuffled in as they had done everyday for the last 15 years.  Other were happier and some just seemed miserable.  I realized that I had been doing this out of habit for the last few years.  Never really questioning my role or fit, but just doing it because that is what I was supposed to do.  It was the path of least resistance.

As I thought about this, I started to notice that the path of least resistance is two fold.  There is a path of least resistance for what is easy and there is a path of least resistance for what is meant to be.  The first, allows the person the luxury of delayed emotion, the latter’s emotions seem to be on the front end.  The path of least resistance for what is easy is like buying with a credit card.  You get what you want right then.  The pull of a softer song, the soul’s “meant to be” path – which naturally carries the least resistance –  is like saving for what you want and finally being able to go to the store and buy it.

As I have been packing up and getting ready for my last day, I realized much of what I did was least resistance for what was easy.  As I looked around, I realized that I never really fit in, that I went along to get along and that even though some great memories were there, they were always tinged with a bit of sadness, confusion or frustration.

As soon as I made my decision to move on, it was like the world went into color.  I realized that my soul had been trying to tell me this for years.  A weight lifted off of my shoulders.

I still don’t know what’s next.  On my way home, this was my ride.  This was how I felt that day.  And it is all ok.

Jeronimo!!!

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Well, I did what I said and resigned from my job.  No safety net, no concrete business plan, no well thought out next steps.  I vacillate between sheer joy and absolute terror.

I grew up to be safe – safe job, safe life, safe dreams.  There was no dreaming big in our working class 70s household.   There was no “trusting the process” or “going where your heart takes you” – it was keep your head down, keep out of trouble and be thankful you have a job.

My belief systems are like demons swirling around me:  “who told you to follow your dreams?”  “who told you are worthy of pursuing happiness?”  I have had to go in to battle.   Frankly, they are better armed and better shots.  This is belief system warfare and they win much of the time.

I have thought for a long time about leaving the steady, routine job that I have been in for many years.  The pull of safety, insurance and a steady paycheck were all just too hard to walk away from – why on earth would I walk away from that?

Well, in midlife, I am really feeling a pull in another direction.  And this one is not a “get a different job” direction.  This one is more of a “finding something that was lost” direction.  It’s one of those things that when I am working, I don’t take time to look for – I am too tired or busy, or both.  I have finally turned to face it, but it ain’t pretty.  Years of neglect on my dreams and desires have left it looking pretty sad.  I used to have dreams that I would find additional rooms on my house that contained dying animals or decaying food.  One Jungian analyst told me it was my potential – and that was 5 years ago.

So, here I am in midlife terrified and joyful, not necessarily in that order.  I have decided to follow my dreams and trust the process.  Crazy, right?