Postmenopause: The Great Happiness After The Menopause
Creative thinking, a sense of beauty, balance: after the menopause a happy time begins.
We are used to seeing life as an arc: One is born, grows and develops, develops skills and strengths until a peak in early adulthood. From there, we believe, the decline begins: dwindling strength, thinning hair, joint pain, reading glasses, clumsiness.
“But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that it is quite wrong to speak of a general downward trend,” says psychologist Laura Carstensen, who researches aging at Stanford University. On the contrary, this phase of life brings with it considerable improvements in a number of areas. Instead of the bow, the metaphor of the ladder seems more appropriate: Man continues to develop as long as he lives. This view is not entirely new: “climacteric” comes from the Greek word for ladder, and “climax” stands for zenith or climax. That does not sound like dismantling! But what happens in this “third act” of life, as the actress Jane Fonda calls it?
With the years also the life satisfaction increases – stress, worries and annoyance decrease
Historically, we find ourselves in a unique and extremely exciting situation whose effects have hardly been researched scientifically. For in a very short time, about 120 years, the average life expectancy has practically doubled. This means that today’s women have much more time to live after the menopause than any generation before. And they feel surprisingly young: according to a survey, they are around eleven years younger than they actually are. Compared to photos of women from earlier generations, they also look younger.
It’s not just the appearance. Study after study has shown that older people are happier than young adults and also happier than middle-aged people. Social scientists speak of the “paradox of aging”: even if aging is accompanied by losses and losses, stress, worries and annoyance typically decrease with age – and life satisfaction increases. A slight downward trend can only be observed in old age, towards the end of life, says Carstensen. “But it never gets as bad as it did when you were young.”
In old age one remembers more often the beautiful moments and sadness can be better accepted
The higher life satisfaction is not a question of generation, as was initially assumed. It is not certain vintages that particularly enjoy old age because they have lived under particularly favourable conditions. As long-term observations show, people report more and more positive experiences as they grow older. They also develop a more stable self-esteem. They are internally strengthened and no longer as dependent on external confirmation as they were in younger years.
Older people owe their greater well-being to various strategies that they use skilfully: They focus their attention more on positive things. They mercifully forget unpleasant things. They are conciliatory. They are optimistic about the future. If one shows test persons pictures with positive or negative content (for example smiling or angry faces), young people especially remember the disturbing pictures. With older people it is exactly the opposite: they remember especially the beautiful moments.
In everyday life, the focus on the beautiful and good things in life leads to greater satisfaction. But older people are not only generally happier, they are also better able to deal with difficult and stressful feelings. They can accept sadness without being overwhelmed by it.
“They can look at injustice with compassion instead of despair,” says Carstensen. They also cope well with mixed emotions, for example, they know how to enjoy moments of happiness even though they are pervaded by sadness and melancholy. “When older people experience beautiful moments, they are also aware that life is fragile and finite,” says Laura Carstensen. “This is a good sign, it proves emotional health.”
Older people are emotionally more stable and more tolerable than younger
In the past, researchers assumed that at some point the personality would stabilize and hardly change. “It was a big surprise when I discovered in the course of my doctoral thesis that the personality is as unstable in old age as it is in young adulthood,” says Jule Specht, developmental psychologist and professor in Berlin. In scientific terms, personality is usually measured by the expression of the “Big Five”, five basic personality traits that are determined by questionnaire: emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, tolerance and conscientiousness.
It was found that older people are less open to new experiences and prefer to stick with the tried and tested. At the same time, they are on average less conscientious. On the other hand, they are more emotionally stable and tolerable than younger people – the grumpy old are just a cliché. English scientists coined the catchphrase for this from the la dolce vita personality who knows how to enjoy the sweet Italian life: fulfilling one’s duties and exploring the environment are no longer so important in old age; what counts is well-being and good relationships with familiar people.
After the menopause we know what we should focus on – and what is good for us
However, these typical changes are average values – the individual case may look completely different. And the older generation in particular is particularly heterogeneous, says psychologist and age researcher Hans-Werner Wahl, so the process of aging is highly individual. How women fare after the menopause depends, among other things, on their genes, income, education and lifestyle, how they eat, for example, and whether they exercise a lot – but also on their ideas and inner convictions.
Anyone who thinks positively about getting old at a younger age is better off 20 or 30 years later, says Wahl: “People who see old age as an opportunity and challenge live longer on average and also remain mentally active and physically healthy for longer. However, as people grow older, they all become aware that their remaining life span is limited. As a result, after the menopause we are more likely to spend our energy on finding out what is good for us at the moment – and not sometime in the distant future, which we may not even experience.
Older people simply set clear priorities. Psychologist Laura Carstensen calls this “socio-emotional selectivity”. Studies have shown that social contacts decrease with age. This need not be a sign of retreat, but can be explained by the shortened future perspective: While young people strive to meet new people and absorb as much information as possible, older people concentrate on relationships and things that are important to them. They are, as Wahl says, “world champions in creating everyday worlds that are good for them”.
Thinking becomes slower, but also more effective – what we forget, we compensate with more mature decisions
The vast majority of women over 60 compensate for age-related losses so successfully that everything continues to work well. Because older people simply fall back on their routines in everyday life, which helps. The fact that we generally act a little slower over the years than before could also be seen as an adjustment or a virtue, says Wahl, especially in a society that longs for deceleration. “The older ones live it up to us!”
Working memory also declines with menopause at the latest. We can’t remember names, the title of the film we saw yesterday – and where the hell did the mobile phone go? The nerve cells in the forebrain no longer work as effectively from middle age. Sooner or later women end up “on the misty planet of misplaced keys and misguided thoughts”, as the late author Barbara Strauch described it. The Munich psychologist Ernst Pöppel found out that over the years the window of time widens in which the brain simultaneously processes incoming signals. This is at the expense of the speed of reaction.
The link between faces and names also weakens with age. In laboratory tests, older people are clearly inferior to younger people when it comes to the speed of information processing. But, says Pöppel, slowness also enables more complex thought processes and more mature decisions.
We lose the boys when it comes to finding creative solutions
And it gets better. Longitudinal studies have shown that important cognitive abilities actually increase after the menopause: In the age between 53 and 60 years, a study from Seattle showed that the performance level is higher than between 20 and 30 years. In terms of vocabulary and verbal memory, women even improve well beyond the age of 60.
Social skills and judgement also improve – after all, older people have plenty of experience that helps them to deal with others correctly or to assess situations correctly. “The brain gets better in middle age, there’s no question about it,” sums up developmental psychologist Sherry Willis. Older people are slower, yes. But when it comes to finding creative solutions in real scenarios, they easily outpace the young. In the past, this ability was called wisdom, and society had great respect for it.
There are still women who fear the onset of menopause and the entry into the third phase of life. While many barely notice the hormonal change, for some it can indeed be arduous. But no matter how this time is experienced, at some point it is over. No more sweaty blouses, no more inexplicable mood swings. Instead, a calm body. Equilibrium. Peace. The estrogen level has settled down to pre-pubescent levels. Actually a really nice idea: compared to pubescent girls, nine-year-olds are balanced, energetic – and really cheerful.
We express ourselves very well, think in complex terms and judge with certainty: This is considered wise
In old age, a similarly stable emotional state is not uncommon. Even if younger women can hardly imagine it: after the turbulence of the menopause a happy and harmonious time begins. How did Jane Fonda, now 80 years old, once pondered: As girls, we are cheeky and self-confident and the main character in our lives. But with the onset of puberty, women, most of them anyway, wanted above all to belong and be popular – and turned into characters in the lives of others. “In our third act,” she says, “it may be possible to go back to the beginning.”