Top Three Reasons to Volunteer as a Senior

As seniors, our days of serving are not behind us! In fact, studies have shown that there are numerous benefits for us when we volunteer. If you're feeling a bit of the blues, try volunteering and help build up your community.

First, volunteering brings an element of fun and fulfillment into your life. By serving others, you can know that you are having an impact while also having a sense of achievement in your life. Volunteering can open up various aspects and talents in your life that you didn't even know you had until you volunteered!

Second, volunteering increases your community size. By working with like-minded volunteers, you can make incredible friends, and can even teach the younger volunteers life lessons that you have learned! Whether it's at your community garden, local library, or church, volunteering can help you feel a part of a community bigger than yourself.

Third, volunteering is good for you mentally and physically! Volunteering helps you stay mentally fit by fighting against depression and reducing your levels of stress and anxiety. Volunteering also helps you stay physically fit by lessening the risk  of heart disease and chronic pain.

So enjoy this warm spring season and volunteer! If you need help finding a volunteer opportunity that suites you, check with your properties Activities Director or look online for local volunteer networks (e.g. Hands on Network)

Get Outside and Garden!

With the arrival of Spring and the days of sub-freezing temperatures (hopefully) behind us, it’s time to polish off those cobwebbed, dirt-encrusted gardening tools from last year and start planting! Not only can your body be rejuvenated as you tend to your garden, but gardening is also a fabulous exercise! In the often sedentary lifestyles of today, gardening is a great way to easily get the exercise your body needs and it even helps you become more self-sufficient while doing so. The average gardener in the United States can grow all of their vegetables for six months of the year, thereby saving money by not having to rely on grocery stores for veggies. The plants you grow can be free of the nasty pesticides and herbicides found on common store bought foods, which means that they tend to taste better! Plus, you can be confident in knowing that you were part of the equation to make it grow.

 
Gardening outside in the sunshine also gives you the Vitamin D that your body needs in order to absorb calcium from the foods that you eat. Your body can get up to 90% of its daily requirement of Vitamin D just by being outside in the sun! As you age, calcium becomes especially important for your body, because it helps you have stronger bones.  So get outside and garden - and when your plants start producing and you have an overabundance of their earthy offerings, invite a neighbor over to your garden and share the wealth!

Find the Fountain of Youth by Traveling!

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page," - St. Augustine.

The Benefits of Travel

1. Traveling can improve your health.

Numerous studies have been conducted that show traveling is healthy and helps slow your body’s aging process! A study by the Global Commission on Aging and Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies showed that traveling lowers the risk of dementia, Alzheimers, and heart disease, as well as improving your overall well-being, sharpening the mind, and refreshing the spirit. So get out and travel!

2. Traveling can improve your relationships.

Traveling allows you to not only share in memorable moments with your spouse, but it also can improve your interpersonal relationships with each other. In fact, 75% of adults who travel with a significant other tend to have happier and more intimate relationships. Family vacations can also not only improve relationships and create memories, but they have been found to also reduce behavioral problems and illnesses in children. Plus, traveling can bring multiple generations together and 60% of children say that they feel closer to their grandparents after vacationing together.

3. Traveling can increase your intellect.

By constantly being surrounded by the profound newness that comes with traveling, whether it’s the new culture, scenery, language, food, or something else, traveling sharpens your mind by subconsciously solving the various puzzles encountered in each day’s intellectually stimulating environments. Learning is a fundamental part of life, and even as we age we should constantly be looking to learn more about the world around us! Traveling increases our intercultural awareness and helps us gain a powerful insight into the lives of others around our world.

4. Traveling can increase your happiness.

If you’re feeling down, try traveling and see where it takes you! Traveling has been known to lower your unhealthy stress, and help fulfill your travel dreams. Most Americans cite travel as one of the main things they plan on doing once they retire. Not only are you fulfilling a dream, but travel has actually been found to improve your overall happiness!

Time For Tea!

During our afternoon teatime at the Pickwick Society Tea Room, Marie and Marcia were thrilled to eat the fresh, healthy food and sip the perfectly steeped tea.The Pickwick Society Tea Room offers numerous varieties of vitalizing tea and was the ideal spot for some springtime fellowship, where laughter and spring cheer abounded. At Waterford Estates, we strive to provide a vibrant active life for our residents by organizing numerous outings around the city. This goes to show that no matter your age, you can always have fun!

The Benefits of Walking

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. … To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.”

― Edward Abbey

Walking is one of the most basic forms of movement, yet its benefits are often widely forgotten in the frantic pace of today. According to the American Heart Association, walking is the “simplest positive change you can make to effectively improve your heart health.” Numerous studies show that walking for at least 30 minutes a day can help reduce the risk for osteoporosis, breast or colon cancer, coronary heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. Not only does it reduce all of those, but it also helps you maintain your body weight (and lower the risk for obesity) and improve your blood lipid profiles, blood pressure, and your blood sugar levels. Even just taking a walk before or after lunch has been shown  to enhance your mood, increase your level of aerobic fitness, and help you become more enthusiastic, less tense, more relaxed, and able to cope, as compared to not taking that lunchtime stroll. So rise up! Go forth and embrace the elixir of fresh air and movement!