Aging Healthily: Perspectives from the Older Adults on Mindfulness and Exercise

Both exercise and mindfulness practice have been shown to have a myriad of health benefits for older adults, but less is know about why many older adults don't engage in these practices and how to motivate them to do so. In this blog post, the authors of a new qualitative study, published in BMC Geriatrics, discuss what they learned when they asked a group of older adults about the benefits of and barriers to exercising and practicing mindfulness.

Diana C. Parra 23 Dec 2019

The number of people over 60 years old in the United States is expected to double by 2050. And this presents a growing societal challenge: How do we ensure that this population has the skills necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle and remain socially engaged?

Two promising interventions that could benefit older adults cognitively, emotionally, and physically are exercise and mindfulness. Exercise helps prevent falls, delays disability, enhances cognitive functioning, improves depression, and reverses metabolic diseases. Mindfulness reduces stress, worry, and loneliness; decreases systemic inflammation; and improves mental health, sleep, awareness, self-efficacy, cognitive functioning, and psychological well-being. Given these benefits of exercise and mindfulness, we wanted to know what it is that keeps older adults from initiating and maintaining such health-promoting activities. As it happens, researchers rarely explore the preferences and motivations of older adults in this context, and this lack of research spawned our qualitative study, published in BMC Geriatrics, comparing elderly participants’ perspectives of the benefits and barriers of initiating and maintaining mindfulness and exercise.