Loneliness is Bad for Your Health

Here is a press release from the Association for Psychological Science about the negative effects of lonliness.  And this isn’t just for seniors – everyone can be impacted by isolation.

The press release, from the APS,  shows the importance of having a caregiver i the home for the elderly because being left alone for long periods of time can actually have a detrimental effect of their health.  Just another reason why the services of Home Instead Senior Care can help the elderly get well, and stay well.

Two University of Chicago psychologists, Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo, have been trying to disentangle social isolation, loneliness, and the physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the cellular level.

The researchers suspected that while the toll of loneliness may be mild and unremarkable in early life, it accumulates with time. To test this idea, the scientists studied a group of college-age individuals and continued an annual study of a group of people who joined when they were between 50 and 68 years old.

Their findings, reported in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, are revealing. Consider stress, for example. The more years you live, the more stressful experiences you are going to have: new jobs, marriage and divorce, parenting, financial worries, illness. It’s inevitable.

However, when the psychologists looked at the lives of the middle-aged and old people in their study, they found that although the lonely ones reported the same number of stressful life events, they identified more sources of chronic stress and recalled more childhood adversity. Moreover, they differed in how they perceived their life experiences. Even when faced with similar challenges, the lonelier people appeared more helpless and threatened. And ironically, they were less apt to actively seek help when they are stressed out.

Hawkley and Cacioppo then took urine samples from both the lonely and the more contented volunteers, and found that the lonely ones had more of the hormone epinephrine flowing in their bodies. Epinephrine is one of the body’s “fight or flight” chemicals, and high levels indicate that lonely people go through life in a heightened state of arousal. As with blood pressure, this physiological toll likely becomes more apparent with aging. Since the body’s stress hormones are intricately involved in fighting inflammation and infection, it appears that loneliness contributes to the wear and tear of aging through this pathway as well.

There is more bad news. When we experience the depletion caused by stress, our bodies normally rely on restorative processes like sleep to shore us up. But when the researchers monitored the younger volunteers’ sleep, they found that the lonely nights were disturbed by many “micro awakenings.” That is, they appeared to sleep as much as the normal volunteers, but their sleep was of poorer quality. Not surprisingly, the lonelier people reported more daytime dysfunction. Since sleep tends to deteriorate with age anyway, the added hit from loneliness is probably compromising this natural restoration process even more.

Loneliness is not the same as solitude. Some people are just fine with being alone, and some even see solitude as an important path to spiritual growth. But for many, social isolation and physical aging make for a toxic cocktail.

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Author Contact: Louise Hawkley hawkley@uchicago.edu

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Just for Fun: Jokes On Us

A man is reminded for days before his anniversary by his wife that she is desperately wanting a new car to celebrate their 25th year of marriage.  “I want a fast one, sweety,” she would demand.  “One that goes zero to 200 in six seconds!”

This went on for several nights.  The evening before their anniversary, the woman leaned over to her husband in bed and said, “Remember.  Fast.”

“I know, my dear.  Really fast,” grumbled her husband.

The next morning the wife awoke to find her husband had already left for work.  She frantically ran to the front porch to find a neatly wrapped package with a big red bow sitting pristine in the driveway.  She ran to the box and opened the card. 

It read:

“To my love after 25 long years of marriage.  Enjoy your gift.  It is very fast, just as you demanded.  Last time I checked, it goes from zero to 210 in less than six seconds.”

Excited beyond words, she tore off the ribbon and paper.  Excitement turned to disgust when she discovered her husband had gift-wrapped their bathroom scale.

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Local Senior Care Company Hosts Open House: Lunch Provided

The Walled Lake, MI office of Home Instead Senior Care® in Oakland County, Michigan, the world’s largest provider of non-medical home care and companionship for seniors, will celebrate the opening of its new office on Tuesday, October 30, 2006.  The company’s owner, Shannon Wygant, will host the event at the new location, 109 Legato Drive, in Walled Lake Michigan, 48390.  Interested parties can tour the office, learn more about Home Instead’s services and CAREgivers, and pick-up a free lunch at the “grab-n-go” type event.   The open house will begin at 11 a.m. and will run until 2 p.m.  Lunches will be provided for those who RSVP their attendance in advance by calling 248-624-1455.

The Walled Lake franchise of Home Instead Senior Care® was started in March of 2004.  Mr. Wygant opened his first franchise in Waterford during November of 2001.

The Home Instead model  was a perfect match for owner Shannon Wygant.  “During my mission work in Mexico from 1994 to 1998, I worked daily with families and found that I had a great affinity to help seniors; a simple dinner would turn into hours as I listened to them talk about their lives and their children.  Upon returning to Michigan and my home town of Bloomfield Hills, my search for a franchise that embodied the core values of respect and dignity led me to Home Instead. With Home Instead Senior Care, I found a new mission, keeping the dreams of seniors alive by keeping them at home.”

Home Instead Senior Care®, based out of Omaha, Nebraska, now boasts more than 750 franchises in North America, Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan.  Specializing in respite, companionship, Alzheimer, dementia, bathing, personal care, and incontinence care, Home Instead’s CAREgivers are the backbone of the company.  Certified, bonded, and insured, these employees usually go into a client’s home or assisted living facility and ensure they have everything they need; from light housekeeping to running errands, even playing cards or reminiscing, CAREgivers make it possible for seniors to stay at home and stay active, both physically and mentally.

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Be A Santa To A Senior Program Begins in October: Community Ornament Parties Scheduled at Area Senior Centers

Local Senior Care Company, Area Agencies and Retailers Play Santa to Overlooked Seniors: Community help Needed

A local senior care company, along with area retailers and seniorcare agencies, are bringing Santa to the lives of seniors who may have been overlooked in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season.

Three area offices of Home Instead Senior Care® in Oakland County, Michigan, the world’s largest provider of non-medical home care and companionship for seniors, have teamed with dozens of regional senior care providers and all Oakland County National City Bank branches and ACO Hardware stores to provide presents to seniors who otherwise might not receive a gift this holiday season. 

Jeri Edwards, coordinator of customer service and operations assistant for ACO Hardware emphasized, “We are excited that we can now give back to seniors who have been our customers for all of these years.  We’ve been in business in Michigan for over sixty years, and many of those who will benefit from this program are, or were at one time, our customers.” 

“In addition to supplying gifts, Be a Santa to a Senior^® is also designed to help stimulate human contact and social interaction for seniors who are unlikely to have guests during the holidays,” said Bert Copple, Director of Community Relations for two of the Home Instead offices serving Oakland County.  “Since children are often the focus of holiday festivities, we’d like to help brighten the holidays for some area seniors as well.”

Here’s how the program, which runs from Nov. 1 through Dec. 7, works:  Prior to the holiday season, the participating local non-profit organizations identify financially challenged and lonely seniors in the community and provide those names to Home Instead Senior Care for this community service program.  Christmas trees and collection boxes, which will go up in all Oakland County National City banks and ACO Hardware stores on November 1, will feature ornaments with the first names of seniors and their respective gift requests.

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Are You Prepared for an Emergency?

A recent article from the NewsMax.com website showed that a town in Alabama is beginning the process of reopening its fall-out shelter, a building once only used during the Cold War when a nuclear attack was greatly feared.  So why reopen the shelter fifteen years after the federal governemnt stopped funding such causes?

Fear, perhaps.  But in an unceratin world, where tensions remain high with countries like Syria and Iran, and an ever-fumbling Russia, the truth that our country could be attacked again is a real threat.  So the question I pose today is this:

“What would you do if your city was attacked by a nuclear or biological weapon?”

Would you know where to go?  Do you have a plan in place?  I fear that for most seniors, that answer would be a resounding NO.  Here is an excerpt from the article found at NewsMax.com:

Alabama City Reopening Fallout Shelters

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community’s shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.

Emergency planners in Huntsville _ an out-of-the-way city best known as the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center _ say the idea makes sense because radioactive fallout could be scattered for hundreds of miles if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb.

“If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there’s not much we can do. But if it’s just fallout … shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation,” said longtime emergency management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led local leaders to renew Huntsville’s program.

Huntsville’s project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress cut off funding and the government published its last list of approved shelters at the end of 1992.

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