If leafing through the yellow pages for a plumber or carpenter is as close as you’ve come to DIY for a couple of decades, maybe you’re missing a great opportunity to feel better about yourself and your life.
Do-It-Yourself is indeed a Big Freakin’ Deal for anyone having a Midlife Crisis – it can be an invaluable resource for alleviating some pervasive midlife problems. Putting up some shelves or fixing that shaky stair railing builds more than your property value. It can also build your mental sharpness, physical fitness, personal attractiveness, and self esteem.
Here are five ways in which DIY is particularly good for people over 50.
1. It helps you stay sharper longer. Mastering new skills is just about universally recognized as one of the best, most effective ways to forestall age-related cognitive problems and keep the ability to remember, concentrate, and focus in top shape. Figuring out how to install a ceiling fan can be as valuable a mental workout as sitting down with the Times Sunday crossword.
2. It increases your activity level. On average, activity levels drop by more than 18 percent as we move from young adulthood into middle age. This decline in physical activity is believed to be at the heart of more alarming statistics: by middle age, the norm seems to be a 28 percent decline in physical fitness levels and and a 20 percent increase in weight.
Not only does increased activity have a significant positive impact on both weight and general fitness levels, it has also been shown to dramatically decrease risk of illness and death. In addition, older adults with higher activity levels are far less prone to cognitive problems like dementia, and are less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, higher activity levels seem to be powerfully related to positive physical appearance characteristics, like youthfulness, vitality, alertness, strength, and sexuality. Mowing your own grass can improve a lot more than your house’s curb appeal – it can be a powerful enhancement to your own curb appeal as well.
3. It offers new challenges and enhances creativity. Feelings of boredom, disenchantment, and ennui are typical complaints associated with midlife crises, and the older we get the easier it is for an insidious “been there, done that” attitude to creep into the outlook. Health professionals agree that finding a new challenge is one of the best ways to shake that syndrome. Striving to meet a new challenge can also be extremely effective in lifting or even eliminating depression. This is particularly true when the challenge involves coming up with a creative solution to something that you’ve identified as having significant personal importance to you, like getting that damn dripping faucet to stop keeping you awake at night.
4. It gives you new achievements. Setting yourself an important but realistic goal and becoming truly invested in achieving it is undoubtedly one of the all-time best self-motivation techniques, and achieving a personal goal is a tremendous morale booster. Just deciding you’re going to take on that leaky faucet yourself can lift your mood, and actually doing it will increase feelings of self-determination, competency, independence, capability, and achievement.
5. It’s an absolutely unparalleled source of self-esteem. If there’s anything a lot more gratifying than the feeling of successfully completing a DIY project, it’s hard to imagine what it would be. Feelings of pride, ingenuity, personal achievement, and self-satisfaction can be surprisingly hard to come by some days …. but every time that light switch works or the back door doesn’t squeak, that’s exactly what you’ll feel.
