Prime Time - Jane Fonda [55]
One more thing: Estrogen therapy, if begun while a perimenopausal woman is in her late forties or early fifties, can improve and protect the brain. Hormone replacement is so controversial, and its effects vary with the individual, so it’s best to consult a doctor. Still, Cynthia Gorney wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “It makes new cells grow. It increases what’s called ‘plasticity,’ the brain’s ability to change and respond to stimulation. It builds up the dendrites and number of dendritic spines, the barbs that stick out along the long tails of brain cells, like thorns on a blackberry stem, and hook up with other neurons to transmit information back and forth. The thinning of those spines is a classic sign of Alzheimer’s.”2
In the next chapter, I will tell you some really good and interesting news about aging.
CHAPTER 9
Positivity: The Good News Is You’re Getting Older!
We are all happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
GUESS WHAT? YOU CAN PRETTY MUCH EXPECT TO BE HAPPIER at eighty than you were at twenty! Regardless of whether you are male or female, married or single, employed or not, or have your children living with you! Regardless, in other words, of events in your life. Surprising, huh? Especially given all the things that can start to go south with age—for example, buttocks, joints, valves, skin, hairlines, and social networks!
Nonetheless, a 2008 Gallup poll showed this result after interviewing 340,000 Americans aged eighteen to eighty-five. Dr. Arthur A. Stone, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who led the study based on the poll, isn’t sure why this uptick in well-being occurs.1 Could it be psychological changes? Alterations in brain chemistry or endocrine changes? No one really knows. What appears to be certain is that between the ages of eighteen and fifty, those interviewed tended to feel more sadness, stress, worry, and anger—and then, vavoom, beginning at fifty, life seemed to take an upward turn.
This has been my personal experience as well, although I became more aware of it at age sixty than at fifty. As I said in an earlier chapter, one of my main character traits as a younger person was a tendency to melancholy. On top of that, I was wound pretty tight. The ten years I spent with Ted Turner (from ages fifty-two to sixty-two) taught me more about laughter and letting go than almost anything ever had before. In fact, I’ll tell you a secret: I wouldn’t have been able to be as funny playing Jennifer Lopez’s mother-in-law in Monster-in-Law had I not had that time with Ted, who made it possible for me to learn to laugh at the outrageous and to see that over-the-top can be endearing.
But it has been more than ten years now that Ted and I have been apart—from ages sixty-two to seventy-two—and I continue to notice how much more positive I have become … joyful, even. Most things that would have run me up the wall with anxiety or sent me to bed with depression roll right off my back now. Very few things really stress me anymore. Well, children and grandchildren can still cause stress! As they say, “You are only as happy as your least happy child.” But for me, it’s not anywhere near what it used to be, and when stress comes, it doesn’t linger.
Laughing with my friend Robin Morgan in 2004. She was interviewing me for Ms. magazine.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HAROLD DANIELS
Troy, me, and Shirlee on the set of Monster-in-Law.
Dr. Ken Matheny, Regents Professor in Georgia State University’s Department of Counseling and Psychological Services, which he founded in 1966, told me that one of the premier sources of information about centenarians in the country is the Institute of Gerontology, at the University of Georgia in Athens. “There are now about fifty-six thousand Americans who are centenarians,” he said, “and when they study these folks, they find that on the whole they report more happiness than the average person. Which is startling,