Educate Yourself After Retirement

Life changes after we retire. This is the time for some to be free from mustiness to work for earning a living, raising family, and some routines that we hate to do. But this is can be a time of boredom, uselessness, capitulation and slowing your life’s pace. Either way, the way we will likely fell or behave after we retire is much more depend on what activities we want to do on that particular time.

Here is one of the great benefits of being a retires: now you have got plenty time to take classes on subjects that interests you. You may have passion to learn Latin, learning on how to sculpt, learning origami or Japanese garden, or perhaps you have got a gift and talent to teach autistic children. You will probably be welcome everywhere from your local college to community center. Against this background, it is fair to ask why today’s typical American retiree watches 24hours of TV each week and takes advantage of few, if any, learning opportunities.

But here again, it is best not to wait. Although neuroscientists and others who study aging can’t conclusively tell us why older people seem so resistant to learning, evidence is accumulating that it has a great deal to do with how we use—or, in too many cases, underused—our brains throughout our lives. The old workout mantra “use it or lose it” seems to apply to our brain just as much as it does to the rest of our body. Or as writer Sean o’Casey said, “If you have never read a book in your life, you will not start at age 60.”

A brain that is not challenged to learn new things for an extended period will actually become smaller and less capable of learning in the future. At the same time, continuing to be an active learner throughout your life may contribute to a larger, healthier brain. Underlining this point, one doctor reported that adults over age 70 with brain-stimulating hobbies were two and a half times less likely to suffer from the effects of Alzheimer’s later in life than were those whose main leisure activity was watching TV.

It seemed that the better educated person are not having strong passion to retire. Once the choose to retire, this group of people are more likely to continue to grow in pursuing education or interests topics. From gender perspective, woman seems have a thin edge over men in pursuing interest subject and to continue to grow after retirement. Education is more encouraging than sex in explaining what might keep us learning after we retire. It would seem that the same things that motivate some of us to engage more years of formal education prior we retire may keep to drive us to learn and grow later on.

Think about how you can challenge your brain to stay active every day from now on. Things as simple as learning to operate your computer mouse with your left hand or taking a walk in an unfamiliar area are small and easy steps we can all can take.

Better yet, challenge yourself to learn a new subject—one that uses the lazier cells in your brain. For example, if you’re already fluent in three languages, don’t just master another one. You will likely stimulate more brain-cell growth by learning to paint, play a musical instrument, take apart a car engine, or wrap your mind around basic physics.

Anything that’s both new to you and challenging will work; it doesn’t have to involve formal schooling. A classics professor might do better to learn how to prune fruit trees, line car brakes, or even solve difficult jigsaw puzzles than to write a scholarly essay parsing Plato’s logic. activities that combine physical and mental challenges, such as square dancing or juggling, are particularly good, because they simultaneously challenge two parts of the brain.