University Essay: Psychological Factors and Successful Ageing

This essay examines the relationship between psychological factors and successful ageing. It defines successful ageing as a state of simple living without chronic illness, emphasizing low disease likelihood, high physical and cognitive function, and active life engagement. The essay focuses on psychological factors, particularly resilience and purpose in life, as key contributors to mental well-being and successful ageing. It also highlights other associated factors such as physical health, social support, financial stability, and stress management. The essay concludes that the ageing process depends on physical, psychological, and social factors, and suggests psychological interventions to promote positive ageing skills.

Running head: HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
Successful ageing is defined as the concept of simple living, where the person is
devoid of any chronic physical illnesses or disorder. There are three primary components of
successful ageing, which includes low likelihood of illness and disease-connected debility,
high physical and cognitive functional ability, and energetic engagement or involvement with
life. There are different physical, social and psychological factors that contribute towards the
process of successful ageing. The essay will focus on the association between the good
psychological factors and effective or successful ageing (Aldwin et al. 2017).
In psychological factors, that reduced proportion of depression and increased
proportion of resilience is considered as the most significant factors that is directly related
with the process of successful ageing. The above mentioned factor determine the mental
health condition of an individual, as being mentally fit is the key concept towards successful
ageing because the person tends to feel happy and secure that eventually result in better
health condition. Psychological resiliency is defined as the person or individual capability to
successfully adapt to difficulty and stress (Mlinac and Schwabenbauer 2018). Hence, if an
individual develop enhanced level of resilience, they can partake a positive step towards
successful ageing. The other important psychological factor that is highly responsible for
successful ageing is determining the purpose or reason of life, which act as an indicator for
successful ageing as it reduce the risk of mortality among people. The people who age from
20 to 50 develop a mature defence that allow them to overcome from the effect of
psychological factor. There are other associated psychological factors that is responsible for
successful ageing in older people includes physical health, social support, financial stability
and personal income, cohesiveness and family dynamics, variety of stress-management
strategies, developing meaning or purpose of life, maintaining optimal standard of cognitive
function, self-justification towards negative aspect of life and their outcomes, mastery of
widowhood and bereavement and strategies adapted to prevent from depression and personal

2HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
control (Anton et al. 2015). The above mentioned psychological factors had both negative
and positive effect on an individual as these factors have an impact on an individual mind and
how their brain reacts or responds to each factors determines their overall health. If the
individual bear a good psychological health, the possibility of them adopting to any stressful
situation increases and they can develop the desire or need to change according to the
situations and prepare themselves to face their old phase of life with better mind-set. Hence,
adapting the psychological intervention assist the individual to develop positive ageing skill
and practice (Davis et al. 2016).
It can be concluded that the complete process of ageing depends on three primary
factors namely physical, psychological and social factors. These factors helps an individual to
adapt different strategies that will help them to acquire positive ageing. The essay had
focused on the concept of psychological factors and highlighted different factors that are
involved in this aspect and also exhibited how this factors are affecting the process of
successful ageing.

3HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
References
Aldwin, C.M., Igarashi, H., Gilmer, D.F. and Levenson, M.R., 2017. Health, illness, and
optimal aging: Biological and psychosocial perspectives. Springer Publishing Company.
Anton, S.D., Woods, A.J., Ashizawa, T., Barb, D., Buford, T.W., Carter, C.S., Clark, D.J.,
Cohen, R.A., Corbett, D.B., Cruz-Almeida, Y. and Dotson, V., 2015. Successful aging:
advancing the science of physical independence in older adults. Ageing research reviews, 24,
pp.304-327.
Davis, A., McMahon, C.M., Pichora-Fuller, K.M., Russ, S., Lin, F., Olusanya, B.O., Chadha,
S. and Tremblay, K.L., 2016. Aging and hearing health: the life-course approach. The
Gerontologist, 56(Suppl_2), pp.S256-S267.
Mlinac, M.E. and Schwabenbauer, A., 2018. Psychological resilience. In Resilience in Aging
(pp. 81-104). Springer, Cham.