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Breaking Free: Dropping Bad Habits After 50
By Meredith Wadman, January & February 2005
Conventional wisdom says an older person can’t change ingrained habits. But do the facts really bear this out?
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On a June morning in his 53rd year, Charles Smith* woke up in a sleazy motel
room in suburban Virginia. He was fully clothed. His body was half off the bed.
His head was pounding. He wanted to vomit.
Charles had gone out for a couple of drinks the night before. How he had
ended up in this dive, he had no idea. What was clear was that, as usual, he
had not stopped after two drinks.
Then he remembered something that made his remorse pinch like a vise: it was
his daughter's sixth birthday. He could no longer deny that he was in the
gutter.
"I thought, 'If I don't do something about my drinking now, I
won't see her turn seven,' " says Smith, who had been drinking
hard for 30 years. Today, Smith is 71, and his daughter is 25. He has not had a
drink since that life-changing morning. He credits Alcoholics Anonymous, which
he still faithfully attends.
Breaking bad habits can be a brutal challenge for anyone—especially
for someone who has spent several decades married to, say, martinis or Mars
bars or MasterCards. But the good news is, if you're over 50, your age
doesn't necessarily work against you when you tackle your demons. It even
can be an asset.
"Old dogs can learn new tricks. There's no question. In fact, we
prefer to work with older people, because they change better. They're more
motivated," says John Foreyt, a weight loss specialist who directs the
Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston.
"You may have more maturity at 52 than you did at 32. And more capacity
to delay gratification. You may be more fed up," adds New York-based
psychologist April Lane Benson, editor of I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive
Buying and the Search for Self.
To be sure, after 35 years of lighting up a cigarette with your morning
coffee, the thought of banishing the smokes may feel akin to a slow stretch on
a medieval rack. But before you despair, consider the physiology involved.
Since our days as cave dwellers, human beings have had to learn new behaviors
quickly in order to survive. Because of this, the brain is remarkably plastic.
The consensus in the medical literature is that a 30-year habit is probably no
more firmly ingrained in our brain circuitry than a one-year habit, according
to Dr. Jeffery Wilkins, director of addiction medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles. Conversely, the brain is remarkably efficient at
establishing new patterns.
Hitting Bottom
That said, behavior change often is excruciatingly difficult. So tough, in
fact, that many of us don't even attempt it until a crisis forces us to
change. That was the case for Carol Bettis*, a divorced mother of two who spent
nearly 20 years indulging a credit card habit that eventually landed her in
more than $100,000 of debt.
"If one dress in green looked good on me, four dresses in all the
colors available were even better," she says. "And of course the
shoes and accessories to go with them."
To finance her habit, Carol repeatedly borrowed against the equity in her
home. When her credit union finally turned her down, she began using her
expense account at the small business where she was controller. Six months
after she turned 50, her bosses discovered what she had done.
She lost her job and nearly went to prison. Under the terms of a hard-won
settlement with her former employer, she paid restitution by liquidating her
retirement account and selling her home. "I moved from living in my dream
three-bedroom home to living in a 26-foot travel trailer," she says.
"I thought I was going to be a bag lady."
Within days of losing her job, Carol found Debtors Anonymous, a 12-step
group modeled on the Alcoholics Anonymous program. She's been attending
weekly meetings ever since. The result: At 64, she is less than two years away
from paying off the credit card debt that she owed. She owns her own
condominium. She contributes to a 401(k). She cancelled all her credit cards 14
years ago and buys exclusively with cash. And she's been in her current job
for eight years. "I owe my life to the [Debtors Anonymous] program,"
she says. Her advice to anyone over 50: "You're never too old to make
changes in your life."
Is Age an Advantage?
Science is bearing her out. Consider a major study funded by the National
Institutes of Health. Published in September 2004 in the journal Obesity
Research, the study looked at more than 1,000 overweight people at risk of
getting diabetes and evaluated how successfully they were able to change their
lives by exercising regularly and losing weight. After three years, the results
were striking: For both weight loss and exercise, success rates rose directly
with age. Those over 65 were most successful of all, far outdoing people under
45 years old.
"There's always a belief that older individuals won't be as
successful in changing behaviors," says lead author Rena Wing, a professor
of psychiatry at Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island. "But in
fact this study suggests that older individuals are actually better at
achieving exercise and weight loss goals."
Joe Goulden, a 70-year-old writer in Washington, D.C., says that dropping 17
percent of his body weight has made him feel "just one hell of a lot
better." Four years ago, Goulden, who stands six feet, two inches, weighed
more than 250 pounds. "I didn't want to look at myself anymore,"
he says.
He had tried all those "goofy" diets in the past, and failed. So
Goulden changed his diet permanently to his own version of a healthy,
sustainable one. It is heavy on salads, corn flakes, tuna, and skim milk.
Grapes substitute for ice cream. Fritos and other tempting snack foods almost
never cross his threshold. Goulden bought a treadmill and started using it
three times a week. He began keeping a cup of tea beside his computer, taking a
swig whenever he got the growlies.
Resources
smokefree.gov
The National Cancer Institute's stop smoking website. On the site's More Resources page, look for the
"Clear Horizons" guide to helping smokers over 50 quit.
Debtors Anonymous
Contact the organization at PO Box 920888, Needham MA 02492-0009,
781-453-2743.
Alcoholics
Anonymous
The site's Is A.A.
For You page offers a 12-question quiz to help you determine the
answer.
Overeaters Anonymous
There's a quiz here, too, to determine whether O.A. is right for you.
The payoff: He has lost 43 pounds and kept it off. "I enjoy looking at
myself in the mirror now," he says. "I've had about 15 pairs of
slacks taken in four to five inches. And that is really a great
feeling."
'Give It a Shot'
Even nicotine can be conquered late in life, according to experts like Glen
Morgan, a clinical psychologist at the National Cancer Institute. "Folks
are able to quit smoking after 20, 30, or 40 years," says Morgan, who
specializes in smoking cessation. "I don't have evidence that it's
harder than when they're 30."
Take Dena Jansen, a Maryland retiree who lit up her first cigarette in her
mother's Evansville, Indiana, kitchen in 1948, when she was 17 years old.
Forty-four years later, she was smoking two and a half packs a day when she
quit cold turkey, prompted by an episode of pneumonia.
"It really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be," says
Jansen, now 73. Her advice to older smokers considering quitting: "Give it
a shot. If you fall off the wagon, get back on. When you get to a certain age,
it's easier to do that." Older people understand that "a mistake
is not the end of the world."
How to Make the Change
But just how should you go about giving up a well-worn habit? Behavioral
change experts generally agree on several tips for habit-changers from 18 to
88. Below, we've refined them where appropriate for those over 50.
- Figure out why you want to change. An internal motivation (I want to
be around to dance at my granddaughter's wedding) is preferable to an
external one (my doctor told me to lose weight). But to start with, even
cosmetic goals will do.
- Use your life experience to your advantage. Catalog the attempts
you've made at change and why they've failed. Then apply what
you've learned. Don't plan to work out at six each morning if you
haven't risen before eight for the last five decades.
- Develop a written plan for quitting that includes a start date. The
more detailed it is, the better. Don't say, "I want to lose
weight." Instead, say, "I want to lose two pounds a month for six
months beginning on February 1." Behavioral change expert Charles Stuart
Platkin says that planning for a habit change should be undertaken with all the
time and attention to detail that we put into planning our daughters'
weddings.
- Substitute a new behavior for the old one. Exercise is a great
replacement for smoking or eating. And even a less-than-virtuous substitute is
better than a plainly bad habit. When Dena Jansen quit smoking, she was living
in Las Vegas. She didn't know what to do with her hands. So she spent the
next several weeks in casinos. "I figured if I was saving that much money,
I might as well put it in the machines," she says.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If the prospect
of trying to lose 20 pounds paralyzes you, start small. Walking for 20 minutes
a day and consuming just 100 fewer calories daily—that's one
tablespoon of mayonnaise—adds up to a 20-pound weight loss over the
course of a year for an average-size person, according to Baylor's John
Foreyt.
- Get support. Having friends and family on board is critical for most
successful behavior change. Let those close to you know what you're
planning to do and how it might affect your behavior. Conversely, stay away
from people (including spouses!) who have an interest in undermining your
efforts.
- Anticipate obstacles. Develop a plan for what you're going to do
when the bread basket arrives at the restaurant table. Take a walk, order a
veggie plate, or ask the waiter to take it away once others have been
served.
- Expect setbacks, and don't be undone by them. Have a plan for
the day after you slip.
- Don't set yourself up for failure. Late November may not be the
best time to embark on a 1,200-calorie diet.
- Don't quit trying. Most people don't succeed in changing on
their first try, says Wilkins of Cedars-Sinai. "You never want to give up
because you don't know if it's the third time, the fourth time, or the
fifth time where you will succeed."
* Some names have been changed to protect the identity of sources.
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