If You've Accepted These 3 Things By 70, You've Lived A More Meaningful Life Than Most People Ever Will
These powerful truths reveal you've lived wisely and well.
Karola G | Canva By the time you reach 70, life has handed you enough joy, heartbreak, surprises, and lessons to fill a book — and hopefully, it's a good one. At that age, a kind of peace settles into people who've figured out what actually matters to them. People who reach their seventies with genuine contentment aren't the ones who avoided hardship or got lucky with circumstances — and the best part is that you don't have to wait until seventy to start.
If you've accepted these things by 70, you've lived a more meaningful life than most people ever will:
1. You can’t always be happy
Our feelings come from our thoughts. When we first realize the power our thoughts have, we often jump right to the “let’s have happy thoughts” place in our lives. If we only think happy thoughts, then we’ll only feel happy. We don’t live in a bubble.
Once we accept that we are going to experience many difficult emotions during our time on earth, we can move past resisting them and into the “how to process emotions” stage. This is crucial work because depression is caused by suppressing your emotions. When you resist feeling emotions, you create so much drama in your life.
When you allow yourself to physically feel your feelings, the feelings will pass. Emotions are energy in motion. Simply put, there is an energy in your body that needs to be processed. We can see little kids processing their emotions every day.
Research found that people who accept their negative emotions rather than judging them as "bad" or trying to push them away experience significantly better psychological health. Acceptance helps keep people from reacting to and exacerbating their negative experiences.
They might cry, rage, or get really quiet. At some point, they were taught to keep that inside, which can be the beginning of other damaging behaviors like over-drinking, blaming others, and overspending.
2. Your emotions are a gift, even the bad ones
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When I view my emotions as gifts showing me what I can work on or where I get to grow, I accept my feelings as helpers on this path of life. In fact, when I look at the awesome things in my life now, they all began with a difficult or negative emotion.
My decision to leave my marriage, my decision to start my business, my decision to begin dating again, and my decision to redefine my relationship with my biological family. I felt difficult emotions at first and then, boom! Growth and bliss.
Yes, you might feel uncomfortable as you process the emotion, but I assure you that you are physically able to process any emotion. And that it will pass. It is only when we suppress our emotions that we run into trouble. We end up feeling a piece of our emotions over and over without moving through them, which isn’t helpful. When we allow ourselves to feel what we’re feeling, we enter a new, calming, and peaceful way of being.
Psychologist Jonathan Adler's research found that experiencing mixed emotions, even when uncomfortable, actually preceded improvements in wellbeing over the following weeks. "Taking the good and the bad together may detoxify the bad experiences, allowing you to make meaning out of them in a way that supports psychological well-being," he concluded.
3. No feeling lasts forever
So many amazing things come from allowing ourselves to feel the more difficult, negative emotions, so I encourage you to allow more into your life. Not only will you rid yourself of the damaging language “I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” but you continue to evolve into that next best version of yourself. “Discomfort is the currency of our dreams.”
When you name what you're feeling, something shifts. Research shows that putting a word to your distress actually calms the brain's alarm system, and labeling negative emotions as you experience them decreases their intensity and duration.
It's like the difference between being swept away by a wave and watching it from the shore. You get just enough distance to process what's happening instead of being consumed by it.
How do we process our emotions? There are many tools like journaling, meditating, and working with a coach. These tools all allow you to follow this same path:
Name it. Name your feeling. Name your emotion. A feeling is one word. When we put a word to what we’re feeling, we begin to process the energy of the emotion through us. Examples include: “I feel disappointed”, “I feel threatened”, “I feel lonely.”
Describe it. What does your feeling feel like in your body? Feelings are energy in motion and are physical sensations in your body. Where do you feel it in your body? Does it feel hot or cold? Sharp or soft? Do you feel short of breath? Nauseous? The more specific, the better.
Allow it. Keep your mind on the physical feeling. Breathe. The feeling will pass, usually within 90 seconds. Stronger emotions are less comfortable to feel, but don’t jump off the wave mid-stream. You can handle any emotion or feeling that comes your way.
Each of these steps is equally important, and I urge you to move through all three steps. As a whole, we spend an awful lot of time and energy avoiding our feelings. I assure you, it’s actually easier to feel the darn things than to spend all this time avoiding them. To illustrate this point, imagine your emotions as a beach ball.
Close your eyes and imagine how easy it is to hold the beach ball above the water. This is what it feels like when you’ve developed your emotional intelligence and are able to process your emotions. Now imagine holding that beach ball under the water.
This is what we’re doing when we avoid feeling our emotions. Think of the energy you use as you push against the ball. When you finally allow the ball to surface, it comes up forcefully and with a bigger splash the longer you hold it under.
The same is true when you allow yourself to be sad or angry or disappointed. If you resist those emotions for a long time, they will come out of you explosively and without much control. When you begin to practice releasing your emotions, you will feel a deep sense of release and calm.
Start your week with an open mind to feel what you’re going to feel. Notice when you do things to avoid feeling what you’re feeling (shopping, eating, blaming others, etc.)
Be kind to yourself as you observe what you’re feeling and how you manage your feelings. Depending on your age, you’ve had a lot of years to program yourself on how to process or not process your emotions.
This week, put on your detective cap and look at your tendencies. So much of life is learning and looking. I like to remind myself that my feelings are here to teach me something and that “nothing has gone wrong here”. It is normal for us to feel a wide range of emotions.
We create drama in our lives when we resist feeling our feelings. Treat yourself kindly and with compassion.
Susie Pettit is a mindfulness-based cognitive coach and podcast host. She coaches women to live a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.
