Joyspan could be the secret to ageing happily. Here’s what to know

For 20 years, the gerontologist worked with people who were profoundly lonely and people who had been neglected or financially or physically harmed as she led the United States’ first centre for elder abuse.

What she witnessed tracked with the stereotypes many people held about ageing as a negative and sad experience. But she knew that wasn’t the only way to grow old.

She knew people in later life who thrived despite their struggles, including her radiant 96-year-old mother, Betty. And it wasn’t as though these people had breezed through life unscathed or lived like monks.

Betty, for instance, has painful arthritis and was left dealing with bankruptcy when her husband died. She has never been particularly athletic, and she enjoys dessert and a cocktail.

So what was it that set those who thrive apart from those who suffered in later life? Burnight calls it joyspan.

“Joyspan is not the absence of hardship – it does not require perfect physical health,” she says. Rather, it involves a daily choice to find the good in life and tend to four pillars:

“When we’re attending to those, we will notice a difference,” says Burnight, author of the New York Times best-selling book on the subject, Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life’s Second Half.

When people start to think that the best days of their lives are over, and that they have nothing to give, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They stop bothering to try anything new (adapt and grow); they stop making the effort to see friends (connect); and they assume no one would want to learn from them or that they have nothing to offer (give).

“It impacts you physiologically, too, because you’re not moving as much, and you’re not using your brain. It all goes in the same direction.”

Conversely, there are people who proactively reject the idea that ageing is all decline and recognise that there are things that get better as they get older. They also realise they care less about what others think, and so are willing to try new things.

“Then you reach out to that person and connect, and that stimulates your brain, and you have to go to the effort of getting ready and getting out the door so you move your body, and it too is a cycle but, it’s a continued growth cycle.”

Despite her challenges, Betty still finds joy, connection and growth picking roses from her garden, reading, regularly playing cards with friends, grandparenting and baking pies.

The thing about joyspan is that, so long as the four areas are being addressed in some small way, there are no rules for how to do it. And we don’t have to