In order to advance ‘healthy ageing’, it is important to understand what it is that people have reason to value into old age, and how people can maintain these valued aspects of their lives. Understanding motivation, can help people to feel more in control of their lives, to engage in healthy behaviours or to improve their wellbeing. While this is true for everybody, goals often undergo age-related changes.
A collection of articles highlights the role of motivation for healthy ageing.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) healthy ageing is ‘the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age’. Well-being is a concept which expands beyond our physical health and takes a biopsychosocial perspective. Well-being includes attributes that ‘enable people to be and to do what they value’ and takes a key role in this definition of healthy aging.
Motivation science examines what people desire, dislike or fear, how these desires, dislikes, and fears are transformed into goals, how people pursue these goals successfully or disengage from them if necessary, and how these processes change over time. Therefore, healthy aging should include motivation science to understand what it is that people have reason to value, and how to attain and maintain such valued aspects in their lives.
The recently published supplement issue of ten articles gives an overview of the role of motivation for healthy ageing. The first article lays out a heuristic model of motivation and healthy ageing, showing that goals, motivational processes such as goal setting, pursuit and disengagement are embedded in contexts and situations in which people find themselves. For example, social, technological aspects, cultural characteristics, as well as the built and natural environment together make up the context and define the extent to which people have opportunities or face constraints to be able and to do what they value. Retirement might render work-related goals moot and opens up new opportunities to find different goals that bring value. On the other hand, people might need to adapt their goals to what is still attainable due to age-related constraints. The challenge is therefore to find the sweet spot where value and attainability intersect.
Based on this model, the other nine articles address one or more components of the motivational model of healthy ageing. The supplement issue illustrates the central role of motivation for healthy ageing and hopes to inspire both strands of research, and with this, ultimately addressing the question how people can age healthily and fulfil their potential well into old and very old age.
The supplement issue is the result of three interdisciplinary workshops organized by Velux Stiftung to clarify the role of motivation for healthy ageing.
