This article originally appeared on Money. The decade before retirement is a critical time. Here's how to make sure you're on the right path. After 30-plus years of working and socking away savings, you can finally see retirement on the horizon. But it’s not time to coast just yet. The actions you take in the final decade before you quit working are crucial to getting the next phase off to a smooth start. Here are 5 things you must do now. 1. See if you’re saving enough. If you haven’t recently, take stock of where you are and where you need to be. For example, to replace 70% of your earnings by age 65, you’ll need to accumulate 12 times your pay at 65. But even if you’re playing catch-up, you can still make it to the finish line with what you need. Your choice: Seriously power-save, or work a bit longer while saving less. Say you have five times your income; you could sock away 33% a year for the next 10 years, or delay retirement 24 months while banking 20%. Either way, don’t miss out on catch-up contributions! Those 50-plus can put $6,000 extra in a 401(k), $1,000 more in an IRA in 2015. 2. Stagger your retirement with your spouse. Among two-income couples, nearly one in five retires in the same year, and another 30% within two years of each other, reports the Urban Institute. But quitting in tandem isn’t necessarily the best move. If one spouse works just a few years longer, you can draw less from your portfolio in those initial years. 3. Don’t automatically quit on stocks. To achieve returns to sustain a 30-year retirement, you need to still be investing for growth. Stocks should make up 50% to 60% of your allocation, with the rest in bonds. The caveat: Those within 10% of their ultimate savings goal can choose to dial back to 40%. 4. Do the math on your mortgage. Of course you don’t want to carry credit card debt into retirement, but what about the mortgage? The old advice was to burn it before you left work, but in today’s low-rate environment, maybe not. Assuming that your rate is less than 5% and that you’ll be able to afford the payments from guaranteed-income sources in retirement—or if you’re planning to move—there’s no rush. You may do better by investing money you would have put toward the loan. On the other hand, if you won’t be able to swing the nut later on, or simply want peace of mind, use this mortgage calculator [time-calcxml id=hom03] to figure out how to erase the debt sooner. Or consider a cash-in refi to a shorter-term loan. Say you have $200,000 and 20 years left on a 30-year mortgage at 5%. Refinancing to a 15-year at 3% and putting in $50,000 would shave off five years and cut the monthly payment from $1,381 to $1,074. Keep up the original payment, and the loan will be paid off in 11 years, plus you’ll save $10,300 in interest. 5. Make friends with the young’uns. Sure, you still want to dazzle your boss, but you’d better be working just as hard to make allies below you. Your younger coworkers are likely to move up the ranks over the next 10 years and have a say in whether you stay or go. Hanging onto your job for the next decade will be essential to keeping your plan on track. So train subordinates, mentor up-and-comers, and look into a “reverse mentorship” in which a junior colleague teaches you something new. By Emily Laurence for Bergen Review Media It’s tempting to wonder how to increase serotonin, since it seemingly is the thing that makes you happier. However, serotonin actually offers up quite a few additional benefits for your health. Besides helping regulate mood, serotonin is also needed for motor skills and cognitive functioning. It’s also included in nerve function that regulates blood pressure, heart rate, and the digestion system. So it’s pretty darn important. While boosting your brain’s serotonin could help boost your mood, too, it’s not a panacea for every mental health issue. Integrative psychiatrist James Lake, MD, warns that managing depression—or even just a bad mood—is much more complicated than zeroing in on serotonin. “Serotonin is certainly an important neurotransmitter and important in that equation, but there are numerous other neurotransmitters that are important, too,” he says. Besides serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins all play important roles in regulating mood. And if you’re truly struggling with what you believe to be a serious mood or mental health condition, With this in mind, there are several ways to naturally boost your serotonin levels. Keep reading to see what they are. Scroll down for 5 tips on how to increase serotonin. 1. Tweak your diet. Depending on what you eat, you could be replenishing the serotonin in your brain—or depleting it. “Nutritional deficiencies can directly lead to problems with replenishing serotonin,” Dr. Lake says. This is something Well+Good Council member and psychiatrist Drew Ramsey, MD preaches on the reg. “We now have real evidence to back up what’s good common sense: that eating well doesn’t just benefit your body, but it also benefits your brain,” he previously told Well+Good. Dr. Ramsey has said that the Mediterranean diet is especially beneficial for boosting happiness because omega-3 fats, vitamin B12, zinc, magnesium, and iron boost brain health while lowering inflammation. 2. Get consistent, good sleep. “People who are depressed or have other mental health problems are often not sleeping enough or sleeping too much,” Dr. Lake says. And this could affect your body’s ability to use or make serotonin. One study in rats found that being chronically sleep deprived could affect the brain’s serotonin receptors, making them not as sensitive to the positive effects of serotonin. (The finding was on rats though, which isn’t totally conclusive for humans.) Aim to get between seven to eight hours of good sleep a night. 3. Take a vitamin D supplement. Multiple studies have connected vitamin D deficiencies with mental health conditions; the thinking goes that vitamin D (along with omega-3 fatty acids) helps facilitate serotonin production. Talk to your doctor to see if a vitamin D supplement is something worth considering. 4. Go for a walk in the sunshine. One way to get enough vitamin D is by spending some time outside, which is why many people tend to feel a drop in mood during the winter months. If you’re feeling down, try making afternoon walks a prioritize to up the amount of vitamin D you’re getting, which in turn may help boost your serotonin levels. 5. Take steps to lower stress. Surprise, surprise: stress is totally messing with your serotonin. “Stress is a chronic inflammatory condition, both in the brain and in the body itself,” Dr. Lake says. “It can indirectly result in damage to neurons that produce serotonin or the other parts of the brain that are involved and the serotoninic pathways that make the system work less effectively.” In other words, stress causes inflammation, which is bad news for your brain. Prioritizing self-care, therapy, and other stress-reduction tactics could go a long way towards better health, including better serotonin levels. Does serotonin have any side effects?Like all good things, it is possible to get too much serotonin. But this generally only happens as a rare side effect of certain SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a type of medication commonly used to manage depression and anxiety), or combining SSRIs. According to the Mayo Clinic, the body’s serotonin levels can artificially become too high, causing symptoms like increased nervousness, insomnia, nausea, diarrhea, tremors, and dilated pupils—and should be addressed immediately with medical attention. Again, Dr. Lake emphasizes that regulating mood and managing depression is really complicated; it isn’t as easy as finding a way to boost your serotonin and that’s it. But doing so can help with milder mood issues. Give the above tips a shot and see how you feel. And if they don’t work, talk to a mental health professional who can offer other science-backed ways to improve your mood. Relationships also play a role in boosting happiness. So does sex. Whether you know it or not, life coaches are on the rise. And we’ve become completely fascinated with how quickly their clients are seeing results.After working with a life coach, clients are coming out with better self-confidence, self-awareness, and the motivation to achieve what they want out of life. Understanding that everyone is different and may need to take different steps to get to where they want to be, there are still every day, simple things that we can work on. For that reason, we reached out to some of the best life coaches in the D.C. area to see how they do it. Life coaches Sara Oliveri, Jim Weinstein, Liz Strom, and Catherine Wood have provided us with ways to take your life to the next level. Their experience as coaches, psychotherapists, in-demand speakers, professors, business executives, workshop facilitators, and degree-collectors makes their award-winning coaching expertise something to pay attention to. Here are the 7 ways that these life coaches are recommending you upgrade your life: Enhance Your Core Values Begin orienting your life around your core values – your personal formula for thriving. Core values are important because they help us grow into the person we want to be. Let go of things that you find yourself focusing on that are meaningless or unhelpful to you (fear, embarrassment, jealousy, regret) and focus on things that will make you a better person. Self-care, love, honesty, adventure, friendship—positive core values! When we use our core values to make decisions, we are focusing on what is important to us. –Sara Oliveri and Liz Strom Exercise/ Healthy eating This one comes as no surprise as we’ve definitely heard how much of an impact regular exercise and healthy eating can have on your mental and physical health. Increased energy and mood, a lower risk of medical problems, and genuinely feeling more content and relaxed are just a few of the benefits. But increased happiness isn’t the only reason that life coaches are recommending healthy living. When you’re working out and eating right you tend to feel better about yourself, leading to more self-confidence. Self-confidence is key when you’re looking to upgrade your life! –Jim Weinstein Meditation/Breathing At one point or another, you’ve probably heard the phrase “take a deep breath and calm down”. You were most likely told this by someone who was trying to get you to calm down, relax. Not only can taking deep breaths calm you down, but it can help to reduce stress and anxiety by relaxing your nervous system. On top of relaxation and reduced anxiety, meditation can help let go of the negativity in your life. By letting go of the negative, you’re making room for improvement. –Jim Weinstein Be Social The next thing that Life Coaches are recommending is to enhance your social life. The advantage of belonging to a community is that there will always be people that are there to help you, offer you comfort, and give you friendship. The saying “strength in numbers” is entirely true when it comes to mental and emotional health. Feeling alone or rejected by others is associated with low self-esteem and depression. Surrounding yourself with friends and family helps improve mood, productivity, and studies show you may even live longer. -Jim Weinstein Be You Don’t compare yourself to others. We all walk our own paths for a reason, and not everyone’s path is as it seems. Living in a society that is constantly developing and influencing who we are, it is important to always be ourselves from the inside out. When we recognize who we are and what we want out of life our chances of experiencing a fulfilling and rewarding life are a lot higher. No one else can be you and that’s what makes you unique. –Liz Strom Know What You Need While we often find ourselves worrying about what others need and want from us, it’s also important that we take care of our own needs. Knowing what you need mentally, emotionally, and physically is critical to your stability and happiness. Ask yourself, “what do I need in this moment?” and then become the source of fulfilling your own needs instead of waiting around for someone to take care of your needs for you. If you’re feeling stressed out, overwhelmed, exhausted recognize that you may need to schedule some “you-time”. – Catherine Wood Always Do the Best You Can The last recommendation, and one of the most important ones, is to always do the best you can. Now, this doesn’t mean that everything you do must be perfect, but that you should at least try your hardest to go that extra mile. If we do things half-heartedly then we aren’t living up to our full potential. This leads to regret and low self-esteem as we become our own worst critic. Even if we fail, we shouldn’t be discouraged. We learn from our mistakes and can use that experience as a life lesson. –Liz Strom This article first appeared on Capitol Standard. |
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