If there’s one thing that I have learned since starting Sixty and Me it’s that life after 50 is a choice. You can invest in your health, wealth and happiness. Or, you can let yourself go. You can build a solid foundation for the future. Or, you can accept age-related problems as inevitable. Unfortunately, it’s easy to miss our own destructive thoughts and behaviors until it is too late. So, to help you get started, here are 5 mistakes to avoid if you want to find happiness and get the most from life after 50.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to forget all of the positive things in your life and focus on the negative? Why is it that our worries spin in our heads, while thinking about what we are grateful for requires conscious effort?

In many ways, baby boomers are more connected than ever. Unfortunately, in an increasingly fast-paced world, many baby boomers are missing out on one of the most important gestures available to man – the humble hug.

Help stabilize and protect your knees by strengthening and improving mobility in the muscles that surround and support the knees like the quadriceps, inner thighs, hamstrings, calves, glutes—eve

It occurs to me that there is a side-effect of the “if it feels good, it must be bad” mentality that we develop over the years. Have you ever felt guilty for taking time away from your work to go for a walk? Did you feel like you were being unproductive? Are there simple pleasures that you enjoyed when you were younger – like playing video games or riding a bike – that you abandoned because they were “childish?”

Getting a stronger core doesn’t have to involve shunning carbs and spending hours on end in the gym. Enter a simpler (and much more sane) way to tone and strengthen your stomach: bodyweight exer

Baby boomers have a lot on our minds. We worry about our kids, so far away and yet so close to our hearts. We obsess about whether we have saved enough for retirement. We wonder whether we will be able to stay healthy and fit in the coming decades. We worry about… well, pretty much everything actually. And that’s the problem.

Several years ago, while out shopping with a close friend, we had a somewhat disturbing conversation. This friend is about 18 months older than I and, at the time, had just turned 60. As we were rummaging through the racks at one of our local department stores, she impatiently rejected one fashionable item after another and then bitterly proclaimed, "I can’t wear these – they’re too young for me. Besides, men don't look at women our age anymore." I was quite taken aback…

For my 14th birthday, my mother gave me a copy of Sue Townsend’s “Adrian Mole Aged 11 3/4” – a humorous children’s book. In it, she wrote “To our daughter – a female Peter Pan.” I was thrilled. I have always acted in a semi-juvenile fashion. That is to say, I laugh a lot at everything (and no doubt irritate many people while I do so). I can’t help it. I just happen to see the ridiculous in ordinary situations…