One of the nice things about getting "older" — however you define it — is that you learn how to handle stress more wisely. One of the unpleasant things about getting older is that life gives you more reasons to be stressed. Retirement uncertainties. Aging parents. Creaking bodies with a list of injuries that sideline the very activities that kept you sane.

But here's the part that you should pay some heed: the stress you don't even notice but that starts leaking out in the wrong ways to people who deserve better from you. I speak from personal experience.

My 10-year-old daughter recently asked me the same question three times in two weeks: "Papa, are you stressed?"

She noticed what I couldn't see in myself — the small behavioral signals that stress was leaking out sideways. I wasn't yelling or punching walls. I was just ... different. Shorter-fused. Less present. The kind of changes that register on a perceptive child. Which is actually a redundant phrase. Children are tuning forks. They register emotions you don't even know you're broadcasting.

When I finally sat down with her to figure out what she was picking up on, the answer surprised me. It wasn't work or bills. The problem was simpler and more insidious: I'd had shoulder surgery in May and couldn't exercise for months.

This matters more than you might think, especially as we age. For many of us past 50, physical activity isn't just about staying fit or losing weight. It's our emotional exhaust system. A hard workout, a long swim, a sweaty tennis match. Even a long, vigorous walk — these are not luxuries. They're how we metabolize the daily accumulation of worry, frustration and free-floating anxiety about a world that often feels like it's unraveling faster than our ability to process the devolutions.

When injury or surgery takes that outlet away — as it increasingly does as our bodies demand more maintenance — we often don't have a Plan B. The stress doesn't disappear. It just finds other exits, usually ones that hurt the people around us.

Sitting on that couch with my daughter, I realized something crucial: The sources of my stress hadn't changed, but my ability to regularly purge that stress had. Without my usual physical outlets, emotional pressure was building like liquid in a blister with nowhere to go.

My daughter was absorbing the stress leaking out of me. She said the house even smelled like stress. Geez.

There was a second revelation during that couch conversation. Sitting on a table nearby was my personal journal, which I realized I hadn't written in for weeks, maybe months. Anyone who journals knows its power for managing stress. Writing out your thoughts — the real, messy, unfiltered ones — is profoundly therapeutic. It's a way to externalize what's swirling internally, to see your worries on paper where they look less overwhelming and more manageable.

Both habits had fallen away, as habits do when life gets busy or bodies get hurt. And their absence left me without the two primary tools I'd used for decades to keep my emotional house in order.

So I made my daughter a promise.

I'd start exercising again in whatever modified way I could, and I'd resume daily journaling. The next morning, seconds after waking, she asked me, "Did you write in your journal?" Yes, I told her. I'd set my alarm for 6:30, made coffee and written. Not because I'm a morning person — I'm emphatically not — but because I was finally doing my job of managing my own stress before it managed me.

Staying emotionally solvent

We're often dealing with injuries that limit our movement precisely when we need movement most to handle everything else on our plates. We're too busy managing aging parents or financial anxieties to maintain the simple daily practices, like moving our bodies and writing out our unexamined thoughts, that keep us emotionally solvent.

The solution isn't complicated, but it is necessary to avoid hurting those closest to you. If you can't do your usual workout, walk. Do pushups or chair squats. Swim if you can. Anything. And start writing even one or two sentences a day, preferably with an actual pen on actual paper. You'll be astounded at the return on investment.

Because if my 10-year-old could notice I wasn't OK before I did, maybe someone in your life is noticing the same thing about you.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Bookblock at Unsplash