Does refusing to act your age delay aging?

In a UK study, researchers found "people who thought old age began earlier were more likely to have had a heart attack, to be suffering from heart disease or be in poor physical health generally when they were followed up six to nine years later."

Becca Levy of The Yale School of Public Health "followed more than a thousand people who were at least 50 at the time. She found that people who had positive ideas about their own ageing (who agreed with comments such as "I have as much pep as last year" and who disagreed that as you get older you get less useful) lived for an average of 22.6 years after they first participated in the study, while the people who felt less positively about ageing lived for just 15 years more on average."

Claudia Hammond writing for BBC Future suggests "People who think old age starts later in life may be more conscious about their health and fitness and therefore take active steps to stay in better shape. They think they are younger and so behave in younger ways, creating a virtuous circle."

Stripping Away

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace. 

Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

The Key to happiness in our later years

Each of us has something like a “Happiness 401(k)” that we invest in when we are young, and that we get to enjoy when we are old. And just as financial planners advise their clients to engage in specific behaviors—make your saving automatic; think twice before buying that boat—we can all teach ourselves to do some very specific things at any age to make our last decades much, much happier.

According to a Harvard study, the single most important trait of happy-well elders is healthy relationships. As Robert Waldinger, who directs the study, told me in an email, “Well-being can be built—and the best building blocks are good, warm relationships.” 

Arthur C. Brooks, writing in The Atlantic

Why a Positive Attitude about Aging is Important

Our age beliefs can have a direct effect on our physiology. Elderly people who have been primed with negative age stereotypes tend to have higher systolic blood pressure in response to challenges, while those who have seen positive stereotypes demonstrate a more muted reaction. This makes sense: if you believe that you are frail and helpless, small difficulties will start to feel more threatening. Over the long term, this heightened stress response increases levels of the hormone cortisol and bodily inflammation, which could both raise the risk of ill health.

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life

Think Yourself Young

According to a wealth of research that now spans five decades people who see the ageing process as a potential for personal growth tend to enjoy much better health into their 70s, 80s and 90s than people who associate aging with helplessness and decline, differences that are reflected in their cells’ biological aging and their overall life span.

“There’s just such a solid base of literature now,” says Prof Allyson Brothers at Colorado State University. “There are different labs in different countries using different measurements and different statistical approaches and yet the answer is always the same.”

Many people will endorse certain ageist beliefs, such as the idea that “old people are helpless”, long before they should have started experiencing age-related disability themselves. Those kinds of views, expressed in people’s mid-30s, can predict their subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease up to 38 years later. 

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life

How your Attitude about Age affects your health

Recent findings suggest that age beliefs may play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Tracking 4,765 participants over four years, the researchers found that positive expectations of ageing halved the risk of developing the disease, compared to those who saw old age as an inevitable period of decline. Astonishingly, this was even true of people who carried a harmful variant of the APOE gene, which is known to render people more susceptible to the disease. The positive mindset can counteract an inherited misfortune, protecting against the build-up of the toxic plaques and neuronal loss that characterise the disease. 

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life