Fear of Getting Old Can Make You Age Faster

 Fear of Getting Old Can Make You Age Faster

A positive perspective on aging predicts better health and longer life

Your well-being later in life and even how long you live may depend on whether you fear getting older, or if you instead embrace aging and maintain a positive outlook about your future self. Mounting research suggests that the sooner you shun negative stereotypes about aging, the better chance you’ll have at good health and longevity.

A new study tackles a piece of this research puzzle, finding that dwelling on the prospects of aches, pains, and mental challenges that may (or may not) come with age presages those very outcomes. The self-fulfilling prophecy can be exacerbated by a reduced ability to handle stress, which can make physical and mental woes worse.

But the scenario is preventable.

“Better self-perceptions of aging are good for your health, regardless of how much stress you have, or how much stress you perceive you have,” says Dakota Witzel, lead author on the paper and a doctoral candidate at Oregon State University.

Learning to deal with stress, in turn, might improve your perceptions of aging, Witzel tells me, citing a separate study last year by a different research team.

Think positive, live longer

The new study is small and shows only a relationship between expectations, stress, and health — it doesn’t prove which might cause the other, the researchers note. And by no means does the research suggest we should ignore the ills that can come with age. But the findings align with other research revealing the importance of the brain-body connection, and how a positive outlook contributes to greater physical health and longer life:

Compared to serious pessimists, the most optimistic people live several years longer — 11% longer for men and 15% longer for women.

People with a family history of heart disease, but who have a positive outlook on life, are a third less likely to have a heart attack than the most negative people.

Individuals who feel younger than they are — a rather disconcerting but common mental dissociation that belies what a mirror reveals — tend to live longer.

Witzel and her colleagues drew from data on just 105 adults, ages 52 to 80, and heavily skewed to white women. The participants were surveyed daily for 100 days about their physical health, perceived level of stress, and self-perceptions of aging, with questions like whether they feel less useful as they get older.

People who took a dim view of their own aging on a given day felt higher levels of stress and reported nearly three times as many negative physical health symptoms, including things like headaches and fatigue, compared with those who felt more positive about growing older, the researchers report in a Journals of Gerontology publication.

The study did not examine any possible connection between these factors and longevity.

However, the suggestion that your perception of stress is an important indicator of health is supported by other research. Stress isn’t something that happens to us; it’s our emotional and mental response to things that happen or loom, and it has serious physical consequences in the near and long term. Stress raises the heart rate and releases powerful chemicals into the body. Left to fester, it raises the risk of heart attacks, depression, and numerous other diseases.

Stop with the negative stereotypes

Our perception of what age is “old” changes dramatically as we get older, and the age to which people say they’d like to live goes up and up with time. Some of the reasons for the moving goalposts become evident only after a good chunk of life is behind us.

For most people, life at 50 or 60 or even 70 is not as terrible as we were led to expect. While headlines abound over the risk of dementia, for example — and it is an awful disease — most people don’t experience any noticeable mental decline until their late sixties, if ever. While about 11% of people 65 and older have Alzheimer’s, by far the most common form of dementia, simple math paints a brighter picture: 89% apparently do not. Meanwhile, thanks to some experience and perspective and reduced responsibilities, people 65 and older are happier, on average, than the treadmillers of middle age.

The good life for seniors is hard to imagine when we’re young, of course.

In my thirties, I couldn’t fathom ever being 60. It seemed, you know, old. Today, on the threshold of that inconceivable age, 60 doesn’t seem nearly as ancient, and I have a pretty strong desire to hang around for a good long while and be healthy enough to enjoy my time here.

The new research suggests that regardless of your age now, you can bolster your mental and physical well-being by acknowledging and re-evaluating your perceptions of old people, by working to view aging in a positive light, rather than accepting and succumbing to the negative stereotypes.

“It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Witzel says.

The sooner you work to proactively alter how you perceive aging, the greater benefit you may experience.

“Stereotypes of aging are formed early in life, and then get reinforced throughout the lifespan,” explains Karen Hooker, Ph.D., Witzel’s co-author and an OSU professor who studies healthy aging. “We tend to have better memory for events and incidents that reinforce stereotypes that we already have — this is just how the brain works. Therefore, the earlier these types of negative ideas and stereotypes about aging can be eliminated or reduced, the better for your own old age.”

One way to improve your perception of aging is to imagine your “hoped-for positive self,” which can then motivate you to take on healthy behaviors to help you become that person, Hooker says. This value of positive thinking was borne out in an earlier study by Hooker and OSU doctoral student Shelbie Turner.

“How we think about who we’re going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be,” Turner said

D.G.Shastri

Courtesy: Medium