It’s your choice: You can change your views of aging and improve your life
People’s beliefs about aging have a profound impact on their health, influencing everything from their memory and sensory perceptions to how well they walk, how fully they recover from disabling illness and how long they live.
When aging is seen as a negative experience (characterized by terms such as decrepit, incompetent, dependent and senile), individuals tend to experience more stress in later life and engage less often in healthy behaviors such as exercise.
When views are positive (signaled by words such as wise, alert, accomplished and creative), people are more likely to be active and resilient and to have a stronger will to live.
These internalized beliefs about aging are mostly unconscious, formed from early childhood on as we absorb messages about growing old from TV, movies, books, advertisements and other forms of popular culture. They vary by individual, and they’re distinct from prejudice and discrimination against older adults in the social sphere.
More than 400 scientific studies have demonstrated the impact of individuals’ beliefs about aging. Now, the question is whether people can alter these largely unrecognized assumptions about growing older and assume more control over them.
In her new book, “Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live,” Becca Levy of Yale University, a leading expert on this topic, argues we can.
“With the right mindset and tools, we can change
our age beliefs,” she asserts in the book’s introduction.
Levy, a professor of psychology and epidemiology, has demonstrated in multiple studies that exposing people to positive descriptions of aging can improve their memory, gait, balance and will to live. All of us have an “extraordinary opportunity to rethink what it means to grow old,” she writes. Recently, I asked Levy to describe what people can do to modify beliefs about aging. Our conversation,
below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
: How important are age beliefs, compared with other factors that affect aging?
A
: In an early study, we found that people with positive age beliefs lived longer — a median of 7.5 additional years — compared with those with negative beliefs. Compared with other factors that contribute to longevity, age beliefs
had a greater impact than high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity and smoking.
Q
: You suggest that age beliefs can be changed. How?
A
: That’s one of the hopeful messages of my research. Even in a culture like ours, where age beliefs tend to be predominantly negative, there is a whole range of responses to aging. What we’ve
shown is it’s possible to activate and strengthen positive age beliefs that people have assimilated in different types of ways.
Q
: What strategies do you suggest?
A
: The first thing we can do is promote awareness of what our own age beliefs are.
A simple way is to ask yourself, “When you think of an older person, what are the first five words or
phrases that come to mind?” Noticing which beliefs are generated quickly can be an important first step in awareness.
Q
: What else can people do to increase awareness?
A
: Another powerful technique is something I call “age belief journaling.” That involves writing down any portrayal of aging that comes up over