Pessimistic aging attitudes can age you Research shows it’s your choice: You can change your views of aging and improve your life wise, alert, accomplished and creative), people are more likely to be active People’s beliefs about ag- and resilient and to have ing have a profound impact a stronger will to live. These internalized beon their health, influencing everything from their mem- liefs about aging are mostly unconscious, formed ory and sensory perceptions to how well they walk, from early childhood on as how fully they recover from we absorb messages about growing old from TV, disabling illness, and how movies, books, advertiselong they live. ments, and other forms of When aging is seen as a negative experience (char- popular culture. More than 400 scientific acterized by terms such as studies have demonstrated decrepit, incompetent, dethe impact of individuals’ pendent and senile), indibeliefs about aging. Now, viduals tend to experience more stress in later life and the question is whether engage less often in healthy people can alter these behaviors such as exercise. largely unrecognized assumptions about growing When views are positive (signaled by words such as older and assume more
By JUDITH GRAHAM KAISER HEALTH NEWS
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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. 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
GOLDEN TIMES
can do to modify beliefs hopeful messages of my about aging. research. Even in a culture Q: How important are like ours, where age beliefs age beliefs, compared tend to be predominantly with other factors negative, there is that affect aging? a whole range of A: In an early responses to aging. study, we found that What we’ve shown is people with positive it’s possible to actiage beliefs lived lonvate and strengthen ger — a median of positive age beliefs 7.5 additional years that people have as— compared with similated in differLevy those with negative ent types of ways. beliefs. Compared with Q: What strategies do other factors that contribute you suggest? to longevity, age beliefs had A: The first thing we a greater impact than high can do is promote awarecholesterol, high blood pres- ness of what our own age sure, obesity and smoking. beliefs are. Q: You suggest age beA simple way is to ask liefs can be changed. How? yourself, “When you think A: That’s one of the 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. Another powerful technique is something I call “age belief journaling.” That involves writing down any portrayal of aging that comes up over a week. It could be a conversation you overhear in a coffee shop or something on social media or on your favorite show on Netflix. If there is an absence of older people, write that down, too. At the end of the week, tally up the number of positive and negative portrayals and the number of times old people are absent from conversations. With the negative descriptions, take a moment and think, “Could there be a different way of portraying that person?” Q: What comes next? A: Becoming aware of how ageism and age beliefs are operating in society. Shift the blame to T U E S D A Y, M A Y 3 , 2 0 2 2
