Feeling old? It’s all in the mind

You get old, and everything starts breaking down, right?  Well, no, ageing has more to do with the way we think about it, and our attitude determines just how much we decline.

A new study has discovered that nearly half of people over the age of 65 saw their cognitive or physical abilities improve, when they should have been declining—and much of it is down to their attitudes towards ageing, says Becca Levy at Yale School of Public Health.

Her team tracked the health of 11,314 people, aged around 65 years, who were tested for their cognitive and physical abilities, and especially their walking speed.  At the end of the 12-year study, 32 percent reported improved cognitive abilities, and 28 percent were physically stronger.

This ratio would have risen to more than 50 percent of over-65s not being affected by ageing if those who had neither improved nor declined had been included in the final results, Levy said.

The findings—which involved participants in the US government’s Health and Retirement Study—seem to go against everything we expect should happen as we get older, and that could be the point, says Levy.  Older people with more positive beliefs around ageing were much more likely to see an improvement in their physical or cognitive abilities as they got older.

By contrast, earlier studies by Levy and her team demonstrated that people with negative feelings about getting older had poorer memories, walked slower, and had more biomarkers that suggested a higher risk of heart problems and Alzheimer’s disease.  These negative feelings also shrank the brain’s hippocampus—which controls memory—and the region was three times larger in those who remained positive as they got older.

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