Your aging mindset can add years to your life

Can your beliefs about aging affect your longevity?

“Mind over matter.”
“The power of positive thinking.”
“Speak it into existence.” 

You've heard some version of these mindset mantras your whole life, usually from someone who is about to sell you something.

Me? I'm a procedures doctor. I like things I can measure, biopsy, or graph. At any longevity conference, I'm reliably the least woo-woo person in the room.

So it says something that two studies about what people believe about aging have been rattling around my head for months.

The study that started it

In 1975, researchers asked 660 residents of a small Ohio town how they felt about getting older. Do things keep getting worse as you age? Are older people less useful? Everyone in that study was 50 or older when they answered.

Decades later, Becca Levy at Yale matched those surveys against national death records. The people who held positive views about aging lived 7.5 years longer than the people who had absorbed the negative ones, even after adjusting for their actual health, their income, and how lonely they were.

Seven and a half years. That's bigger than anything that sits in my medicine cabinet, and believe me, I tried to wave it away.

The study that really got me

Levy's team then followed 4,765 adults who were dementia-free at the start of the study. Over four years, dementia developed in 2.6% of those with positive age beliefs and 4.6% of those with negative ones.

Then they looked at the participants carrying APOE ε4, the strongest genetic risk factor we know of for Alzheimer's. Among those carriers, the ones with positive age beliefs were about 50% less likely to develop dementia than carriers with negative beliefs.

Same gene. Different outcome.

Why this isn't a manifesting pitch

What changed my mind wasn't the vibes, it was the mechanism.

We absorb ideas about aging from culture starting in childhood, long before they apply to us, and then we quietly live inside them. Those beliefs become concrete behavior. The woman who assumes decline is inevitable skips the physical therapy, because what would be the point? The woman who assumes she can still improve does the exercises, asks for the referral, and books the DEXA. Twenty years of that adds up. There's also experimental work showing that exposure to negative age stereotypes raises the cardiovascular stress response, so we're talking about behavior and physiology, not wishful thinking.

These are observational studies, so they show relationships rather than proving cause. But the pattern has held across decades, and unlike your genes, your beliefs are something you can change.

One line I don't want lost: this is not permission to explain away symptoms. If your memory has genuinely changed, get evaluated. "It's just my age" is a story, not a diagnosis.

How to HOP to it

Catch the phrase. For one week, count how many times you say "at my age." Don't fix it, just count it. The number surprises most women.

Audit your inputs. If your whole feed is about erasing the evidence that you've been alive a while, you're marinating in a message about your own future. Go follow some women in their seventies who are busy doing things.

Collect counter-evidence. The friend who got stronger at 62. The aunt who learned Italian at 70. Your brain believes what you repeatedly show it.

The bottom line

Whether you're 42 and just starting to hear "at your age" or 72 and have been hearing it for decades, these beliefs were learned, which means they aren't fixed.

I still think the training and the protocols matter. But if something you picked up in childhood is worth seven and a half years, it deserves the same attention you give your supplements.

Now, HOP to it!

Dr. Amy Killen & the HOP Team

P.S. September is Healthy Aging Month. Consider this your permission slip to stop apologizing for your birthday.

References

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Kunkel, S. R., & Kasl, S. V. (2002). Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(2), 261–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.2.261

Levy BR, Slade MD, Pietrzak RH, Ferrucci L (2018) Positive age beliefs protect against dementia even among elders with high-risk gene. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0191004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191004