Don’t be unconvinced: People who feel young are really younger

People who feel younger are generally healthier, have better memory, and even have a lower risk of death.

Stills from the variety show "Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves"

Author | Chen Tianzhen

Editor | Gao Peiwen

Recently, the show Sisters Riding the Wind and Waves has been a hit. The female stars who are over 30 years old and participated in the show have shown the unique charm of mature middle-aged women who are independent and strive to surpass themselves. Although there have been many controversies, more people have been inspired by the sisters and shouted "I am no longer afraid of getting old." At a time when the whole society is full of anxiety and prejudice about age, this show naturally makes people think: What is age? 01

Your subjective age is more important

We intuitively know that torn calendars and blown-out birthday candles record our age, and the passage of time naturally gives us a label - "chronological age", which is also the socially recognized age shown on our ID cards and all documents. Biologists, on the other hand, value a person's "biological age". From a physiological point of view, aging is the decline of the body's internal physiological functions: cells in organs gradually age as the body grows, and eventually stop dividing, go to apoptosis, or mutate and cause cancer. By measuring some age-related biological indicators, such as a person's blood pressure, weight, and skin firmness, his "biological age" can be determined. It is more objective than chronological age. If a person maintains a healthy lifestyle, lives in a good environment, or is lucky enough to have better genetic material, then his biological age will often be younger, that is, "younger" than chronological age. In addition, there is another age, "subjective age", which is the age a person thinks he is, and it represents a person's perception of his own age. For example, young people sometimes think they are "older", while after the age of 25, most people feel younger.
Scientists have found that a person's "subjective age" also affects his or her aging level (corresponding to "biological age"): those who feel younger are usually healthier, have better memory, and even have a lower risk of death. In any case, those torn calendar papers and blown-out birthday candles are not enough to reflect all the facts about age.

02

Can mental power affect the body?

Can our subjective mind really affect our objective body? To a certain extent, it is true.
In 1979, psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a bold experiment, asking a group of people in their 70s and 80s to go back 20 years. She and her students carefully renovated an old monastery in New Hampshire, USA, back to the way it was 20 years ago, in 1959, when an IBM computer was large enough to fill the entire room. Over the next week, the elderly people invited to participate in the experiment will spend time here according to the lifestyle of 1959.
Langer and his students come to talk to the elderly every day about "current events": the United States launched the first satellite, and Fidel Castro led the army to sweep across Cuba and enter the capital Havana. They talked about popular books, watched celebrity TV shows of the time on black and white TVs, listened to pop music of that era on the radio, and watched the movie "Some Like It Hot" starring Marilyn Monroe... All these settings made the elderly seem to have returned to 1959, when they were younger and healthier. At the same time, the experiment set up a control group, and the elderly in the control group also underwent a week of recuperation. The difference was that they were told that all this was just to reminisce about the past, and they did not need to live as if they were in 1959 like the experimental group.

After a week of sensory and conscious immersion, Langer found that the memory, vision, hearing, and even physical strength of the elderly in the "immersion group" had improved. Before and after the experiment, they also took photos of the two groups of elderly people and asked people who were unaware of the experiment to evaluate the photos. The results showed that people generally believed that the elderly in the "immersion group" looked younger. When the minds of the elderly were brought back to their youth, their bodies also returned to an earlier era! Langer's experiment provides an interesting proof: the chronological age calculated based on the date of birth may mislead our understanding of aging. People may be able to influence the body and slow down aging through the power of the mind.
03

Feel younger and have better health indicators

Everyone perceives their age very differently. If chronological age is seen as a scale of time, then subjective age is more like a spectrum that can be spread out. The gap between subjective age and chronological age will continue to evolve throughout a person's life. Research data shows that most children and adolescents feel that they are a few years older than their chronological age. But starting around the age of 25, the situation begins to change, and the increase in subjective age begins to lag behind chronological age. And as you get older, this perception gap will get bigger and bigger. When a person is 50 years old, he may feel that he is 5 years younger than his chronological age, which is about 10%, and when he is 70 years old, this deviation may reach 15%-20%. It's like the subjective age is increasing according to Martian time. Ten years have passed on Earth, but only 5.3 years have passed on Mars. More importantly, all this is not just a perception level. The subjective perception of age is closely related to the health of the body.
Yannick Stephan, a psychologist at the University of Montpellier in France, followed up data on more than 17,000 middle-aged and elderly subjects and found that about 80% of people felt younger than their chronological age, and no more than 10% felt they were even older. The corresponding reality is that those whose subjective age was 8 to 13 years older than their chronological age had an 18 to 25% higher risk of death during the study period, and they were also more likely to suffer from diseases, and these figures have eliminated the influence of demographic factors such as education, race and marital status. Antonio Terracciano, a psychologist and gerontologist at Florida State University, found that subjective age is related to some physiological indicators of aging, such as grip strength, walking speed, lung capacity, and even the level of C-reactive protein in the blood that reflects inflammation in the body. The younger you feel, the better these physiological indicators of age and health are: you will walk faster and lighter, your lung capacity and grip strength will be greater, and inflammation will be less.

In addition, subjective age also affects cognition and can be used as an indicator to predict the likelihood of developing dementia. After a four-year follow-up survey of 5,748 people aged 65 and above, the researchers found that those subjects with a higher subjective age were also more likely to suffer from cognitive impairment and even dementia. A common view of aging is that as people age, they become softer, less extroverted, and no longer open to trying new experiences. However, the study found that there is a link between subjective age and personality. These aging-related personality changes are less obvious in people with younger subjective ages and more obvious in people with older subjective ages. Interestingly, a younger subjective age does not mean that a person will indulge in a state of eternal immaturity. On the contrary, they seem to have both the wisdom brought by life experience and the vitality of a younger body.
04

Age is just a number

It’s important to note that most of the above research on subjective age is based on correlation only—there is indeed a link between people’s self-perception of aging and their health status, but it cannot determine causality.
It is not clear whether feeling younger makes people healthier, or whether those who are in better health feel younger. To a large extent, the link between subjective age and physical and psychological conditions may be bidirectional: if a person is forgetful, depressed, and physically frail, he or she may feel older. The result may be a vicious cycle, with psychological and physiological factors working together to make a person feel older and in worse health, which in turn makes people feel older and frailer.

However, subjective age is undoubtedly a powerful indicator of health. Doctors can get a good idea of ​​a patient's physical condition by simply asking them how old they feel. In this respect, subjective age is even more accurate than chronological age. So what makes subjective age so predictive? Why do people form a subjective age? Some psychologists believe that people have an intuitive understanding of their physical abilities, mental state and emotional stability, all of which is distilled into a meaningful number - our subjective age. But others point out that how we deal with aging has a lot to do with our views on aging, which are often reinforced by culture and society. When people around you have expectations of you, you will always try to meet these expectations consciously or unconsciously. The reason why people perceive a younger subjective age may just be a self-defense to protect themselves from the negative stereotypes of old age in society.
Psychologist Anna Kornadt hypothesized that people's subjective age might be multifaceted and vary in different areas. Based on this idea, she investigated the gap between subjective age and chronological age when people are in different areas of life. The result is almost unanimous that in areas where negative stereotypes about old age are common, such as work, health and finance, people subjectively perceive themselves to be younger. By imagining themselves to be younger, people protect themselves from negative views about old age, worry less about their performance at work, and envision the future with a more positive perspective. Let's imagine that if society did not have so many negative evaluations of old age, would people still need to say, "I feel younger than I actually am"? David Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, conducted research on this issue and found that in cultures where the wisdom and experience of the elderly are more respected, people do not even understand the concept of subjective age. When they were doing research in Jordan, an old man replied, "I am 80 years old, and I don't understand what you mean by "How old do I feel?"

05

In an aging society, how do we face aging?

Most of us are slaves to our chronological age, hoping to do the "right things" at the "right age". But aging itself is a very complex phenomenon. Whether physiologically or mentally, a person's age is difficult to measure simply with a single number. On the contrary, the chronological age written on your ID card is really just a number. Although scientists have different opinions, it is certain that each of us is aging in different ways, and to a certain extent, we can indeed control our age. Healthy living habits and a positive and optimistic attitude can help slow down aging. So the next time you are troubled by your chronological age, you might as well ask yourself: Does this trouble come from aging itself, or from the constraints of subjective cognition?
However, it may be more important that we not only see the losses brought by aging, but also recognize the benefits of aging. Gerontologist Tracey Gendron said that we need to ask ourselves a question: when we talk about subjective age, are we fueling the saying that "old age means decay"? Old age is actually a time in life worth looking forward to. When you reach old age, you can return to yourself more, enjoy life, be more calm and peaceful, and be more satisfied and happy. We live in an aging society, and even the whole world is getting older. At the same time, each of us is aging irreversibly. Perhaps when everyone can calmly say their age and celebrate it, that would be a more ideal and better situation.

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  References[1]http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/why-you-cant-help-but-act-your-age
  [2]https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180712-the-age-you-feel-means-more-than-your-actual-birthdate[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/well/mind/age-subjective-feeling-old.html#:~:text=Most%20of%20the%20resear ch%20on%20subjective%20age%20is,who%20are%20already%20healthy%20tend%20to%20feel%20younger.[4]https://insig hts.ovid.com/psychosomatic-medicine/psme/2018/09/000/subjective-age-mortality-three-longitudinal/9/00006842