How our views of ageing determine our futures

It was 20 years ago that American researcher Dr Becca Levy said if a previously unidentified virus were found to diminish life expectancy by more than seven years, considerable effort would be devoted to identifying the cause and implementing a remedy.

That hit home when I read it recently because I have spent the past few years worrying about how a virus would impact my older parents. But Levy wasn’t talking about THAT virus. Levy – a professor of epidemiology at Yale University – was talking about Self Perceptions of Ageing (or SPA), or what we think about how we will grow old. If our views are mostly negative, this “virus” can be toxic, impact our quality of life and shorten our lives. Levy’s research revealed that having positive beliefs around ageing can increase our life span by seven and a half years.

Our views of ageing are a dynamic layering of experiences gathered over our lifetime. Some cultures revere their elders, while in many cultures we see older people portrayed as cranky or helpless. We internalise many anti-ageing and youth-obsessed messages where age is shown as something to fight against or camouflage or correct.

These negative internalised beliefs can be unsettling as older adults often feel the same on the inside, even when there are obvious signs of ageing on the outside, such as wrinkles and grey and thinning hair. We often don’t feel offended when we first encounter ageist messages as we are not yet aged, but we do internalise these messages. They only affect us personally as we inevitably (or hopefully) grow older  and become part of this stereotyped and misrepresented demographic.

Such stereotyping can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are well-known  examples of how the stereotyping of specific groups significantly affects outcomes – for example, girls are no good at maths or men are not suited to caring for children. You expose people to frail, lonely and unhealthy elderly stereotypes and they believe them, internalise them and become them. When we think negatively about our own ageing, it directly impacts our health outcomes as we are more likely to be lonely, anxious and depressed, see declines in stability, handwriting, memory and self-efficacy. We are less likely to seek out medical care.

As we grow older our social milieu can influence our awareness of age-related change, as our peers can be the yardstick by which we judge our own ageing. When it comes to our views of ageing, we are the company we keep – one person’s perspectives can predict the mental and physical health of their partner and inner circle over time. Research into the dynamic reciprocal exchange with our peers is critical as it could help us determine how influencing one person’s perceptions of ageing may affect the health and well-being of others around them.

The narrative around ageing needs to change at the societal and individual level. As a predictor of physical and psychological health outcomes, subjective age matters more than chronological age in our second half of life. We need to learn more to feel comfortable about growing older, which would help reframe the narrative so ageing does not equal decline.