By Marty Munson | Men’s Health
In graduate school at Harvard, Becca Levy visited Japan and wondered whether the reason people there had the longest lifespans in the world might have to do with their more positive beliefs about aging. They treat aging as something vital to enjoy, and even have a holiday whose name translates to Respect for the Aged Day. Americans, meanwhile, have a diet of TV shows and memes that link aging with uselessness, weakness, and decrepitude. Levy started wondering just how much your beliefs about aging matter in whether your life will be long and healthy.
As a psychology professor at the Yale School of Public Health, she started studying it. What she found surprised even her: People with the most positive perceptions of aging lived an average of seven and a half years longer than those who had more negative beliefs about it. For real: Those who thought about aging in terms of concepts like “vital” and “wise” outlived those who associated it with ideas like “decrepit” or “less useful.” This longevity advantage was found even after factoring in the effects of gender, socioeconomic status, age, loneliness, and baseline health.
Other studies of Levy’s found that people who had taken in more positive age beliefs from their cultures also performed better physically and mentally. “I think one of the hopeful messages of the research is that ageism can take a toll, but beliefs aren’t set in stone.” Her team has evidence that age beliefs can be changed. In fact, even ten minutes of exposure to positive or negative messaging can change how older people perform on memory tasks in a lab.
