Feeling younger than your age may be good for your health

A study published in Psychological Science in April reported that, over time, adults have been feeling younger, and younger than those of the same chronological age in the past, even when accounting for other factors that could influence subjective age such as chronic illness, loneliness and education level.

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Wettstein and his colleagues analysed data from the ongoing German Ageing Survey, which started in 1996, and tracked 14,928 German adults between 40 and 85 years old across 24 years.

The participants felt, on average, 11.5 per cent younger than their chronological age. For example, a 60-year-old would feel more like they were in their early 50s.

People born more recently felt even younger. Every decade that passed conferred an approximately 2 per cent younger subjective age.

For example, a 60-year-old born in 1936 would feel more like 53 years old, or only about 12 per cent younger. But a 60-year-old born in 1956 – two decades later – would feel like they were 50 years old, or about 17 per cent younger.

And, as they got older, their subjective age did not increase as much as their peers born more distantly in the past.

Hoffman, who was not involved in the study, calls the data “very clear and quite amazing”.

The researchers called it the “subjective rejuvenation” effect and say it held up even in very old age, which was a surprising finding because this period is associated with greater vulnerability and mortality.

The finding that people may generally be feeling younger can be seen as positive because it is associated with greater well-being, healthier lives and lower rates of mortality. (There can be, as always, too much of a good thing: a younger subjective age was associated with more risky pandemic behaviours, possibly because people felt more of that invincibility of youth.)

Researchers are not sure what is causing the trend of feeling younger.

One reason could be that a younger subjective age reflects having more resources than stress, Hoffman says. With overall improved health, higher life expectancy and better resources available today than in decades past, people may feel more youthful.

Feeling younger may be because of ageism

There could also be a less positive possible explanation for this recent shift toward a more youthful state of mind: ageism.

People could be feeling younger because “they don’t want to belong to the group of older adults,” Wettstein says. “So, it’s a kind of psychological distancing oneself from the older adults.”

If our views of old age have become more negative over time – one study showed that age stereotypes in American print media have become more negative over the last 200 years – feeling younger may be a coping mechanism against ageism and ageing.

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The research also found a pronounced gender gap. Women reported feeling younger than men of the same age, a gap that has only widened in recent years, which may explain some of the trends in youthful feeling: women generally live longer and feel healthier than men, but they are also subject to greater societal scrutiny just for getting older.

“There’s this double standard of ageing,” Wettstein says. “Age stereotypes about women are somehow more negative than about men. Older women are even more underrepresented in the media than men and also more negatively represented.”

The research found an education gap, too, though it is a smaller one. People with more education had younger subjective ages than those with lower levels of education, but this gap is shrinking.

Wettstein, however, says we need to be careful about projecting trends into the future. Life expectancy may not continue to climb and neither may ageism in society.

The study had other caveats. The data set had relatively fewer centenarians and most of the subjective age research focused on people living in what are known as “WEIRD” countries – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic.

How people feel about their age and ageing may have cultural influences. Studies have suggested that historically, Eastern countries such as Japan, China and South Korea may have had more acceptance of old age, and subjective ages were closer to chronological ones. “If you were old, it was permissible to feel your age,” Hoffman says. In the past decade, though, this may also have shifted, he says.

How to feel younger but also accept getting older

Our subjective age is not only a marker of ageing but also a state of mind, and mood seemed to influence people’s subjective age, at least in the short term. A study found that if you make adults feel sad, by giving them sad readings or music, they feel older afterward. The opposite could be true, too. Another study found that older adults who were given positive feedback on a memory test and told that they performed well compared with others their age tended to feel younger afterward. They also performed better on a subsequent test.

Physical activity and stress reduction also have a positive long-term effect on subjective age, Wettstein says.

Poetically, correcting ageist attitudes may also help people feel younger because ageism may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In one recent study, Hoffman and his colleagues asked 134 older adults to keep a daily diary about their subjective age, ageist attitudes (For example: “Older people shouldn’t even try to act cool”) and depressive symptoms. Participants who felt older and held more ageist attitudes were more likely to have depressive symptoms on a day-to-day basis. “If you think very [badly] about old age, if you have negative age stereotypes, you also tend to feel older,” Wettstein says.

Education programs correcting age stereotypes such as the notion that older adults are inherently more forgetful, show promise for improving attitudes toward ageing, Wettstein says.

Part of a healthy ageing journey may also lie in adjusting and managing expectations and not pitting our 60-year-old selves against someone in their 20s, Wettstein says. He points to the well-being paradox, where people tend to think older and ageing adults would have lower well-being than younger adults. “But actually, we see that older adults do not have a lower well-being than younger adults,” Wettstein says. “This is resilience.”

This story originally appeared in The Washington Post.

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