How do you feel about getting older? Research shows that thinking positively about aging may help you improve your health – and even help you live longer.
Anne Steffen, a professor of clinical psychology and gerontology at the University of Missouri - St. Louis tells KMOX that it’s easy to feel bleak about getting older – we live in a society that has a lot of negative stereotypes about aging.
“What we know about ageism is that it intersects with all of our other societal -isms in important ways,” Steffen said. “So the intersection of age and gender, age and race and ethnicity, and social class is something that we really have to pay attention to.”
So where does all this ageism come from? In part, Steffen said, it can be learned from parents or other family members and the way they talk about their own aging. But it can also come from other places in our communities.
“You go to any grocery store or drugstore and look at birthday cards, and some of the terrible, terrible messages about aging – that are still perpetuated and considered funny – on birthday cards,” Steffan said. “If we had cards on any other topic in society that were as negative and as terrible, we wouldn’t support them in the way we support that.”
It’s not just birthday cards – it’s late night talk shows, discussions about political candidates, and more. Plus, Steffan said, these media representations never talk about the positive aspects of aging, like being more aware of news, having an overall more positive mood, and overall better mental health than younger adults, due to a lifetime of accruing resilience.
Most of the time, thinking about aging comes with underlying death anxiety. But Steffan said that anxiety is much more common with younger people.
“People die at all ages. As a matter of fact, older adults are less anxious about death than younger adults are,” Steffan said. “Because they have more experience and understand death to be a part of the state of living.”
For the younger population that is often anxious about aging, Steffan said there’s a lot of research going on right now.
“What we know across the various decades of life is that individuals who have more positive views of aging, in fact, have better health behaviors and live longer,” she said. “So there’s something about internalizing negative messages about aging that leads people to then live lives that end up being shortened due to health concerns.”
Hear more from professor Anne Steffan about how to think positively about getting older:
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