There’s an old saying: “You’re as young as you feel.” And psychologists even have a word for that. They call it subjective age.
There’s some truth to that age as well. Research shows that subjective age is a good predictor of physical and psychological well-being. Those who feel younger are generally in better health, while those who feel older than they really are generally suffer from worse health.
Subjective age bias can also be a form of social comparison. We compare ourselves to others that are similar to us to judge our standing in society. For example, a 60-year-old who still feels and looks like she’s 50 can boost her self-esteem by comparing herself to others her de ella age de ella. This leads her to think: “They’re old, but not me.”
People vary widely on many different traits. It’s probably always been the case that some people have felt younger than their age. Likewise, there would have been those that felt older than their age.
However, as Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) psychologist Markus Wettstein and his colleagues point out in an article they recently published in the journal Psychological Science, there’s some evidence to suggest that older people nowadays are feeling younger than ever.
Feeling Younger Than Ever
For this study, the researchers analyzed data collected from nearly 15,000 German men and women aged 40-85. These data had been collected as part of a larger study on aging in Germany. The results showed that at each birth year, there was a fairly wide range of subjective ages. That is to say, some people feel younger than they are, others feel older, and others still feel their actual age. This is just what the researchers were expecting; this finding was no surprise.
The Keys to a Youthful Old Age
Why are older people nowadays feeling younger than ever before? Wettstein and his colleagues considered several possibilities. One explanation, as we’ve already pointed out, has to do with age discrimination. Modern society is enthralled with youth. Especially for older adults who don’t look their age, there may be the temptation to pass themselves off as younger than they really are.
As the researchers point out, there’s a trade-off in acting younger than your age, in that you may avoid age discrimination. But at the same time, you can lose out on valuable social interactions with your age peers, who, after all, you likely have more in common with.
However, another explanation is that older people today are healthier on average than those of the same age in previous decades. One important reason is that very few people smoke nowadays compared to the past, and that alone has had a big impact on overall health. Another reason is that we have much better healthcare, leading to a considerable increase in life expectancy over the last century.
The researchers were surprised by one aspect of the data, though. Specifically, they’d expected people in their late senior years to have little or no subjective age bias. This is because of a phenomenon known as manufactured survival, in which people in poor health have extended lifespans due to medical interventions even though their quality of life is not good.
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