Want to live a long and fulfilling life? Change how you think about getting old

Perry began her “so-called retirement" at 67, after 30 years as an art-history professor at the University of Delaware. She has since become the editor of a top journal in her field, delivered conference papers abroad and recently spent a year as a visiting professor at the National Gallery of Art. She’s also taking a three-year course in oil painting, eager to get a glimpse of her life’s passion from the artist’s side.

Not long ago I asked Perry how she felt about aging. “Well, I don’t have the option, so I’m trying to do it well," she answered with a laugh. Despite some aches and pains, she considers herself “incredibly lucky." Aging has freed her from trying to meet certain expectations, she explained. It has also deepened her friendships—which she says might be the best part of all.

My work has put me in touch with many older Americans like Perry, whose lives are rich with purpose and pleasure. They defy the assumptions held by too many people—young and old—that aging is only about illness and decline. It is a view that is doing far more harm than most of us realize.

Data is mounting, much of it from research by Yale epidemiologist Becca Levy, about the impact our attitudes and beliefs have on our health and longevity. Levy’s interest in the connection began in the 1990s, when she traveled to Japan to try to understand why the Japanese had the longest lifespan in the world. She was familiar with explanations that attributed this longevity to diet—Japanese people consume less meat, dairy products, sugar and potatoes than other wealthy countries. But what stood out to her was how the culture respected and celebrated older people.

“It struck me as very different to what I had observed in the U.S.," she told me. “So I began to wonder if these positive age beliefs could contribute to the longer lifespan in Japan."

Levy began examining data from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, a survey conducted from 1975 to 1995 that included views on aging. Comparing early attitudes with death records, Levy found a striking correlation: People who had reported positive age beliefs early on lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those who had more negative beliefs. The advantage held even after controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and health.

In a 2016 analysis of decades of neurological data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, Levy saw that healthy, dementia-free people who held more negative stereotypes about aging in their youth went on to accumulate significantly more tangles and plaques and lost three times as much brain volume—all factors linked to Alzheimer’s. In another analysis of data spanning 1968 to 2007, Levy found that young people who associated aging with decline were more likely to experience a cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke, decades later.

Levy suggests the relationship between stereotypes and health can be explained by a number of factors, including stress. That is, negative stereotypes about aging can compound the stress people feel about getting older, which can affect our autonomic nervous system, which regulates our heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and respiration.

For example, in a 2000 study of older adults who had been subliminally primed to associate aging with decline, Levy found that subjects who had read a stream of words including “senile," “incompetent" and “dependent" immediately experienced a higher heart rate and blood pressure than participants who first read more upbeat words, including “learned," “sage" and “wise." In 2014, Levy found the reverse to be true, too: Participants who were subliminally primed with a list of positive age-stereotype words weekly for four weeks demonstrated more strength and better balance than those in the control group for the next three weeks.

Other studies have confirmed these findings. A global review of 422 papers from 45 countries measuring the relationship between ageism and health, published in the journal PLoS ONE in 2020, found that negative biases against aging were associated with worse health among older people in 95.5% of the studies.

What explains this link? Beyond the physiological effects of stress, there is some evidence that our expectations about growing older become self-fulfilling because they affect how we behave. For example, while a positive attitude about aging doesn’t take the place of exercise and eating well, a belief that we can live long and healthy lives often encourages people to invest in their future selves by taking more walks and eating more greens.

On the flip side, when we view health problems as inevitable, we’re more likely to see healthy behaviors as futile. Why take that Zumba class if you don’t believe it will make a real difference? This dynamic is seen in mental health, too: When older people believe that unhappiness comes with age, they are less likely to seek treatment for depression.

A positive view of aging needn’t be instinctive. It can be learned, even in our later years. The first step is becoming aware of our negative assumptions. Do a quick self-test: Write down the first five words that come to mind when you think of an older person. If your list becomes mired in the words researchers use to plant subliminal ageist beliefs—such as confused, decline, decrepit and dementia—it means you’ve internalized unhelpful ideas about getting older. It is both possible and valuable to broaden your vocabulary to include more constructive words, including accomplished, enlightened and mentor.

It is never too soon to begin dismantling these negative preconceptions. I started early with my own children, correcting them when they made an ageist comment. Now they are in their 20s, and when I asked them recently to write down the five words they associate with older people, their responses included experience, storyteller, comforting, heterogeneous and nostalgia. I smiled when they texted me their answers, because they bode well for the long and healthy lives I hope they’ll have.

It can also be helpful to actually spend more time with older adults. Our age-segregated culture makes it easy to dismiss older people as irrelevant or out of touch. By nurturing friendships that cut across generations and listening to stories accumulated over decades, it’s possible to forge new ideas and expectations for your own future.

Consider also making a list of older people you admire and why. I might put Jane Goodall, who at 90 has been fighting for wild chimpanzees and the environment for most of her life. I would also add my weekly exercise partner, Perry.

Perry’s stories about her latest adventures in painting and teaching have been a great distraction from the quiet burn of Pilates. They also demonstrate how to age with humor, curiosity and grace. By presuming her life should still have meaning, Perry makes sure that it does. It’s a lesson I plan to take with me into the next decades. My health might just depend on it.

Debra Whitman is executive vice president and chief public policy officer of AARP and the author of “The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond," published by W.W. Norton.