A negative attitude towards aging makes you age faster

I’m 56, going on 57, and starting to feel some of the physical effects of my advancing years. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that none of them are a barrel of laughs.

I’m also starting to subtly notice one of the other negative effects of aging, ageism. No one has openly insulted me yet, but I’m increasingly picking up hints that younger people see me as a bygone, a has-been, an old guy. If the evidence is to be believed, it will only get worse. In the United States, for example, a study of 1,915 adults aged 50 to 80 found that almost all of them routinely experienced age discrimination. Two-thirds of the group had regularly seen, heard or read old age stereotypes, which make jokes about old people. About half experienced ageism in their interactions with others, for example the assumption that they are hard of hearing, can’t use technology, don’t understand or remember things and need help when they don’t. The older people get, the more they encounter these prejudices.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was that the vast majority – over 80 per cent – had experienced a third form of ageism, “internalized ageism”, which means having negative expectations of our own mental and physical health as we get older. This is old age against yourself.

These three forms of ageism are extremely pervasive, at least in Western societies. All in all, only 6.5 percent of the people in the study had never experienced any of them. I suspect they were on the younger end of the demographic.

Ageism in any form is quite disturbing, but especially internalized ageism. In recent years, it has become clear that this form of ageism is in itself an amplifier of the aging process. According to Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, there is an “extensive body of … research” showing that people who hold negative beliefs about aging tend to age more poorly.

For example, a recent study led by researchers at Harvard University found that older people with the highest levels of positivity toward aging experienced slower physical, mental, and cognitive decline, ate better, and exercised more than those with the lowest levels—internalized ageism at work. And it wasn’t that people who were already aging poorly were more negative: people’s attitudes at the start of the study predicted their subsequent trajectories. The mechanism is not clear, but the take-home message is that having negative attitudes about aging will make you age faster.

Levy has similarly found that people over 65 who develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are much more likely to recover if they have a positive view of aging. It was already known that around half of people with MCI get better. What Levy discovered is that a large majority of those who do are relaxed about aging.

The combined impact of these negative attitudes is staggering, individually and collectively. Levy’s group recently published a model showing that each year, among Americans age 60 and older, ageism directly leads to 3.2 million additional cases of the eight most budget-damaging age-related diseases at a cost of $11.1 billion.

The conclusion from all this is obvious. Internalized ageism is a massive, under-recognized health problem that costs individuals and healthcare services dearly. According to Levy, it is a public health crisis.

Where ageism starts

Internalized ageism doesn’t just come from within. The three forms of ageism are mutually reinforcing. When older people encounter some of them, as they (or should I say we?) constantly do in personal interaction, entertainment, advertising, and even in interactions with healthcare professionals, we internalize it.

This relentless onslaught of negative stereotypes has a name: institutional ageism. Like institutional racism, it is pervasive in many cultures but flies under the radar. As the World Health Organization said in a recent report on ageism: “People often fail to recognize the existence of such institutional ageism because the institution’s rules, norms and practices are long-standing, have become ritualized and are seen as normal.”

I hardly need to point out that ageism is a self-defeating form of prejudice. We are all getting older every day, and many of us will. A young ageist today will eventually be hoisted by their own petard (if they make it that far), trapped in a world of ageism that they helped create and maintain.

There is a solution (or at least a partial one) at hand. Back in 2014, Levy and her colleagues showed that attitudes toward aging can be improved with subliminal messages about the positive aspects of aging. But rolling these out at the scale required would be a mammoth task.

As the long-running battle against institutional racism shows, combating deep-seated prejudice is a decades-long endeavor – and inevitably faces setbacks along the way. I probably don’t want to live to see the day institutional ageism is finally banished. But I won’t let it get me down. Instead, I’ll try to turn my own aging process into a barrel of laughter.