Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Feel 20 percent younger
This is called subjective age. It has a physical side and a mental side, so there are two ways to feel young or old.
Subjective age is a better predictor of how long a person will live than biological age. At the doctor's office the question is how old you are, not how old you feel, and the number can push people to behave like a 75- or 80-year-old.
People do feel their age at times, such as after an injury, or when they wake at 5 in the morning and can't get back to sleep. At other times, like coaching a son's baseball team or being on a college campus, they feel young.
How does feeling younger relate to living longer?
A 2015 study by Isla Rippon and Andrew Steptoe in JAMA Internal Medicine followed more than 6,000 English adults for about eight years. Roughly 14 percent of those who felt three or more years younger than their age died during that time, compared with about 25 percent of those who felt older. The researchers adjusted for factors such as health and depression, and the difference held in part. The study is observational, so it shows an association rather than a cause.
Why do adults feel younger than they are?
In a 2006 study, David Rubin and Dorthe Berntsen asked Danish adults how old they felt, and found that adults past about 25 felt younger than their age. People over 40 felt about 20 percent younger than their actual age, with the gap growing as they got older. One explanation is that people compare themselves to others their age and see how much more they can do than expected. The pattern appears in many countries.
Can beliefs about aging shape how people age?
Yale psychologist Becca Levy analyzed the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and found that adults with more positive views of aging lived on average 7.5 years longer. The result, published in 2002, held after accounting for age, health, and income. Levy argues that beliefs absorbed from the culture affect stress responses and health behavior over decades. Her later work linked negative age stereotypes to higher dementia risk.
More from Andrew Huberman
