At a certain point, birthdays become less of a celebration and more of a quiet affair, filled with nostalgia for the good old days. Energy dissipates, senses dull and memory fades. For many, getting old is not an enjoyable process.
Apparently, however, one can avoid the drawbacks of old age. All that must be done is a change in mindset. A study by The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing suggests that individuals who hold more positive attitudes toward growing older have better cognitive, mental and physical ability.
“The way we think about, talk about and write about [aging] may have … a detrimental, measurable effect on mental, physical and cognitive health,” lead researcher Deirdre Robertson said in a press release.
The study tracked a variety of health changes over a span of time, and includes data that potentially represents a national population of community-living adults, according to the study’s website. With a sample group of at least 8,000 Irish adults aged 50 or over, the data determined a strong correlation between attitude and physical aging. For example, results demonstrated that older adults who entertain negative outlooks towards aging have slower walking paces and inferior cognitive aspects in comparison to adults who look at aging more positively.
TILDA’s next step, as explained in the press release by the principal investigator Rose Anne Kenny, will be the development of universal preventative techniques to change people’s attitudes towards aging. The end goal, Kenny said, is to find ways to uphold the quality of life as individuals gets older.
“[This study] shows an updated and optimistic direction in thinking,” said Joseph McGuire, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. “There is no reason that people would ignore the fact that the truth about aging might be better than they thought.”
This objective of establishing a better mindset towards aging resonates with the future time perspective scale, a concept psychologists discovered years ago.
“Basically, it all depends on how [far] into the future you are looking” said Catherine Caldwell-Harris, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, “If you don’t think about the future, you don’t protect your body in the immediate.”
Caldwell-Harris said she believes conclusions from the study should provide hope for adults who currently have negative feelings about aging. If individuals feel that the end of physical health is not necessarily near, then they will be more aware in the present and slow the aging process.
“This explains why there is a correlation between a negative attitude toward aging and a decline in health,” she said. “It is because people assume their body is going to disrepair as they get older.”
A 25-year-old clinical psychology doctoral student at BU, Emily Pariseau, wrote in an email that while the news of TILDA’s conclusions will be hard to spread, transforming people’s perspectives on aging is still a possibility.
“I believe this daunting task [of disseminating and implementing this information] has been made more feasible in recent years due to technology,” she wrote. “Tech-based interventions allow large groups of people access to interventions and resources they may not have been able to access otherwise due to concerns of stigma, economic or cultural difficulties… [and] may be a plausible next step when thinking about societal-wide interventions to target attitudes about growing older.”
In all, the future effect of the TILDA study is looking optimistic and has the potential to improve our perspective on aging while extending our physical youth.
“People got used to the idea of reveling in their youth,” Caldwell-Harris said. “But what if that same feeling can extend to be across a longer time period?”
