To Age Well, Change How You Feel About Aging

The Wall Street Journal: 

That research holds out the possibility for much healthier aging. But it also points to a very big obstacle: Negative stereotypes about aging are pervasive in America. Even many older adults embrace the idea that getting old is a bad thing—which means they’re doing potentially serious harm to their health without realizing it.

Can we change the way we feel about aging—and improve our prospects for healthier senior years? A growing body of research offers hope.

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Negative stereotypes about aging “are a public-health issue,” says Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health and lead author of the Yale study. “What people aren’t aware of is that they have the ability to overcome and resist negative stereotypes” and “compensate for the ill effects of automatic ageism.”

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Stereotypes in general—negative and positive—are entrenched in part because they help us take cognitive shortcuts. By offering a way to “automatically categorize people into social groups,” they allow us to “free up mental energy to” live our daily lives, says Michael North, an assistant professor of management and organizations at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “If we were to try to make sense of everything and everybody we encounter, we wouldn’t have enough attention left over to be functional human beings.”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal