If you believe the stereotype that old equals wrinkled, cranky, feeble and forgetful, you might be headed in that direction, according to a story in the Boston Globe. As it turns out, researchers claim that the best anti-aging antidote might just be a positive attitude about getting older.
How’s that again? Apparently, a recent study by Yale University psychologist Becca Levy that tracked a group of 440 adults beginning in 1968 through 2007 found that those more likely to suffer the decrepitudes of aging, such as heart attacks and strokes, were those who embraced negative attitudes about getting older three decades before. After 30 years of tracking attitudes about aging and health outcomes, it turns out one out of four young people with nega-tudes had heart problems later on compared with just 13 percent of those with posi-tudes.
Look, I had a friend who once told me, “I don’t really like old people.” She was 82 at the time. And, I’m not sure how she felt about the senior set when she was a twenty-something, but when it came to aging, she was a Peter Pan who drank Bloody Marys daily at noon and 4, laughed freely, read voraciously and entertained a wide circle of friends until she died at age 94. We not only are what we eat, but also what we think.
There’s a growing body of research being done by Dr. Thomas Perls, of the New England Centenarian Study, who has found that the super-elderly tend to be optimists. And as Tonic reported recently, America’s oldest person Mary Josephine Ray who died this month in New Hampshire at the age of 114, not only sang songs and joked often, “she lived in the moment and never gave a thought to dying,” according to her granddaughter.
So be sunny and you won’t get senile? Maybe — and it sure couldn’t hurt.
Photo by mikebaird via Flickr.