The saying “you’re only as old as you feel” is proving accurate, according to Markus H. Schafer, co-author of a study from Purdue University that compared people’s chronological age and their subjective age to determine which has more influence on cognitive ability in older adults.
Participants aged 55 to 74 were surveyed about aging and initially asked, “What age do you feel most of the time?” The majority identified with being 12 years younger than they actually were. Those closing lines to Frank Sinatra’s hit song “Young at Heart” seem to apply here.
The people who felt young for their age were more likely to have greater confidence about their cognitive abilities a decade later, Schafer reported in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and subjective age had a stronger effect than chronological age.
Do you feel young at heart?
Youthfulness is an attitude and a way of life. Researchers characterize it as the need to love and be loved and the need to experiment and learn. Youthfulness includes traits such as curiosity, inquisitiveness, imagination, creativity, open-mindedness, joy, spontaneity, enthusiasm, sense of humour, playfulness, optimism, and flexibility.
Our bodies and brains are designed to continue delighting in these traits throughout life, but programming from society, television, advertising, parents, teachers, and friends–even our own self-talk–can lead one to feel old.
So how can you maintain a sense of youthfulness?
• Recognize that you have a choice in your life. You do not have to blindly accept society’s typical norms about aging.
• Continually learn new skills and activities to stimulate your curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Here you find some help in this mind training.
• Socialize with others, and embrace new technologies like social networking websites. Extraversion was a defining personality characteristic in the offspring of centenarians in a Boston University of Medicine study on personality and aging. (The average age of the children studied: 75!)
• Nurture youthful traits. You can do this anytime with this simple visualization exercise:
Close your eyes and relax. Select a trait of youthfulness you want to integrate into your personality. You might have to think back to your childhood when you had an ample supply of imagination, spontaneity, or resiliency. Use rich imagery (Joe Vitale might help you with this reawakening) to immerse yourself in this trait, expressing it as a fun-loving child. Tap into the visualization daily until you truly inhabit this trait.
And finally: Forget about your real age and enjoy your abilities, physical and mental, as if you had NO age!
