I was enjoying a cold one with two of my golfing buddies the other day after we’d slogged through 18 holes in nearly 90-degree heat. We do not on these occasions tend to dwell too much on the aches and pains that often accompany such a journey, so I was a little surprised to hear the senior member of our trio, a recently minted octogenarian, issue what sounded to me like a plea to forgo any thoughts of letting our creaky knees or cranky backs derail our continued weekly adventures. “At our age,” he argued, “we’ve got to keep moving.”
That is most certainly true, I noted at the time, but it later occurred to me that it’s also true for people much younger than us. Could my buddies and I be harboring an ageist attitude, a belief that aging inherently limits our well-being?
Maybe, but among the many “-isms” we must navigate, ageism may be the most socially acceptable — and the most nuanced. In its least subtle form, it can manifest in actions that discriminate against older adults in the workplace, but it can crop up any time a person of any age is judged to be ill-suited to some role or responsibility simply due to their accumulated years. And seniors themselves can muddy ageism’s already murky boundaries by our own lighthearted complaints about the rigors of old age. (See my “creaky knees or cranky backs” above.)
I bring this up in light of recent research suggesting that our view of aging — whether negative or positive — can directly affect our cognitive health as we grow older. North Carolina State University researchers last week released the results of a study that showed a link between a specific type of ageist behavior and memory loss.
“Ageist attitudes, in this context, refers to how people think older adults should behave — the restrictions or prescriptive ideas that someone places on what older adults should and should not do,” explains the study’s corresponding author, Shevaun Neupert, PhD. “We wanted to know if there is any relationship between these attitudes and memory.”
The nearly one thousand participants, ranging in age from 50 to 94, completed a daily survey designed to measure their attitudes about aging while also reporting incidents of memory failures they experienced. At the conclusion of the 14-day survey period, Neupert and her team analyzed the responses and found that memory issues were more likely to occur on those days when the participants recorded more ageist attitudes.
“For example, one person might have very strong ageist attitudes on a Monday, but weak ageist attitudes on a Friday, and that person likely also reported significantly more memory failures on Monday than on Friday,” Neupert notes.
The survey didn’t address how the participants felt they should behave, she adds, but how they felt other older adults should act. “It was a correlation between an individual’s memory failures and how that individual feels other older adults should behave.”
The study, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development, doesn’t explain why such a connection might have occurred, but Neupert says the results point to the need for a broad-based campaign to address ageism.
“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” says Levy. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”
Yale University psychology professor Becca Levy, PhD, has been working toward that goal for the better part of the past 25 years. The author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live, Levy has long argued that shifting our thinking about aging can help us live longer and healthier lives. A recent study she led, published earlier this year in the journal Geriatrics, argues that a more positive attitude about aging may mitigate cognitive and physical maladies that may have been caused by a negative attitude.
“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” says Levy. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”
Her team tracked changes in cognitive and physical function after noting baseline attitudes about aging among more than 11,000 older adults who participated in the Health and Retirement Study. During a follow-up period of up to 12 years, they found that 28 percent of the participants improved their cognitive function and 32 percent improved their walking speed over levels assessed at the beginning of the study. And those who displayed a positive outlook on aging at the beginning of the study, Levy notes, were significantly more likely to show improvement in both areas — even after accounting for demographic, lifestyle, and health factors.
“Our findings suggest there is often a reserve capacity for improvement in later life,” she says. “And because age beliefs are modifiable, this opens the door to interventions at both the individual and societal level.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that my generally upbeat attitude about aging will relieve the creakiness in my knees after my next round of golf, but I suspect that staying positive will make me more likely to follow my pal’s advice — ageist or not — to keep moving.
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