Critics of our booming longevity industry have long argued — persuasively, if you ask me — that its recipe for success relies on exploiting people’s widespread and misguided fear of growing old. Sure, many people are afraid of dying and more than a few tech billionaires are desperately seeking immortality, but it’s the promise of extending our healthspan rather than lifespan that has built what was once a fringe market into a $27 billion behemoth.
But what if it’s our anxiety about growing old that is limiting our healthspan? What if we could extend it simply by shifting our perspective on aging away from something to fear and toward something to embrace? No hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers, infrared saunas, or stem cell injections required.
There’s mounting evidence suggesting that a more positive outlook on aging can yield a longer and healthier life. A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, for instance, found that the most optimistic participants among a cohort of more than 150,000 women lived 4.4 years longer than their most pessimistic counterparts. And a 2023 study led by Yale psychology professor Becca Levy, PhD, showed that such an attitude could even reduce the risk of developing dementia.
“Considering that positive age beliefs can be strengthened,” Levy writes in JAMA Network Open, “our findings suggest that age-belief interventions at individual and societal levels could increase the number of people who experience cognitive recovery.”
And just last month, New York University (NYU) researchers reached a similar conclusion in a study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. Their results revealed a strong connection between attitudes about growing old and epigenetic aging. “We know from previous research that anxiety, depression, and mental health in general are associated with a number of physical health outcomes,” explains lead study author Mariana Rodrigues, a doctoral student at NYU. “[B]ut until now researchers haven’t focused on whether there is a correlation between worrying about aging and the process of aging itself.”
Women may be particularly prone to this source of anxiety, Rodrigues adds, noting the cultural messages exalting youth and beauty. So she and her team analyzed data compiled on 726 women who participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. These participants were questioned about the degree to which they were worried about aging’s effect on their health, attractiveness, and fertility.
MIDUS researchers collected blood samples during the study period to capture the pace of biological aging as well as cumulative cellular damage. Comparing those markers with participants’ responses to the questionnaires, the NYU team found that anxiety related to failing health was strongly associated with accelerated epigenetic aging. Worries about attractiveness and fertility, on the other hand, resulted in no significant connection.
“Our findings suggest that aging-related distress, particularly anxiety about health decline, is not merely a psychological concern, but may be a biologically embedded stressor with measurable consequences for molecular aging,” Rodrigues writes.
This health-related anxiety, she explains, “may operate as a chronic stressor, not only because of its persistence over time but also because it is often accompanied by a heightened sensitivity to internal bodily cues.” And prolonged chronic stress can trigger persistent inflammation and produce DNA-methylation changes that contribute to accelerated epigenetic aging.
More research is needed to clarify the psychological-physiological connection that Rodrigues and others have only begun to explore. Meanwhile, the conversation needs to spread beyond the scientific community. “Aging is a universal experience,” she notes. “We need to start a discourse about how we as a society — through our norms, structural factors, and interpersonal relationships — address the challenges of aging.”
Levy has long believed physicians should be playing a key role in this conversation. In a 2022 interview for the American Medical Association’s Moving Medicine series, she points to the antismoking campaign sparked by the Surgeon General’s 1964 report as a model for a positive-aging initiative. “I think we could do the same thing with these negative age messages and spread the word that negative age beliefs . . . can contribute to bad health outcomes,” she says.
Doctors should ask their patients how they feel about growing old, she suggests, and counsel them about shifting their fears. “If they hear patients referring to their own aging in a negative way, encourage them to think about their age beliefs and to become aware that it’s possible to challenge some of the negative age beliefs.”
It won’t allow you to live forever, but it may help you feel a lot less worrisome about the years you have left.
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