By most standards, Prof Velandai Srikanth is at the peak of his career. He is the director of the National Centre for Healthy Ageing; his decades of highly regarded research has led to work being published in leading scientific journals; and he has been awarded funding from some of the world’s biggest scientific funding bodies.
He has also turned 60, and says that as soon as he did, “Somebody said: ‘So when are you going to retire?’” The comment shocked him – he realised this was the stigma of ageing, and it was coming for him.
As a geriatrician, Srikanth sees the full spectrum of attitudes towards ageing; from those who gloomily view it as an inevitable trajectory of decline and decrepitude, to those who see the joys and opportunities and approach the so-called “third age” with excitement.
According to a US study, those attitudes can meaningfully change someone’s ageing trajectory. A psychologist, Prof Becca Levy, and her colleague Dr Martin Slade, from the Yale School of Public Health, looked at what impact attitudes towards ageing had on physical and cognitive changes over time in more than 11,000 people aged between 50 and 99.
They found that people with more positive attitudes to ageing not only did better at things like walking speed, memory tests and maths than those with more negative attitudes but a significant number of them actually improved over the study’s timeframe – 12 years – compared with how they were when they started out.
Even Levy, who has been studying age beliefs and their impact for much of her career, was surprised at how significant the benefits were of having a positive attitude.
“Many people have examples in their own lives or can point to people that do show improvement in later life, but we tend to classify them as exceptions or exemplars,” she says.
In this study, 44% of the participants actually showed improvements in walking speed and cognition over the average eight years of follow-up; more importantly, those who came into the study feeling positive about ageing were more likely to improve.
If you want to stay active, it helps if you’re encouraged to do so by those around you. Photograph: Charles Stirling /Alamy
Those attitudes were assessed in a number of ways. One of them used the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale, which asks people to rate how strongly they agree or disagree with statements such as “The older I get, the more useless I feel” and “I am as happy now as I was when I was younger”.
Levy has also used other methods, like asking people to come up five common words or phrases that they associate with ageing. “In at least the United States, often they’re negative beliefs that come up pretty soon, pretty early, but most people have those positive views,” she says. “Usually, by the time they get to the fifth one, often there is something positive.”
Prof Julia Lappin, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of New South Wales and Neuroscience Research Australia, says there’s growing evidence that a positive mindset at any stage of life can have benefits for health. “In being positive, with that comes behaviours that contribute to better physical health,” she says. “The term that we use in optimising brain ageing is that you stay cognitively, physically and socially active throughout your life.”
It helps if you’re encouraged to do so by those around you. Lappin gives the example of people living in communities full of active, older individuals, which can have a bit of a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect. “You see that that person down the road, he’s 93, he still walks down to the beach every day, and you think, “Well, I’m 92 I should be able to do it.’”
Positive ageing is also about not assuming that ageing means illness, Srikanth says. “Age is not disease; age is just time,” he says. “People often assume that just getting older means you’re going to get dementia, which is not true – ageing is not equal to having dementia.”
Having a more positive view of ageing means people tend to have higher expectations, including that they can do something to address the health issues that may come with getting older, says Prof Kaarin Anstey, a psychologist and the director of the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute.
“As an example,” he says, “if you had a sore hip, you could either say, ‘Oh, that’s just a part of ageing, it’s just I’m getting older,’ or you could say, ‘I’m going to go do something about that.’”
That something might be going to a physiotherapist or exercising more but, whatever the action, having that positive view of ageing has led to a health-improving behaviour.
It’s one thing to have a positive attitude within yourself about ageing, and another thing to resist the ageism prevalent in our society – what has been described as the one of the last socially acceptable prejudices. It’s the attitude that says someone over 60 – like Srikanth – must be about to retire, despite being at the height of their abilities, experience and knowledge, simply because they’ve done enough tours around the sun. And that attitude is tougher to fight.
“We have got an ageing population, we’ve got people retiring later, yet our discrimination in terms of age and employment hasn’t seemingly changed,” says Associate Prof Rod McKay, a psychiatrist from the University of Notre Dame.
The results of Levy’s study suggest that by discriminating against older people, McKay says, employers may actually be missing out on applicants who are not only at their peak but have the capacity and opportunity to improve even more.
It’s also important to have a positive view of what opportunities either come with ageing or are still present despite ageing: combating ageism within society and within ourselves.
“The happiest time of life is as you get older,” says Prof Brian Draper, a psychiatrist at UNSW who describes himself as “semi-retired”. The rates of depression in Australia are lowest in people aged 65 to 85, although they do increase significantly after 85.
“Generally speaking, retirement leads to improvement in most parameters of people’s lives,” Draper says.
While he acknowledges that humans aren’t immortal, and the body does show wear and tear over time, “It can happen quite late in life, much later than most people realise.
“I think that’s an important aspect of it all; you can continue to function and enjoy life, and mentally and physically function well for quite a long time.”
