Can we get older without getting old?

At the weekend I spent a couple of hours with one of my very good friends. She started out life as a dancer and choreographer, but over the years has moved into a range of naturally oriented areas and therapies, most recently ‘fascial therapy’. My friend and I have had regular conversations over the last year or so about a shared conviction: that fascia, the connective tissue that wraps and threads through every muscle, organ and joint in the body, matters far more to how well we move, and how well we age, than most of us probably appreciate.

During our conversation, I told her about a video I’d seen of the designer Paul Smith on LinkedIn. He’s 80, and yet the loose, easy way he moved in the clip gave every impression of someone biologically much younger. And mentally, he came across as someone youthful, joyful and energetic, too. It got us talking about something I think about often in my work: the value of having positive aspirations for how we want to move and feel as we age, rather than quietly assuming decline is simply inevitable.

This is not just our impression, either. There is even some relevant research that appears to bear this out. Perhaps the seminal study in the area comes from psychologist Becca Levy, who with colleagues tracked 660 people aged 50 and over for up to 23 years, as part of the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement. At the outset, participants were asked about their own beliefs about growing older, whether they associated ageing with words like ‘wise’ and ‘capable’, or with words like ‘useless’ and ‘helpless’. Levy then tracked what happened to them.

The finding, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002 [1], was striking: those with more positive self-perceptions of ageing lived, on average, considerably longer. As Levy put it herself: ‘We found that the median survival of those in the more positive self-perceptions of aging group was 7.6 years longer than those in the more negative aging self-stereotype group.’

Seven and a half years is not a small number, either. For context, it’s a bigger survival advantage than researchers typically find for not smoking or exercising regularly.

This sort of research is known as epidemiological research, a type of study that can’t prove cause and effect in the strictest sense. It might be, for instance, that individuals who were healthier were more optimistic about their futures, but it was their better health status, not their attitude to ageing, that impacted their longevity.

However, Levy and her colleagues ‘controlled for’ functional and self-rated health statistically, as well as other relevant ‘confounding factors’, including age, gender, socioeconomic status, and loneliness. The association between age beliefs and survival held up regardless. That doesn’t settle every question about mechanism, but it does make it harder to dismiss the finding as simply a proxy for another factor, such as existing good health.

I don’t particularly like talking about myself, but the reality is I’ve had a few musculoskeletal challenges over the years. A lot of these stemmed from some decent running mileage at times, some were rugby related, and a lot I think came from a ‘tight’ body and poor posture. Over the last two and a half years I’ve made a concerted effort to ‘turn back the clock’ via stretching and other exercises. And then earlier this year, I added some more specific fascia-related exercises. The bottom line is that my body moves more freely now, and I am more physically comfortable in myself. The way my body feels now is how I’d like it to feel when I’m 80. Also, I see no reason why it shouldn’t.

Fascia work, movement practice, staying limber and capable in the body: these all matter in their own right. But so, it seems, might simply expecting, rather than merely hoping, that vitality, flexibility and mobility are things we can carry with us, not things we’re destined to lose. Paul Smith moving the way he does at 80 may not be just a nice anecdote. It might be a small, visible instance of the effect Levy’s research describes.

The photo I chose for the top of this newsletter is of Eileen Kramer, the Australian dancer and choreographer who lived to 110 (she died in 2024), and who was well known for her positive attitude to ageing. The BBC News piece to which the photo was attached was even headlined ‘The dancer aged 106 who bans the word “old.”’ In one interview she put it plainly: ‘I don’t like people to talk about age. When people ask me about how old I am I say I’m not old, I’ve just been here a long time.’ I think there’s a lesson here.

References

[1] Levy BR, et al. Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2002;83(2), 261–270.