Ask after the secret of eternal youth and answers tend to vary dramatically depending on who is consulted. Doctors, dieticians (and even occasionally newspapers) tend to offer discouragingly specific advice about the restorative effects of antioxidant superfoods or high-intensity interval training.
Fitness influencers and Silicon Valley’s anti-ageing millionaire lobby tend to go even further: urging innocent civilians to adopt their soul-crushing regimes of red-light therapy, intermittent fasting, and high-plasma blood transfusions.
Ask a centenarian for their top tips, meanwhile, and you’re more likely to be told about the overlooked importance of day drinking and putting one’s feet up whenever the opportunity arises.
If a recent study is to be believed, however, there is another undeservedly maligned pastime that might serve as a useful tonic: a good dose of age-related prejudice. Tracking the longevity of 800 Germans over a period of 15 years, scientists found that those who held disparaging stereotypes about older people tended to outlive their peers.
Despite their apparently sunnier dispositions, those inclined to think of older people in an upbeat or positive light turned out to be 35 percent more likely to die over the course of the study than their cynical, age-bashing counterparts. Thinking of oneself explicitly as an exception to the norm of age-related decline made one even more robust.
A healthy inclination to ageist thinking, in sum, makes as great a difference to lifespan as does the difference between a sedentary or active lifestyle.
That background beliefs can influence physical wellbeing is of course a familiar finding: as well-known to pop-psychologists who talk up the power of proactive thinking as it is to scientists who emphasize the potency of placebo effects. Well-meaning injunctions to act one’s age, then, may be decidedly old hat, and all the worse for it.
