Ageism: You’re as Old as You Think You Are
Posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 and is filed under Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
They say that you are what you think you are and they are probably right, at least when it comes to age and ageism. Researchers have discovered that people who thought of aging in negative terms and were unhappy about it were a lot more susceptible to experiencing some kind of poor, heart-health condition later on.
Ageism is one subject that is still widespread in America, where people tend to associate being old or elderly with the usual negative stereotypes, such as being incompetent or too dependent on others because they are too helpless to do things for themselves. These are not healthy self-images and something you want to avoid because it can result in self-fulfilling prophecies.
Based on one study in Psychological Science, which is a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it is thought that young people who have a negative perception of ageing run a much higher risk of developing heart disease later in life.
Research was done on hundreds of men and women for almost four decades by the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, and all the volunteers - whose age ranged from about 18 to 49 years old - were all in the peak of health with no heart problems at all.
Scientists who also studied these volunteers over the age of 60, who previously had no heart conditions until they reached that age, found that they were more than likely negative about becoming old, and the heart-disease conditions that they were experiencing could not be explained by smoking, cholesterol, family history or any of the usual reasons. Perhaps the mind is more powerful than we think.
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