After I turned 60 last October, I became consumed with thoughts of mortality. I worried that I was now on a fast track toward ill health, retirement blues and forgetful conversations filled with non-sequiturs. It’s not hard to see why. In 2023, the American Psychological Association wrote that “ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices” in American culture. From shelves lined with anti-aging products, to punchlines about getting older to workplace bias, the message is clear: entering your senior years isn’t a positive thing.

But deep down, I knew that these ideas weren’t just wrong — they were harmful.

According to research by Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology in the Yale School of Public Health and a professor of psychology at Yale University, older people who have more positive beliefs about aging live as much as 7.5 years longer on average than older people with negative ones. Levy has also found that people in the former group are less likely to develop biomarkers of dementia.

For those like me who sometimes struggle to stay positive, Levy’s research should serve as motivation to do so. In North America, older people are too often diminished and dismissed, but in other countries, they are celebrated and revered. Take Japan, where elders are often featured as heroes in comic books or as heroines in love stories. They’re also active participants in society well beyond their retirement years. The result? Their life expectancy is among the highest in the world.

At Levy’s suggestion, I spent a week paying closer attention to how views on aging show up in my everyday life — in conversations, on the TV shows I watch and in how I think about myself. I quickly discovered that my greatest demons are the beliefs that I’ve internalized. I chastised myself for being bad at technology, for being constantly forgetful and for gaining weight in my 50s.

When I spoke with Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which offers workshops on aging in Mexico’s Baja peninsula and in Santa Fe, N.M., he told me that “we ingest the societal bias against aging.” In other words, society’s criticism morphs into self-criticism.

Luckily, there are ways to challenge that. As Conley reminds me, many traits improve with age — particularly emotional intelligence, spiritual curiosity and our ability to value and invest in our relationships.

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