When I started thinking about this, almost all my associations with aging were older,
and where my fear was deepest had to do with cognition.
Dementia is a terrifying disease, and we are nowhere near a cure.
I think what people forget is that it is in no way typical of aging.
The statistics, the latest statistics from the Alzheimer's Association and this statistic
has dropped significantly just in the 10 years I've been studying this it is that one out
of 10 of the entire 65-plus population does come down with Alzheimer's.
The older you are, the more likely you are to get it age is the biggest risk factor so
the percentage increases as you get older.
But very, very few people my age, 66, have Alzheimer's.
The point being, it is not typical of aging.
And, telling both sides of the story here, Alzheimer's rates continue to decline.
We're not sure why, but the odds of anyone listening to this coming down with Alzheimer's
have gotten lower and lower.
And people are getting diagnosed at later ages.
So let's tell both sides of the story.
As we age, most of us do experience some decline in specific cognitive functioning, like the
ability to remember the name of that movie you saw with what's-her-name last week.
But one thing I'm always pointing out to people is that younger people forget stuff too, all
the time.
This is not just an old-age affliction.
Where ageism comes in is that when you can't remember the name of the movie, and you're
my age, you think, oh, crap, that means I'm getting dementia.
Which it might, but it really, really, really probably does not.
It is true that older people can take longer to come to a conclusion about something, or
perhaps remember something.
But one reason this is so, and interestingly, this came out a study done by data scientists
in Germany, who weren't even studying anything aging related, is that as we grow older, we
acquire more experiences and memories.
So literally, just like a processor, the brain has to sift through more information to get
to an answer.
And it is that process of sifting that enables us, often, older people, to come up with a
more measured or deeper response.
That's why it is so terrific to have mixed age teams.
For many reasons that are intuitively obvious, younger people might come up with more answers
more quickly, and possibly think of things that an older, more perhaps experienced person
might think, oh, we tried that 10 years ago and it's not going to work.
But if you pair the agility of a young mind with the experience and more seasoned approach
of an older worker, you arrive at a synthesis that is the best possible thing.
You can make an analogy in terms of physical activity as well.
Older workers certainly physically move slower, no doubt about that.
But they injure themselves less often.
A growing body of really, really interesting evidence shows how attitudes towards aging
affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level.
People with more positive attitudes towards aging, which I would say is simply more realistic
attitudes towards aging, because most of us are so brainwashed to equate aging with decline,
show that they walk faster, they have better handwriting, which is a pretty good indicator
of general health.
They heal faster, even from severe disability.
They live longer, not just a little bit, an average of seven and a half years longer.
And the latest research shows that positive attitudes towards aging confer protection
against dementia, even in people genetically predisposed to the disease.
The idea is that if you are not worrying about aging, if you are not under this stress of
believing that everything is going to go to hell in a handbasket, and you are going to
be conferred to the sort of dustbin of history, or abandoned by those you love, or abandoned
by your brain, or deserted by your body, those are all sources of stress.
They are messages that an ageist culture bombards us with on a daily basis, in the news, starting
with children's books, all the way up.
When we refute those messages, when we look at the purpose behind them, and look at the
evidence all around us, at the lives that older people are living, it's very easy to
see the alternate truthful reality.
And that confers protection.
The earlier in life we become what I call an old person in training which is to acknowledge
that, guess what, we're going to become old and it's probably going to be different than
we think right now, and probably way better the better, because then we can see ageist
messages in the culture more clearly and refute them.
If we look around at the older people around us, it is obvious that the vast majority are
living interesting lives and going about their daily lives with interest and purpose.
I have never met anyone who actually wanted to be any younger, no matter how terrified
they were of getting older.
So think about that, right?
Because even if we are brainwashed by an ageist culture, we know that our years are what make
us us.