Author: Jeff Cassman

This personality trait is linked to living almost 8 years longer on average.

Optimists are most likely to hold positive beliefs about aging, researchers finds.

Critically, optimists believe they can control their lives and make improvements.

This means that believing in a healthy, engaged old age is a self-fulfilling prophecy — people with these views tend to experience better health and are more active and social.

Ms Shelbie Turner, the study’s first author, said:

“How we think about who we’re going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be.”

People who imagine themselves more positively at 50-years-old tend to have better health 40 years later, studies have found.

They are less likely to suffer a heart attack, have better memory, greater will to live and are less likely to die prematurely.

Professor Karen Hooker, study co-author, said:

“Previous research has shown that people who have positive views of aging at 50 live 7.5 years longer, on average, than people who don’t.”

For the study, 244 people were tested for their optimistic traits and for how they saw themselves in the future.

Each person listed two ‘hoped-for’ future selves and two ‘feared’ future selves.

For example, people feared being chronically sick and in pain and hoped to be healthy and active.

The results revealed that optimistic people were more positive about aging.

Overcoming ageist stereotypes

Older people are often stereotyped as suffering memory problems, having difficulty exercising and being poor drivers.

Professor Hooker said:

“Kids as young as 4 years old already have negative stereotypes about old people.

Then, of course, if you’re lucky enough to live to old age, they eventually apply to you.”

Even older people sometimes reinforce these stereotypes themselves in the way they behave and think about aging.

Professor Hooker said:

“People need to realize that some of the negative health consequences in later life might not be biologically driven.

The mind and the body are all interwoven.

If you believe these bad things are going to happen, over time that can erode people’s willingness or maybe even eventually their ability to engage in those health behaviors that are going to keep them as healthy as they can be.”

The social mixing of young and old would help generate positive views of aging, says Professor Hooker:

“The more you’re around older people, the more you realize that it’s not all bad.

Older people can do some things better than young people do. Increasing opportunities for intergenerational relationships is one way we can make people more optimistic about aging.”

Increase your optimism

People naturally become more optimistic with age, studies have found.

However, exercises such as visualising your ‘best possible self‘ have been shown to increase optimism in the short-term.

Visualising your best possible self may sound like an exercise in fantasy but, crucially, it does have to be realistic.

Carrying out this exercise typically involves imagining your life in the future, but a future where everything that could go well, has gone well.

You have reached those realistic goals that you have set for yourself.

Then, to help cement your visualisation, you commit your best possible self to paper.

The study was…

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Motivation can stay at maximum all day long, research finds.

The key to keeping your motivation at maximum is switching tasks, research finds.

Most people’s motivation and performance starts to dip after doing a difficult task for around 30 minutes.

As people get closer to one hour on a task, there is very noticeable drop in performance.

However, if people switch tasks, their self-control is less limited than many believe.

Dr Dan Randles, the study’s first author, said:

“While people get tired doing one specific task over a period of time, we found no evidence that they had less motivation or ability to complete tasks throughout the day.”

Self-control means doing a task that doesn’t reward you immediately, Dr Randles said:

“It’s doing something not because you enjoy it, but because it’s connected to a larger goal and you want to see it through.”

The conclusions come from a study in which over 16,000 people were given a difficult memory task to do at different times of day.

The results showed that people had the same motivation throughout the day.

Psychologists have generally thought that motivation decreases over the day as people’s self-control wears down or is exhausted.

Dr Randles said:

“This doesn’t mean all studies on self-control are wrong, but at least for that one, attempts to replicate it have found no evidence for the effect.

Our results are consistent with theories showing that people lose motivation within a specific task, but at odds with theories that argue self-control is general resource that can be exhausted.”

Dr Iain Harlow, study co-author, thinks the research shows why short, effortful bursts can be so effective in cementing learning:

“This finding is especially important for intellectually demanding tasks like learning.

It fits with research showing that you remember more of what you learn when you review it frequently but in short bursts.”

Dr Randles concluded:

“The fact participants got worse at a single task speaks to how effortful they found it, and despite the difficulty, we found no evidence whatsoever that their ability or motivation decreased up until the point they got tired late at night.”

→ Try Dr Jeremy Dean’s motivation ebook: “Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Randles et al., 2017).

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From education to cognitive reserve, discover the key factors that slow down cognitive decline as we age.

Why do some people’s cognitive skills glide down a gentle slope as they age while others fall of a cliff?

Living healthily — eating right and getting enough exercise — are certainly important, but they don’t explain the whole picture.

In fact, many of the factors we think of as being vital to aging gracefully have relatively little effect, research finds.

Lifestyle factors like avoiding smoking, taking vigorous exercise and weight control explain only about 38 percent of the variation in cognitive functioning by the time people reach their mid-50s.

And between the ages of 54 and 85, these lifestyle factors only account for a measly 6 percent of the variation in how quickly people decline cognitively.

So what about the rest? Could that all be down to genetics and therefore something we can do nothing about?

Dr Hui Zheng, the study’s first author, is not sure either:

“There’s still a lot we don’t know about why cognitive functioning varies so much between older adults.

More research is urgently needed to discover the main causes of how quickly cognitive functioning declines and how we can slow down its progression.”

Education is top factor

For the study, researchers used data from over 7,000 people whose cognitive functioning was tracked until they were 85-years-old.

The results showed that education was the single largest factor in explaining people’s cognitive decline up to the age of 54 (25 percent).

People with more education, then, retained greater thinking skills with age.

After this, race, parental education, depression, occupation, and household wealth had relatively little effect, as did marital status, religion, gender, health behaviours and chronic diseases.

In contrast, all these factors had relatively little effect between 54 and 85.

This suggests it is much better to start change earlier, said Dr Zheng:

“From an intervention perspective, that suggests it is much more important to try to improve functioning at the baseline than trying to slow down the rate of decline.”

Cognitive reserve

The beneficial effect of education in maintaining thinking skills supports the ‘cognitive reserve hypothesis’.

This is the idea that people who build up cognitive reserves early on are better able to withstand the degrading effects of age or brain damage.

It is rather like a runner who is capable of running faster than they habitually do, so that when age slows their maximum, they can still use that extra bit of performance.

Dr Zheng said:

“College may provide an especially rich environment for cognitive development that may help people develop this cognitive reserve.”

What about genetics?

This study did not include genetic factors, but other research has suggested that 41 percent of cognitive decline is down to genetics.

That still leaves much to be explained.

Dr Zheng said:

“Cognitive decline is pervasive in older adults, even those without dementia, which is why it is important to study other predictors of cognitive functioning and decline.

But still, our study raises more questions than it answers.

We have a long way to go to understand the trajectories of cognitive functioning in older adults.”

The study was published in the…

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Wisdom can protect us from loneliness, anxiety and depression.

Wisdom — a modifiable personality trait — is linked to greater happiness, resilience, and mental well-being.

It is also linked to less depression, anxiety and loneliness.

Here are seven signs that you are a wise person:

1. You remain calm under pressure.
2. You do not postpone making major decisions.
3. You engage in self-reflection to understand myself.
4. You approach situations where your help may be needed.
5. You find it easy to give helpful advice to others.
6. You enjoy being exposed to diverse viewpoints.
7. Your spiritual beliefs give you inner strength.

Professor Dilip V. Jeste, study co-author, said:

“There are evidence-based interventions to increase levels of specific components of wisdom, which would help reduce loneliness and promote overall well-being.

Like the COVID-19 vaccine protects us from the novel coronavirus, wisdom can aid in protecting us from loneliness.

Thus, we can potentially help end a behavioral pandemic of loneliness, suicides and opioid abuse that has been going on for the last 20 years.”

The results come from a survey of over 2,000 people who were asked about seven major aspects of wisdom.

These are:

• self-reflection,
• pro-social behaviors (such as empathy, compassion and altruism),
• emotional regulation (understanding and controlling your emotions),
• acceptance of diverse perspectives,
• decisiveness,
• social advising (such as giving rational and helpful advice to others)
• and spirituality.

Increase your wisdom

Like many other personality traits, wisdom can be difficult to change, but not impossible.

Here are two examples of ways to increase components of wisdom.

1. Increase emotional control

One method that has been tested scientifically is to practice referring to yourself in the third-person (Weng et al., 2013).

Instead of saying “I feel hurt and angry,” a person might say to themselves, “He feels hurt and angry.”

The simple technique helps people distance themselves from the strong emotions they are feeling in the moment.

2. Increase compassion

Compassion, another component of wisdom, is also not something you either have or you don’t — it can (and should) be learned and nurtured.

Participants a one study took part in one-day course in loving kindness meditation to improve their self-compassion.

This helps foster benevolent and loving feelings towards the self and others.

After the self-compassion training, people felt better in themselves, were more compassionate towards others and there was more activation in the areas of the brain associated with love, affiliation and positive emotion.

→ Related: Decision-Making Skills: 16 Ways To Improve

The study was published in the journal International Psychogeriatrics (Thomas et al., 2021).

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