Are You Getting Younger, or Do You Just Feel That Way?

When someone asks you how old you are now, do you have to stop and think before you answer? Perhaps you automatically come up with a number that is a year or two (or more) less than your chronological age. It’s not that you’re trying to hide the real number, it’s just that it doesn’t seem to fit the way you feel.

One of the earliest quests in the field of psychology and aging was not the fountain of youth, exactly, but an alternative to age that was not the number based on what the calendar dictates. There are all sorts of problems in using calendar age anyway. It could reflect something other than “age,” such as whatever was going on in the world when people were born or when they were being tested. You would never know how someone would respond to questions about their personality, for example, if they were not raised at a certain time and place in history. Imagine yourself born in the late 19th century rather than the late 20th or early 21st.

Subjective Age and You

Although it was fun to dream about using a measure other than actual age in research on aging, no one really took the idea all that seriously. However, Humboldt University’s Markus Wettstein and colleagues (2023) decided that the idea was worth revisiting. The authors began by noting that prior research suggests that there is something called an “age-group dissociation bias,” a protection that people create to fend off ageism. Arguing that subjective age might have some value, they go on to note that previous studies also suggested that “feeling younger predicts benefits on key developmental outcomes,” including lower mortality.

With evidence suggesting that subjective age might be worth a second look from an empirical perspective, the Humboldt U. research team then went on to pose the question of whether there’s been a trend for current middle-aged and older adults to feel younger than did prior generations. Think for a moment about this idea. As you compare yourself to your mother and grandmother, what were or are they like at the age you are now? Did they dress more conservatively than you do, and did they seem to have more health problems? Maybe they were more likely to “act their age” than you feel you need to now.

The Subjective Rejuvenation Effect

Wettstein and his collaborators proposed that there is, in fact, a generational trend in which current people in their middle and later adult years have a lower subjective age than did their parent and grandparent generations. They labeled this trend “subjective rejuvenation,” suggesting that it reflects a shift over time in “psychosocial resources” available to people as they age. One in particular may make sense to you, the idea of perceived constraints. A relaxing of social norms about what people can and cannot do as they get older seems to be penetrating into the way current adults feel about their age. The only proviso, though, is that the very old may not have caught onto this trend, given that health issues accumulate as people reach their 80s and beyond.

To test this proposal, the Humboldt U. team drew from a large multi-wave study conducted in Germany on people aged 40 to 85 years, studied from 1996 to 2020, with new samples added in the 2002-to-2014 testings. The final sample used in the subjective age study consisted of nearly 15,000 people born from 1911 to 1974.

The subjective age question was a simple one: “How old do you feel?” The responses were converted to a “subjective age proportional-discrepancy score” multiplied by 100. The roles of other influences were also factored into the generational analysis, including education, presence of chronic disease, having lived in East Germany, and feelings of loneliness.

The findings clearly supported the subjective rejuvenation effect, with a steady decline in this proportional measure toward younger subjective age across the three cohort groups. In other words, people born between 1911 and 1935 only veered toward feeling “a little younger,” the 1936-1951 group a little more so, and the 1952-1974 cohort feeling “a lot younger.” Everyone, regardless of cohort or age, felt at least a little bit younger, including the oldest members of the sample. None of the control variables made a difference.

What Your Own Subjective Age May Mean

As the authors concluded, there is good news and bad news in these results. The good news is that a younger subjective age does come with benefits, including a lower risk of mortality. The bad news is inherent in the very idea of a youthful subjective age. Why should people feel they have to define themselves as younger than their chronologically measured age?

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Delving into this idea, Wettstein et al. observe that in an age-neutral society, “individuals would ideally not need to reveal age-group dissociation” because that ideal society would have “overcome an overly one-sided negative connotation of aging and later life.”

Returning to the subjective age you first came up with in answer to the question, how do you think it fits in with this interpretation? If you placed yourself at the “a lot younger” end of the scale, what led you to that number? Wettstein and his collaborators suggest you might feel that way because you do have that positive resource of feeling in control of your life and your age. But it is possible that you feel you need to run away from your actual age because it would reflect badly on your sense of self.

Anti-aging messages are everywhere, from the (fake) ads for memory supplements to the celebrities posting their support for all kinds of facial products intended to rewire the molecules in your skin that cause wrinkles and sagging. Avoiding these ads is nearly impossible.

The next time you say you don’t “feel your age,” ask yourself whether this is because you really feel good (better health, fewer perceived constraints) or whether it’s because you’ve bought into the anti-aging mantra of the world you live in.

To sum up, feeling good about yourself doesn’t have to require that you also resist feeling your actual age. Feeling good about the years you’ve accumulated is another way to find fulfillment in the years ahead.