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POSITIVE
thinking adds more years to your life than being slim, not smoking, or
going for regular walks, according to a new study.
People with a positive attitude towards getting old
lived on average 7.5 years longer than those who took a gloomy view of
the passing years.
“If a previously unidentified virus was found to
diminish life expectancy by over seven years, considerable effort would
probably be devoted to identifying the cause and implementing a remedy,”
say the four psychologists who carried out the study. “In the present
case, one of the likely causes is known: societally sanctioned
denigration of the elderly.”
So it is time, they say, to stop knocking the old and
start making them feel good.
The team used data gathered in 1975 in Oxford, Ohio,
where almost everybody over 50 was questioned about their life and
health. By tracing the deaths of participants over 23 years, the team was
able to match lifespan against attitudes towards ageing expressed at the
start.
Participants had been asked to agree or disagree with
statements such as: “Things keep getting worse as I get older” or “I have
as much pep as I did last year” or “I am as happy now as I was when I was
younger.” The participants were scored on a scale of zero to five, in
which five represented the most positive attitude towards growing older
and zero the most negative.
In Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
the team says that the median survival for the most negative thinkers was
15 years, while for the most positive it was 22.5 years.
Correcting for age, sex, wealth, health and loneliness
failed to shake the finding, say the researchers, led by Becca Levy of
Yale University.
So it means that thinking positively is better than
reducing blood pressure or cholesterol, which add four years to your
life, and better than being thin, never having smoked, or doing exercise,
which add between one and three years.
The team suggest that the old feel stigmatised, but
that some of them can shrug it off.
There are two messages. “The discouraging one is that
negative self-perseptions can diminish life expectancy; the encouraging
one is that positive self-perceptions can prolong life expectancy.”
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