Click on “Comments” below to hear Yvonne DiVita steam off about the Husted article on aging boomers that I cited in yesterday’s post.
Yvonne wrote Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online about which you can learn more about on her website.
At age 54, Yvonne is nowhere close to fitting the stereotyped images of aging expressed both explicitly and implicitly in the Husted article.
Nor do I, at age 72, conform to those images. I do wear glasses, but my eyesight is correctable to 20-20. I power walk two to four miles most days (and could and would do more if I had time).
I sleep less than I did in my earlier years and at 72 feel as energetic as I did at 32.
Sure, there are those whose energy and health aren’t what they used to be, but generally speaking this is due more to living habits than to age.
A 15-year longitudinal study by Alvar Svanborg in the industrial city of Gothenburg, Sweden, showed no measurable decline in many body functions until after age 70, and very little decline by 81. Cognitive abilities were intact to at least age 75, and still intact in almost all who had reached 81,
Even memory problems are less related to age than commonly believed. This is what psychologist Becca Levy said about memory in a Washington Post interview:
In a cross-cultural study I conducted with Ellen Langer we found that the Chinese participants reported more positive views of aging than the American participants and the older Chinese participants tended to perform better on memory tasks than the older American participants. We also found that older deaf Americans, who tend to have more positive views of aging than hearing Americans, also perform better on memory tasks than their same age hearing American peers.
An article in Psychology Today said about the Levy-Langer study:
Not only did the mainland Chinese and American deaf far outperform the mainstream Americans on four psychological memory tests, but the oldest in these two groups, especially the Chinese, performed almost as well as the youngest. Their performance was so strong even the researchers were surprised. They conclude that the results can be explained entirely by the fact that the Chinese have the most positive, active, and "internal" image of aging across the three cultures studied.
In other words, a person’s negative views of aging can actually cause decay in his or her memory.
So, your best vaccine against memory decline may be to learn to love the idea of growing old.
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