Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
This May Be the Secret to Feeling Younger and Living Longer
A new study offers one way.
Studies suggest that feeling younger may actually help you live to be older. Now, new research points to a way to keep that youthful state of mind, at least for elderly adults: feel in control.
“On days when you felt above your average control perceptions — you felt more controlled for you — you tended to feel younger,” says Jennifer Bellingtier, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, of her findings, which she presented her research at the recent annual American Psychological Association (APA) convention (and which have not been published in a scientific journal).
Bellingtier’s research involved surveying 116 adults, ages 60 to 90, and 106 adults, ages 18 to 36, every day for nine days. Each time, participants were asked how old they felt that day, and how in-control of their life and actions they felt that day.
Past research has shown that it’s common to experience fluctuations in “subjective age,” or how old you feel. That held true for the people in the study: both groups experienced changes in their subjective age from day to day. But in the older group, these fluctuations were correlated with feeling a sense of control, Bellingtier says. On days they felt more in control of their lives, people tended to feel younger. In the younger group of people, changes seemed to be tied to things like health and stress levels.
The power of feeling in-control may be two-fold, Bellingtier says. A sense of agency may boost mental health and drive down subjective age, in turn motivating people to make healthy choices. “When you feel more controlled, you feel younger, and then you feel like you can accomplish more things,” Bellingtier says. “You feel like your actions matter.” This could motivate a person to get outside and exercise or to make better nutrition choices, she says.
Both environmental and internal changes could enhance an older person’s sense of control, Bellingtier says. A nursing home, for example, could allow residents to select their own food options and mealtimes, rather than mandating a set menu and dinnertime. On a personal level, even something as simple as thinking critically about all the daily activities a person controls — from the time she gets up to the books she decides to read — could help her feel empowered and better able to accomplish things.
Feeling younger than your actual age has also been linked to a lower dementia risk and better mental health, and studies suggest that subjective age may be just as important to your health as chronological age. But feeling in control may not be the only way to feel younger. Other research presented at the APA conference found that physical activity — specifically walking — was associated with a lower subjective age among adults ages 35 to 69. Social interaction may also help elderly adults feel younger, research has shown.
The good news is that most elderly adults already tend to feel younger than they are, Bellingtier says. Among the older cohort in her new study, 91% of people reported feeling younger than their chronological age on at least one of the study days, while only 23% reported feeling older at any point during the study.
Conjoined Twins Separated in Risky Surgery at 7 Months Old Now Thriving at Age 17
Twins Sydney and Lexi Stark were already lucky when they were born on March 9, 2001. Though they were conjoined in their lower body, they had defied the odds — 40 to 60 percent of conjoined twins are delivered stillborn, and only 35 percent survive after the first day. But seven months later, the girls were successfully separated during a risky surgery, and now, at age 17, they’re thriving.
“I think it was always, they will survive,” the girls’ father, James, said of the family’s mindset going into their birth during Monday’s episode of Megyn Kelly Today. “I don’t think it was ever a question.”
He and his wife, Emily, learned during a doctor’s visit prior to the twins’ birth that they were conjoined.
“I just remember looking at the ceiling, and I just kind of tuned out,” she said. “And James kind of took over from there.”
“Obviously we knew what conjoined twins were, you see stories and you read about them,” James said. “[The doctor] brought out this thousand-page medical book and flipped through it to the page on conjoined twins and there was literally two paragraphs on conjoined twins.”
But the family stayed positive, and James was cracking jokes the day Lexi and Sydney were born.
“The girls were squirming and James went over to Lexi and he said, ‘Oh Lexi, are you having a nightmare that your sister is stuck to your butt?’ And all the nurses giggled. They were like, okay, this family is going to be just fine,” Emily recalled.
On Oct. 9, they brought the girls into the hospital for their separation surgery. Because they were joined at the spine and shared a spinal cord along with some intestines, the doctor said there was a serious risk that one or both would be paralyzed, or die.
“We had done so many things to get to this day, and about two weeks before I looked at James and I said, are we playing God? Are we messing with perfection? Because we could keep them together and we could keep them, but are we messing this up?” Emily said. But James said they had spent months — both before the twins’ birth and in the time leading up to the surgery — coming to their choice.
“At the end of the day you have to trust that you made the right decision with the information you had at the time,” he said. “If something went wrong, you’re never prepared for that, but at least you went into it knowing what you were doing.”
And after hours in surgery, Lexi and Sydney were successfully separated.
“The room just exploded, you could hear that ‘Woohoo! Two babies!’ ” Emily recalled. “We got the fairytale. We know the ending, so far.”
Now the girls are entering their senior year of high school, and share a few twin quirks — they can tell when one is upset or in pain, even when they’re completely apart.
“In upsetting situations, sometimes I won’t get upset, I’ll be like, that’s not a big deal. While she’s over here like, that’s so awful, oh my goodness and freaking out for me,” Lexi said.
“Sometimes I won’t know and she’ll come home and say I had a bad day, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh there it is,’ ” Sydney explained.
And they may be even further apart in just a year — Sydney hopes to go to college at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, while Lexi is aiming for the University of Calgary.
“So not only is it a different state, it’s a different country,” Sydney said.