How Anxiety About Aging Accelerates Aging

“Stress makes your hair turn gray” is a well-known thing (it’s only one factor in hair turning gray, and neither a necessary nor uniquely sufficient factor, but it is a factor).

See also: Can You Reverse Gray Hair? A Dermatologist Explains

But gray hair is trivial (it’s health-neutral in and of itself, and does not necessarily denote ill-health, though ill-health can increase its likelihood), and there’s a lot more to aging than that.

Biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:

• Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
• Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
• Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
• Cellular markers or aging (e.g. telomere length)
• …and more, but we only have so much room here

Learn more: Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

So, how about the impact of anxiety on aging? And how about, in particular, the impact of anxiety about aging?

Young at heart (and brain, and gut, and kidneys, and…)

Researchers (Dr. Mariana Rodrigues et al.) from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases investigated this, and found that that women who worry about growing older, particularly fears around declining health, may experience faster biological aging at a cellular level.

Dr. Rodrigues and her team looked at data from 726 women (average age 50.4 years) who participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. Participants reported how much they worried about different aspects of aging, including declining attractiveness, worsening health, and fertility loss.

Blood samples were then used to assess biological aging through two epigenetic clock models:

• DunedinPACE measures the current pace at which the body is aging
• GrimAge2 estimates cumulative biological damage and mortality risk

What they found was quite telling, as some factors were a lot more relevant than others (and some, it seems, weren’t relevant at all).

For example, women who worried more about their future health showed a faster pace of biological aging, reflected in higher scores with the aforementioned epigenetic clocks (that’s bad). In contrast, anxiety about appearance or fertility didn’t show a meaningful association with these aging markers at all.

You can find the paper itself, here: Aging anxiety and epigenetic aging in a national sample of adult women in the United States

So, what to do about that?

Well, first there are quite general approaches. For example, we have written previously about:

• How To Set Anxiety Aside
• How To Reduce Chronic Stress

…and, for that matter, even: The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)

And when it comes to fear of aging and all that might come with it, it is good to consider: When The World Moves Without Us… Can We Side-Step Age-Related Alienation?

It’s also worth meeting some physical health concerns head-on.

On the one hand, in a lot of ways you really can “think yourself younger”, as per: When Age Is A Flexible Number

On the other hand, sometimes you need to acknowledge challenges in order to meet them. We haven’t really done a main feature on this yet, but we did touch on it in: Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)

…because what’s key here is ensuring that you do have what you need to meet those challenges. In the article we just linked, it’s about chronic pain, but the same philosophy applies to chronic adverse health conditions of all kinds, and certainly goes for disabilities also.

“Disabled” can be a bit frightening as a word, especially to Americans specifically, given how the culture prizes independence and self-reliance.

A recent survey of 3,881 Americans aged 50–95 (of whom, 1,353 from Michigan) found that many older Americans avoid the disability label even though far more report significant functional limits (there’s a medical word for those, and guess what, that word is “disability”).

Some notes about numbers:

• Disability incidence: about ⅓ of people aged 65–74 and more than 44% of those over 75 had difficulties with hearing, seeing, walking, climbing stairs, dressing, bathing, concentrating, remembering, working, or leaving the home
• ADA-related conditions: when asked about conditions such as speech or breathing difficulties that would qualify for accommodations under disability law, half of adults aged 65 to 74 and about ⅔ of older respondents reported disability-level needs
• The accommodations gap: fewer than 1 in 5 older adults had ever received a healthcare accommodation and only 1 in 4 had asked for one

And yet, studies show that people who do identify as disabled have higher self-esteem, less depression and anxiety, and stronger self-efficacy, and it has been noted that the disability community often works together to solve problems that others ignore:

Source: Many older Americans don’t see themselves as disabled, survey finds

Now, the word itself may not change your life. It’s just a word. But, you might want to consider:

• Find people who are older than you whom you admire
• Find people who are more disabled than you whom you admire
  • Not in a “disability porn” way! If you’ve not encountered that phrase before, no, it’s not about a sexual fetish; rather it is used by many disabled people to refer to how abled people will put certain “inspirational” disabled people on a pedestal—and then hold all disabled people to those standards. And now suddenly Peggy from accounting has to live up to Trischa Zorn (very successful Paralympian whose blindness has of course not interfered with winning 55 medals for swimming), forgetting that Paralympians might have a disability in one area but are still Olympians and have absurd abilities in other areas that the other 99.99999% of humanity do not. But rather, you just happen to admire someone who, coincidentally, also happens to be disabled, or more disabled than you are.
• Be prepared! Do not fret about disability aids. If it helps, it helps. Do you wear glasses? That’s a disability aid. If you’re not afraid of glasses, or don’t think that someone wearing glasses makes them a lesser person, then get that grippy jar opener, get yourself a cane if it helps.
  • Writer’s anecdote: my usually trivial EDS had a ridiculous flare-up these past few days, to the point I could barely go up and down stairs; my knees were just giving out constantly; I had to strategize and use supports. Now [I’m doing much better again, back to normal, and/but] I’ve ordered myself a cute cane, and a differently cute folding travel cane. More than 99% of the time I’m the last person to need such things; my lower body is very strong and I am broadly in excellent health. But for the <1% of the time that my body says “Yes but is it really? We’re not convinced, so why don’t we just collapse your joints for you to save you from overloading them”, it means I can navigate steps without risk of disaster. So if you’ve been putting off getting something that “Well, I don’t realllllly need it”, then this is your sign to get it in ready just in case. Sincerely, I had to improvize with a non-handled stick to get around my house because I didn’t already have a made-for-purpose cane. So, do better than I did!

Want to learn more?

You should definitely check out this excellent book we reviewed a while back:

This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism – by Ashton Applewhite

…and the equally highly recommendable:

Women Rowing North – by Dr. Mary Pipher

Take care!