When you’re exhausted and stressed, do you feel like you’ve aged several years, as if you’ve suddenly grown older? You’re not alone. A new study has revealed that even younger people feel older during the most stressful days, especially when they perceive they have little control over their decisions and their lives in general.
What’s the problem? It may seem like a minor shift in perception, but when we feel older than we really are, the chances of our health deteriorating increase.
Stress ages subjectively
Psychological phenomena do not operate outside the body. Their impact is felt, although not always immediately. In fact, science has already confirmed that depression makes us age faster, literally. It has also established that psychological trauma accelerates ageing. On this occasion, it has been proven that stress ages us subjectively and immediately.
Researchers at North Carolina State University recruited a group of more than 100 young people in their 20s and 30s to understand the impact of stress on perceived age. They asked them to fill out a survey over several consecutive days to determine how much stress they were under on a daily basis, how much control they perceived themselves to have over their lives, and how old they felt they were.
They found that on days when people experienced higher levels of stress, they reported looking and feeling older. However, for this change in their perception to occur, another factor had to come together: a decrease in control over their lives.
Obviously, both the perception of stress and the level of control are relative, as some people can function quite well in stressful environments and tolerate uncertainty. However, when stress overwhelms us and we lose control over what happens, our self-image and self-efficacy are also affected.
The researchers found that the more stressors we experience in a typical day, the older we feel. They calculated that each additional stressor can make us feel at least a year older. In their sample, young people who reported feeling stressed generally perceived themselves as five years older.
Why does stress affect our subjective age?
Regardless of the ravages that chronic stress causes in our body, perceiving that we are not capable of dealing with the demands of the environment and that we are losing control makes us doubt our abilities and exhausts us physically and mentally, so it is understandable that we unconsciously interpret this state as a loss of abilities, something that we associate with aging.
The feeling of not being able to cope with everything, as before, makes us consider the possibility that we are getting older. And when we feel overwhelmed, that is enough to add years to our life.
The problem is that the amount of stress we are experiencing today far exceeds the levels of previous generations, so it is important to be aware of its impact. A previous study carried out with thousands of people at the universities of Montpellier and Florida found that as subjective age increases, so does the risk of hospitalisation.
As if that weren’t enough, feeling older has also been linked to a higher likelihood of suffering from depression, faster cognitive decline and even premature mortality. So it’s not something we should take lightly.
The antidote to feeling younger
Chronological age is the age marked by the calendar. Subjective age is the age you perceive.
The good news is that there is a kind of elixir of eternal youth – at least perceived – and we have it within our reach: physical activity.
Another study that followed more than 10,000 people over a period of 8 to 20 years found that those who did more physical activity felt 30 to 50% younger.
There is no doubt that staying active and fit protects our health, as well as promoting emotional well-being and giving us an extra dose of energy, which will help us feel younger. In addition, physical exercise is also an excellent antidote to stress and, in fact, stimulates the body’s natural regeneration processes.
So now you know, if you’ve had a series of stressful days, instead of lying on the couch thinking about how you’re getting older, you’d better put on your trainers and go out and do some exercise. Your future “self” will thank you.
References:
Lee, S. E. & Neupert, S. D. (2024) The effect of control beliefs on the relationship between daily stressors and subjective age in younger adults. Mental Health Science; 2(2): e56.
Stephan, Y. et. Al (2020) Physical activity and subjective age across adulthood in four samples. Eur J Ageing; 17: 469–476.
Stephan, Y. et. Al. (2016) Feeling Older and Risk of Hospitalization: Evidence From Three Longitudinal Cohorts. Health Psychol; 35(6): 634-637.
