Turn Back the Clock: Don’t Let Stress Add Years to Your Age

In research, there are multiple ways to measure a person’s age, and perhaps the one that matters most at the personal level is subjective age. This is the age that you “feel” yourself to be rather than a count of the number of birthdays you’ve celebrated. And depending on your subjective age, you may not feel that your birthday is much of a reason for celebration anymore.

Our subjective age is influenced by what’s happening inside our bodies and what is happening around us—at the local, community, national, and global levels (Hughes et al., 2021). We are connected to one another, whether we realize that or not, and experiencing trauma or witnessing the traumatic treatment of others, even people we don’t know, affects us—and literally ages us. Stress can play a huge role in our subjective and biological, not chronological, age in a number of ways (Polsky et al., 2022). Stress compromises our bodies’ ability to fight off illness and speeds up the aging process at the cellular level.

If you’re one of the “Boomers” or older “Gen Xers,” you have lived through some significant historical upheavals. On the positive side, we’ve witnessed hard-fought advancements regarding civil rights, voting rights, Fair Housing rulings, reproductive rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the embrace of environmental advocacy and action. These were big wins for our nation, but the need for these victories underscores the pain of these inequities that were present for far too long.

Active participation in these struggles may have caused individual trauma for those directly involved. However, collective trauma is a term that might be applied to folks who witnessed the struggle and anguish and loss of life that it took to achieve these goals. And collective trauma is happening across the nation now as we witness the “shock and awe” efforts of political leaders to shake up the federal government.

The last three weeks of political and governmental upheaval have likely been very impactful for folks born in the 60s and 70s—who witnessed the changes that were enacted when people fought for what we believe is right and good for the nation’s people. Now, as rights are being stripped away and citizens’ lives put in danger by the very body that is charged with protecting the nation and its people, the government, it’s totally normal to feel overwhelmed, fearful, and as if you’ve aged years in a month. Stress totally speeds up the normal aging process and raises your subjective age.

Fortunately, there are some actions you can take to “turn back the clock” and mitigate the damage that the stressors are leaving in their wake. Here are some “anti-aging” strategies that will contribute to your overall well-being:

• Volunteer for a cause you care about. Altruism is healing. Not only that, but spending time around people who are passionate about the changes you want to see come about builds a strong sense of pride, cohesion, and esprit de corps within the group.
• Find community. Connecting with others in positive ways helps us manage stress. Friends serve as stress buffers as they help normalize our feelings, share ideas for coping, and distract us from our worries.
• Get outside. Fresh air and sunshine lift moods, and when your mood is lightened, you’re actively reducing your subjective age, and the younger you feel, the healthier your outlook and your body.
• Limit your time online. Guard against spending too much time marinating in news sites that only confirm your worst fears or generate new ones.
• Learn a new skill. Practicing mindfulness really helps the brain take a break and reset. Or learn a new sport—working out and exercising positively affect the brain by increasing blood flow, generating endorphins, and building new pathways between neurons.

You’re only as old as you feel, and if you’re exposing yourself to stress and trauma-inducing stimuli without an emotional safety plan in place, you’ll be aging yourself a lot quicker than nature would. We can’t keep the world from churning, but we can keep ourselves from being churned up by events we cannot control.