When Velandai Srikanth turned 60, a colleague asked, “So when are you going to retire?”—a question that struck him not for its intent, but for what it revealed: the quiet, pervasive stigma of ageing, even among the accomplished. As director of the National Centre for Healthy Ageing, Srikanth has spent his career studying how we grow older, yet still felt the weight of assumptions that equate age with decline. But a landmark 12-year US study of 11,000 adults aged 50 to 99 suggests that how we think about ageing may be just as important as how we treat our bodies. Led by Yale’s Prof Becca Levy and Dr Martin Slade, the research found that people with positive attitudes toward ageing didn’t just maintain their physical and cognitive abilities—they often improved. Over an average follow-up of eight years, 44% of participants actually got better at walking speed and cognitive tasks, defying the narrative of inevitable deterioration. “Many people have examples in their own lives or can point to people that do show improvement in later life, but we tend to classify them as exceptions or exemplars,” Levy says. This study shows they may be far more common than we think—especially among those who enter later life with optimism.
Attitudes were measured using tools like the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale, which assesses beliefs through statements such as “The older I get, the more useless I feel” and “I am as happy now as I was when I was younger.” Levy also asked participants to list words associated with ageing—a simple exercise that often begins with “wrinkles” or “frail” but ends, by the fifth word, with “wisdom” or “experience.” That shift matters. A positive mindset doesn’t erase biology, but it shapes behaviour. As Prof Julia Lappin of UNSW and Neuroscience Research Australia explains, staying cognitively, physically, and socially active is key to brain health—and positivity fuels those actions. In communities where older adults remain visibly active, a kind of ripple effect takes hold. “You see that person down the road, he’s 93, he still walks to the beach every day, and you think, ‘Well, I’m 92, I should be able to do it,’” Lappin says.
Crucially, positive ageing isn’t about denying challenges—it’s about refusing to conflate age with illness. “Age is not disease; age is just time,” Srikanth insists. That distinction empowers people to act: a sore hip isn’t an inevitable burden of years, but a signal to seek help, move more, or see a physiotherapist. The real obstacle isn’t biology—it’s ageism, one of the last socially acceptable prejudices. Fighting it means redefining what it means to grow older—not as a slow fade, but as a phase rich with possibility. As the global population ages, the way we think about ageing may become one of our most powerful public health tools.