Research Hit: How Your Mind Slows Aging

New research shows that anxiety over aging is related to larger degradation in DNA biological clocks

So does this support the expression, “You’re only as old as you feel”?

Yes, it does. In my review of aging well below I mentioned two articles that have found similar things.

1. Positive views of your self and future selves was predictive of how well you age.
2. Subjective age, how old you feel, predicts your functional age. If you feel younger, you show the effects of age less: you age slower.

[embed]Ageing Well Who wouldn't want to age well and stay active and healthy well into old age? The science shows us how, and there was…leadingbrainsreview.substack.com

That’s already good to know!

Indeed — these are all promising but are not related to biological data on aging — they review the psychological characteristics of aging. I do say, though, that psychology follows biology i.e. if you feel younger your biology will also say your younger.

And this is precisely what Mariana Rodrigues and colleagues of New York University explored. Specifically the examined data from 726 women participating in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. In this they reported how anxious they were about various feature of aging such as becoming less attractive, developing health problems, or being too old to have children.

But the interesting part is they then collected blood samples to get measures of two well known “epigenetic clocks”.

What on earth is an epigenetic clock?

Good question. An epigenetic clock measure changes in expression of DNA over time. As you may know different features change in our DNA or in the Mitochondria in our cells (that house our DNA) over time and based on environmental influences. We can consider this our DNA aging.

These two “clocks” measure speed of biological aging (this “clock” is known as DunedinPACE) and accumulated biological damage over time (this “clock” is known as, suitably, GrimAge2).

And what this they find?

Those women who reported higher levels of anxiety about growing older showed signs of faster epigenetic aging according to the DunedinPACE clock.

So worrying about aging makes you age faster?!

That would seem to be the case. It seems like this anxiety is related to aging. It could be that the anxiety itself changes aging by introducing more low level chronic stress into the system or that being positive has healing effects (based on release of various hormones and transmitters).

That sounds fantastic!

Yes, it certainly does sound like: think positive to change your biology!

But there are, as usual, some caveats. First they noted that it was only the anxiety of aging and health concerns that was related with this change in the biological clock. Some of that could also be due to changes over lifetimes. For example, as we mature many of us focus much less on things like attractiveness.

The biggest challenge is that this was not a longitudinal study but rather a snapshot in time. A longitudinal study would be necessary to give more confidence of this i.e. measure anxiety of aging over time and biological changes over time. But still that would be correlational and not caustaional.

To be a causative study we would heave to change people’s perspectives and then measure biological aging and see if there is an impact.

But surely as you say there would be positive benefits from thinking positively?!

It makes sense — as a masters athlete I can certainly say that attitude to life and aging impacts a lot — as some of you know I am a track athlete and I am, at 57, running faster times than I was in my 20s…and I was very active and athletic in my 20s also (but not active as a track athlete).

And as I mentioned there are plenty of plausible biological explanations such as low level stress that impacts aging and so on and so forth. But I would recommend not just thinking you’re young, or not worrying about aging, but also engaging in activities that keep you young.

That includes exercise, being cognitive active, but also engaging with younger people in the community.

[embed]How Seven Habits Boost Brain Function and Lower Depression Risk You’ve written before on healthy habits and improved brain function and decreased risk of brain degeneration — how is…andyhab.medium.com

Originally published on my Substack

Reference

Mariana Rodrigues, Jemar R. Bather, Adolfo G. Cuevas. Aging anxiety and epigenetic aging in a national sample of adult women in the United States. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2026; 184: 107704 DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2025.107704