America’s life expectancy is at an all-time high right now, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Women are still expected to live longer than men - a decades-long trend - with an average life expectancy of 81.4 years and men are expected to live at least 75.8 years.
But life expectancy is not a fixed point and experts say how you approach life contributes to longevity - especially if you maintain a healthy mindset.
Previous research shows that there’s real-world power in positive thinking.
“When people repeatedly imagine the future as limited or declining, which a lot of people aging do, the brain begins to kind of reinforce those expectations,” Deepika Chopra, a health psychologist, told The New York Times on Thursday. “But if we can consciously direct attention toward even something small, a small positive future moment every day,” she said, the brain will anticipate good things in the future.
People who feel they have something to look forward to are more likely to follow medical advice, get more physical activity and maintain social connections. Socializing helps us to release endorphins, “happy” and anti-inflammatory hormones that relieve pain and strengthen our immune system.
A 5% longer lifespan
Many studies over the past two decades have linked positivity to improved well-being.
Higher levels of optimism have been tied to living beyond age 90 in women, researchers at Harvard found in 2022. Of nearly 160,000 women, those who were the most optimistic were likely to have a 5.4 percent longer lifespan and a 10 percent greater likelihood of living beyond 90.
Other studies showed that students who were the most pessimistic as students tended to die younger than their classmates, and nuns who wrote more positive autobiographies in their twenties also outlived those who wrote more negative accounts, according to a review of research conducted by the University of Illinois.
Positive feelings about aging were tied to improved thinking skills and walking speed in 45 percent of 11,000 seniors who were monitored for a decade, in a recent study from Yale researchers, and a 2023 study found that people with more positive feelings about aging reported less frequent concentration or focus problems.
So, why does a sunny disposition help?
Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Michael Scheier says optimism helps people adapt to difficulties better than pessimism.
“The reason why pessimists and optimists obtain better or worse [life] outcomes, is that they really cope differently with challenges and stress,” he told the Cal Alumni Association in 2023.
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Pessimism seems to have more of an impact on our health, he noted.
That’s why negative mental health conditions are risk factors for heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes and stroke.
Feeling negative emotions, such as stress, raises our levels of the hormone cortisol. Too much exposure to the hormone can disrupt the body’s processes, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“Not being pessimistic is, I would say, more important for your health than being optimistic,” Scheier says. “Both make a difference, but if you had to choose one, it’s better not to be pessimistic.”
It may also have to do with the frequency of pessimistic feelings.
“It’s not that people who are optimistic don’t get stressed or don’t get angry, but it happens less frequently,” Josh Klapow, a clinical psychologist and behavioral scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told TODAY.com. “So physiologically, it puts them at less risk for all of the negative consequences that we know from stress.”
An easy way to be more positive? Make sure to laugh today.
“When you can laugh at life, you feel less stressed,” the Mayo Clinic advises.
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