By Hannah Singleton
National Geographic
While aging is often portrayed as a slow decline, scientists say that view overlooks the bigger picture.
“Everyone talks about aging as this decline,” said Michelle Feng, chief clinical officer at Executive Mental Health and a licensed psychologist who specializes in geriatric psychology and medicine. “But aging is just living. It literally means that you’re alive.”
How you choose to think about aging makes a big difference in how you experience it, she adds. Studies show that people who hold more positive beliefs about aging are more likely to have better cognitive health, fewer mental health issues, and even a longer lifespan.
A positive outlook “leads to better cognition, cognitive health, lower likelihood of depression and anxiety later in life,” Feng said..
So what improves with age? From emotional resilience to sharper decision-making, here’s what the research shows.
1. You get better at handling stress
Stress doesn’t disappear with age, but our response to it changes. “Older people have a lot more ability to understand stressful or difficult circumstances, and they’re actually better able to manage [stress] than they are when they’re younger,” said Aanand Naik, executive director of the UTHealth Houston Consortium on Aging.
One reason why is that many older adults have developed strategies to deal with recurring challenges. “Older adults have more experience generally, but they have more experience with specific situations and have strategies on how to manage and address them,” Naik said.
Part of it is also physical: A 2023 study found that older adults aged 65-84 had lower cortisol levels and heart rate reactivity during a lab-based stress test compared to adults aged 18-30. They also reported feeling less stressed overall.
2. You become more emotionally resilient
It’s not just the stress response that changes with age—our emotions shift, too. “As you get older, you have a bit more emotional intelligence and emotional adaptability,” Naik said. Feng agrees, adding that “older adults tend to be a little bit better at avoiding negative affect and maintaining the positive affect.”
That shift may be partly neurological. Younger adults tend to suppress emotions using prefrontal brain regions—a strategy linked with more internal stress. Older adults, however, more frequently use a technique called reappraisal, reframing situations to find meaning or perspective. This shift makes many people less emotionally reactive, but may also help explain why older adults report greater overall emotional well-being.
3. Experience makes you wiser
While certain kinds of memory and processing speed decline with age, others—such as vocabulary and long-term knowledge—remain steady or even improve. Researchers call this crystalized intelligence: “It’s your knowledge base,” Feng said.. Both she and Naik refer to it more broadly as wisdom.
In some cultures, that wisdom isn’t just acknowledged—it defines the role of aging itself. A study from Japan’s Awaji Island found that older adults consistently outperformed younger individuals in traditional ecological knowledge, a finding researchers refer to as the “wisdom of the elders.”
A 2025 review by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa found that across many Indigenous cultures, including among Native Hawaiians, Māori, and Inuit, elderhood is a respected role earned by preserving cultural traditions and guiding the next generation.
4. You stop caring what everyone else is doing
Older adults often report that they care less about what others think and spend less time comparing themselves to others. This aligns with socioemotional selectivity theory, which suggests that as people perceive their time as dwindling, they narrow their focus.
“How much time you feel like you have left in life determines how you prioritize things,” Feng said. “When your time is more limited, you may focus more on emotionally rich or meaningful things that can benefit you now, instead of in the future.“
5. Yes, sex can still be great
Sexual satisfaction doesn’t necessarily decline with age, and in some cases, it improves. “For people in committed relationships, sexual lives often get better in your fifties,” Naik said. “I don’t know if some of that is because if you’ve had children and many of them have been out of the house, but we have studies of people until their 70s and 80s who still have regular sexual relationships. So it’s not like it goes away.”
Both men and women report higher sexual satisfaction with aging, but women may especially benefit. One study found that women aged 55–80+ reported higher orgasm satisfaction, even as physical arousal declined. Many women who weren’t sexually active still described high sexual satisfaction overall.
6. Your happiness may peak later than you think
Despite what pop culture tells us, your 20s aren’t necessarily the happiest decade of your life. For years, extensive studies suggested that happiness follows a U-curve: It’s highest in early adulthood, dips in midlife, and rises again in the 50s and beyond.
However, more recent research challenges that notion, showing that happiness can continue to climb with age. Elderly adults often recall midlife as one of the most positive periods, and many report life satisfaction peaking in their 60s and 70s.
7. Your mindset shapes how you age
One of the biggest myths about aging is that it’s out of your control, but adopting this mindset can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “If people think that depression is a normal part of aging, then you’re kind of setting yourself up,” Feng said. “But it’s not. You have to sort of know these things in order to figure out: how do I want to age?”
A 2002 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with a positive attitude toward aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those who internalized negative stereotypes.
“We should understand that [aging] is not prescribed,” Feng said. “We really have so much more control over how we age than we think we do, and that can empower you to make decisions that are good for you.”
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