Good news,
folks! Some things actually get better with age,
and I’m happy to say that emotional stability is
one of them. It says so right in the
authoritative Journal of Neuroscience.
Ever since
Freud, psychologists have focused almost
exclusively on misery –- our fears, our
depressions, sadness, anger, hostility,
aggression, you name it. Now, thank goodness,
the young discipline of “positive psychology” is
gaining ground as psychologists and
neuroscientists try to figure out what makes
people happy.
One of the
most provocative studies in this new field was
published last summer in the neuroscience
journal. Australian researchers studied 242
healthy people aged 12 to 79. The subjects were
shown pictures of fearful faces and happy faces,
while their brain responses were tracked with
functional MRI scans and EEG, or
electroencephalograms, which show the regions of
the brain active at any given moment. The
findings suggest that people get less neurotic,
more able to control fear, and more emotionally
stable as they age, an observation that fits
with other data.
Specifically, the Australian team found that the
amygdala –- a deep brain center for processing
raw feelings, especially fear -– becomes less
reactive to fearful stimuli between older and
middle years, while a higher brain center, the
medial prefrontal cortex, which governs planning
and judgement, gets more active between the
middle and later years.
This
suggests that healthy, older people “are less
bothered by things. They are more in control of
their reactions to fear,” said Dr. Andrew
Leuchter, director of the Laboratory of Brain,
Behavior and Pharmacology at the David Geffen
School of Medicine at UCLA.
The
findings also suggest that aging is not only
linked to “putting the brakes on” negative
emotions, but to “releasing the brakes” on
positive emotions, said Lea Williams [cq], a
neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in
Australia and lead author of the study. These
findings, she said in an e-mail, “are consistent
with people reporting that they focus more on
quality of life as they get older. Our many
experiences do impact our emotional brain
systems in a way that helps attain a better
sense of comfort with oneself and the world.”
The
neuroscience data fits with some epidemiological
data. A 2004 study from the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention showed that young
people report more sad, blue or depressed days
per month than older people – 3.4 per month for
20 to 24 year olds, versus just over 2 days for
people 65 to 74.
Another
government study, the 2003 National Health
Interview Survey, asked people how often they
felt sad, hopeless, worthless or that everything
was an effort. The least sad were people aged 65
to 74. Only 2.6 percent of this group said they
felt sad all or most of the time, in contrast to
3 percent of the 18 to 44 year olds. After age
75, however, it's not clear whether the happy
trend continues -- and a lot more research is
needed.
The idea
that many people do indeed mellow with age makes
sense to Dr. George Vaillant, a senior
psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and
director of the Harvard Study of Adult
Development who for decades has studied the way
people change over the years.
Older
people “modulate emotion better than the young,
which lets them be more ‘Buddhist’ and thus
happier because their frontal lobes are better
connected to their limbic system,” the deeper
region of the brain where emotions are
processed, wrote Vaillant, the author of “Aging
Well,” in an e-mail.
The
general trend toward greater happiness with age
makes sense to Harvard’s chief happiness guru
Tal Ben-Shahar, too. Ben-Shahar, who taught one
of Harvard College’s most popular courses,
“Positive Psychology, said in an e-mail
interview that “one of the reasons why we are
happier with age is that we simplify our lives.
We focus on what’s really important to us, while
discarding things that are less personally
meaningful.”
"When we
experience negative emotions, we are more
accepting and also are secure in the knowledge
that ‘this, too, shall pass,’” he said.
Evolution
may also play a role in helping people get less
fearful and more sanguine with age, said
biological anthropologist Helen Fisher of
Rutgers University.
“A young
person has everything to look forward to and
everything to gain or lose,” she said. It make
sense for younger people to watch out for
negative things that might kill them, while
older people who have already succeeded in
passing on their genes have less to fear, she
said. "It’s now adaptive for them to be less
vigilant about all the exigencies of life, to
stay calm and keep others calm.”
Even
though the odds are good that you will get
happier as you age, there’s no need to wait.
Younger people, like those in Ben-Sharar’s
Harvard classes, can learn the basic skills. The
first, he said, is to give yourself permission
to feel negative emotions like sadness, fear or
anxiety. The sooner you do, the faster these
feelings will pass.
It’s also
key, he said, to engage regularly in activities
that you find pleasurable and meaningful.
Remember, too, that happiness is mostly
“dependent on our state of mind, not on our
status or the status of our bank account.
Barring extreme circumstances, our level of
well-being is determined by what we choose to
focus on and by our interpretation of external
events.”
To which I
say: Amen!
