Despite the physical impact aging has on people, leaving many requiring high quality mobility scooters, a study has found that many older people are actually happier than younger adults.
Published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the study analysed data collected from a random sample of 1,546 people aged from between 21 to 99 in San Diego.
After taking part in a phone interview, the people in the study filled in a long survey asking about their physical and mental health. Topics included how happy and satisfied they were with life, as well asking about how anxious, stressed and depressed they were.
The author of the study, Dr Dilip Jeste, who is a geriatric psychiatrist and director of the Center on Healthy Aging at the University of California, San Diego has had his say on the results of the study:
“There’s this idea that old age is bad, it’s all gloom and doom and older people are usually depressed, grumpy and unhappy… but as they got older, it looks like things started getting better for them. It suggests that with age, there’s a progressive improvement in mental health.”
Happiness and wellbeing are often said to take a U-shaped curve throughout life, dipping in middle age before inclining again later in old age.
But the surveys said otherwise. Older people were physically more impaired than the younger ones, due to the natural deterioration of aging, but in mental health, the advantage flipped.
Where younger people were noted as being the unhappiest, their elders were the happiest overall. This study was just a snapshot in time but suggests overall that aging isn’t as bad as people think, and you will continue to have high levels of happiness long into old age.
