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We feel young for longer and longer

17.5.2023

Translation: machine translated

Most people feel younger than they are in years. This subjective rejuvenation effect not only increases with age, but also from generation to generation.

How old do you feel? The older you are, the further your objective and perceived years of life are likely to have diverged. And this subjective "rejuvenation effect" increases from generation to generation. This was calculated by a research team using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large German long-term study. Almost 15,000 adults aged 40 and over answered the question about their subjective age several times between 1996 and 2020.

It was already known that most people from midlife onwards do not feel as old as they objectively are. The group led by psychologist Markus Wettstein from Berlin's Humboldt University now wanted to find out how this effect changes not only with increasing age, but also across generations.

The analysis of the SOEP data showed that, on average, people in Germany feel around 11.5 per cent younger than they actually are - so at the age of 60, they feel like they are in their early 50s on average. Although subjective age also increases with age, it does not increase at the same rate as true age, but at an increasingly slower rate: the rejuvenation effect increases by 1.6 per cent every ten years.

According to our own perception, we are ageing ever more slowly

And the effect even increases with each generation. People today are subjectively ageing more slowly than they did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. On average, a 60-year-old today feels two per cent younger than a 60-year-old ten years ago. This means that the "younger" generations, born between 1952 and 1974, feel 13 per cent younger at the age of 40 and up to 17 per cent younger than they are at 65.

However, not everyone feels young to the same extent. On average, it is stronger for women than for men and stronger for West Germans than for East Germans. It is also less pronounced among lonely and chronically ill people.

Subjective age is considered a "biopsychosocial marker": the younger you feel, the better your physical and mental fitness and well-being. However, this also increases some health risks, such as contracting Covid-19, as the research group reports. Feeling younger also shows a perceived distance (dissociation) from one's own age group, which is definitely perceived as old. The increasingly younger subjective age could therefore reflect the trend towards negative age stereotypes.

Spectrum of science

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