71 Posts That Gave People An Unexpected Existential Crisis About Their Age (New Pics)

If scrolling through this collection has made you feel a bit personally attacked about your age, don’t worry. No matter how old you are, a lot of people actually don’t feel their age. 

Kids are a great example. They constantly insist they’re older, and if you tell a toddler they’re small, they will absolutely argue that they’re a grown-up, thank you very much. 

As adults, we tend to do the same thing in reverse. You might be 60 if you look at the date on your birth certificate, and yet pretty much feel like you’re not a day over 35. There’s actually plenty of research to back up this interesting phenomenon and how it impacts us.

Back in 2006, researchers David Rubin and Dorthe Berntsen surveyed 1,470 Danish adults between the ages of twenty and ninety-seven with a pretty simple question: do you feel older, younger, or the same as your actual age? People under twenty-five usually felt a bit older than they actually were. 

But past thirty-nine, it was a whole different story. Seventy percent said they felt younger, twenty-seven percent felt exactly their age, and only two percent said they felt older. So if you’ve ever thought “there’s no way I’m actually this old,” you’re far from the only one.

A more recent survey by financial services company Legal & General found something similar. They asked over 1,000 people about three different versions of their age: chronological, mental, and physical. 

Eight out of ten people said they felt mentally younger than their actual age, and 56% felt physically younger too. The gap also widened over time. By the age of 60, most people felt like they were 42 on the inside.

The survey also looked at what kinds of activities made people feel more youthful. Exploring the outdoors, traveling, going to live events, and socializing all scored high across the board. 

One standout finding, though, was about dancing. For 77% of women, it had a strong connection to feeling young. For men, that number dropped to just 46%. On the flip side, the biggest thing that made people feel older was plain old aches and pains, which affected about a third of respondents.

Here’s the good news, though. Feeling younger than your actual age can genuinely be beneficial for your health. Yannick Stephan and his colleagues at Montpellier University studied 10,000 adults and found that people who felt older than their real age had a 25% higher risk of being hospitalized in the coming years. 

Stephan even suggested that doctors should start asking patients about their subjective age as a simple diagnostic tool. “It’s information obtained by asking a simple question, without taking blood samples and without a medical examination, but it gives precious indications,” he said.

A 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open followed 14,000 adults over the age of 50 for four years.

Researchers found that those with the highest satisfaction with aging had a 43% lower risk of passing away from any cause. They also had lower rates of diabetes, stroke, cancer, and heart disease.