You're not getting older, you're getting happier

A study suggests we get more emotionally stable as we age, letting go of things that bother us and focusing more on quality of life.

By Judy Foreman, Special to the Times
Published July 31, 2007

Good news, folks! Some things actually get better with age, and emotional stability is one of them.

Ever since Freud, psychologists have focused almost exclusively on misery - our fears, depressions, sadness, anger, aggression. Now 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 authoritative Journal of Neuroscience. Australian researchers studied 242 people ages 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 electroencephalograms (EEG), which show the regions of the brain active at any given moment.

The findings suggest people get less neurotic, more able to control fear and more emotionally stable as they age. Those observations fit 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 middle and older years. And a higher brain center, the medial prefrontal cortex, which governs planning and judgment, 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. He is 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, 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 fit with some epidemiological data. A 2004 study from the 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 vs. slightly more than two days for people ages 65 to 74.

Another study, the 2003 National Health Interview Survey, asked people how often they felt sad, hopeless, worthless, or that doing everything was an effort. The least sad were people 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 trend continues - and 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, Boston, and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. For decades he has studied the way people change.

Vaillant, the author of Aging Well, wrote in an e-mail:

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.

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 University's most popular courses, Positive Psychology, said 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.

Even though the odds are good that you will get happier as you age, there's no need to wait. Younger people can learn the basic skills. The first, said Ben-Shahar, is to give yourself permission to feel negative emotions such as 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, he said, 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."

Judy Foreman, a former staff writer at the Boston Globe, writes about health.

[Last modified July 30, 2007, 12:15:46]