London - They say you’re as old as you feel.
For some people, that means they are lucky enough to feel several years younger than they really are. For the more world-weary, it usually means they feel several years older.
But a new study has found that some of us feel genuinely “ageless” - more than one in 20 people don’t have an “age they feel inside”.
These “ageless” people don’t think about how old they feel inside and instead just enjoy the company of others right across the age spectrum.
Psychology researcher Sengul Kupeli-Holt from Southampton University said the study exposed the common psychological myth that everyone has a subjective age that’s different from their real age.
She said: “Contrary to what researchers have assumed, many people simply do not have an age on the inside – they are ageless. Only for some people who are agebound is age part of their identity.”
In the study, 1 114 women and men were asked to report a range of subjective ages that they identified with.
The study found 6.5 percent said they did not have a subjective age - they effectively regarded themselves as ageless.
Almost 10 percent said they definitely did have a subjective age – “I always feel 18 inside” – and were classified as “agebound”. The remainder were on a spectrum between the two extremes.
Ms Kupeli-Holt found ageless and agebound people were evenly spread across chronological ages, gender and levels of education.
She warned that being fixated with age could lead to severe stress.
“It tends to make you more susceptible to being stressed about your age, even to the point of post traumatic stress disorder if they can’t cope with the fact they are steadily getting older than their subjective age. There’ s an internal tension at work,” she said.
“But to look on the positive side, agebound people tend to be healthier than their peers and this may be because they look after themselves more so they look and feel younger.
“Some people, however, really don’t care about age at all, they really think they are ageless.
“They are not bothered about how old other people are, how they dress or behave, and they have friends of all ages.
“It’s liberating because they completely ignore the issue of age whereas it’s something most people think about a lot.”
The research was presented at the British Psychological Society conference in Liverpool recently.
Daily Mail