The key to understanding why you feel older some days might be in how you see yourself.
Feeling really stressed out can make you feel more than 10 years older.
Just one stressful event, over and above the norm, can make a young adult feel one year older, psychologists have found.
Dr Shevaun Neupert, study co-author, said:
“Emerging adults are at an age where they are no longer kids, but they haven’t settled into their adulthood yet.
We wanted to know if stress affected their subjective age – how old they felt – and we found that it could make a big difference.”
Stress ages you
For the study, the researchers followed 106 people aged 18 to 22 over 8 days.
The results showed that as their stress levels changed, so did the age they felt.
Dr Neupert said:
“Stress was the determining factor.
It could be stress related to school, work or social circumstances, but stressful days led to study participants feeling older.”
The effect of stress was additive, said Dr Neupert:
“The more stressors someone experienced, over and above their average day, the older they felt.
We calculated that each additional stressor made people feel an average of at least one year older.
There was also an effect of being generally ‘stressed out’ such that young adults who were generally more stressed felt an additional five years older.”
Identity matters
This levels was increased to 11 years older when they were under a lot of pressure.
How old people felt under stress depended on how fixed their identity was.
Those with a more fixed identity reported little change to subjective age.
Dr Neupert said:
“We know that children often report feeling older than they actually are.
And that adults often report feeling younger.
This work helps us understand the role that emerging adulthood plays as a crossover period from one to the other – as well as the importance of stress in influencing fluctuations during that transition.”
The study was published in the journal Emerging Adulthood (Bellingtier et al., 2018).
