Why Do We Want to Look Younger?
Do you remember as a child thinking that “When I grow up, I’m never going to do anything to change my looks! I’m just going to look the way I will look when I become an old person. Why can’t old people just accept how they look when they get old?” Of course when I was thinking these things I was around 10 and my idea of being old was perhaps 40.
However, as the ensuing decades passed my thoughts about this topic began to change. This puzzled me, especially since as a kid I was so darn sure that looking older was never going to bother me.
Then about six months ago I learned of a simple but enlightening study done by two PhD psychologists. They interviewed a large sample of two groups of people all of whom were over 60 years of age at the time. They were matched in all respects that these researchers could control for except for one major characteristic. Half of them enjoyed very good health, and half of them were quite unwell. The unhealthy group suffered with things like severe congestive heart failure, severe COPD, extreme obesity, diffuse severe degenerative connective tissue disease or arthritis, and other assorted mobility and activity limiting end-stage diseases and conditions.
These researchers asked each person just one question. “Compared to your chronological age, how old do you feel like you are IN YOUR MIND?” (Let’s call this one’s “mind age.”) The healthy group answered this question just like the way I feel. And the answer they gave was “Thirty years younger.” This does not surprise me. The real shocker was the answer that the severely unwell group gave in response to the same question. The response they gave averaged out to be a completely unexpected: “Twenty years younger than my actual age!” Can you believe it?! I would have thought they would have said something like “Thirty years OLDER.”
There is one more thing that we should acknowledge in order to understand my conclusion about all of this. So, to lead us there, consider how others treat us when we are conversing with them person to person. Do they treat us in accordance with the age we LOOK or the age we FEEL within ourselves? Shocker: We are treated the way we look. And if we look the age we chronologically are instead of our mind age it causes us a certain amount of emotional stress.
No wonder we feel better and are more comfortable within our own skin and psyche when we look younger than our chronological age. There is less stress for us that way. And if we look 30 years younger, well then, we actually feel fantastic. And we therefore probably start off our relationship with a person who thinks we are younger with a warm and fuzzy feeling toward them.
All of us can be skillfully guided into looking younger. It takes both a healthy lifestyle and well trained experienced aesthetic providers. This description applies to each of us five providers at Carter MD Aesthetics. We will be honored to lessen the difference between your appearance age and your mind age. So keep this in mind and get on the schedule to become your happiest self!
William A. Carter, M.D.
Carter MD Aesthetics