Mind over matter, matters more than you think

 How your beliefs around age shape how you live and surf.

I recently put out some content around being a surfer who doesn’t surf anymore. I can personally relate to there sometimes being a bit of reluctance towards paddling out, even if I love it and always come back happier and more relaxed. That was the seed for that content. …but it turns out that content uncovered that a lot of people feel like their age is why they don’t surf as much anymore. So I decided to look into this aspect of surfing and aging. How does our belief around aging affect how we relate to it. Because a lot of what I heard after putting out that content didn’t sound like avoidance. It sounds like acceptance. …but maybe that acceptance is premature.

What I got back after that content was a lot of this:

“I just don’t have the body for it anymore.”

“Age is a real thing.”

“I’m just getting too old to do it like I used to.”

And age is the most respectable excuse there is, because very few people argue with that. It’s hard to challenge it without dismissing real challenges that people experience. Nobody really says “are you sure?” when you blame your age. It closes the conversation instead of opening it. And that’s exactly what makes it worth a second look, not because it’s never true, but because beliefs alone have a much bigger effect than most realize.

The Science

There’s a real, well-documented body of research showing that believing you’re too old to do something doesn’t just describe your decline. It can speed it along, perhaps we can even go so far as to say it causes it. Which means the sentence “I don’t surf as much because I’m getting older” isn’t a neutral fact you’re reporting. It might be the thing doing some of the damage.

The belief is part of the mechanism, not just the description

The person who’s spent the most time on this is a Yale researcher named Becca Levy. Her core finding, first published in 2002, still holds up as one of the more startling results in health psychology: people who held positive beliefs about their own aging, measured by how they responded to statements like “as you get older, you are less useful”, lived about 7.5 years longer than people who held negative ones. She tracked 660 people in an Ohio town for 23 years to get that number, and controlled for the obvious confounders: baseline health, socioeconomic status, loneliness. …let me repeat that in case you didn’t catch it. If you have positive beliefs around age and aging you live 7,5 years longer on average even if you have poor health, lower socioeconomic status.

Seven and a half years is a big number on its own. What really is astounding is if you compare it with other longevity interventions. Keeping your blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight in check, or quitting smoking, or exercising regularly, each of those adds somewhere between one and four years of life expectancy, according to the standard estimates. A belief you’re carrying around, one you might not even notice you have, outperformed all of them. That’s astounding.

It really raises the questions, what other beliefs do you carry about yourself and how do they limit you. …or even, how do they change you?

Levy’s explanation is called Stereotype Embodiment Theory, and the basic idea is this: we absorb messages about what aging means starting in childhood, long before it applies to us. From every “over the hill” joke, every ad that treats older people as slower and more fragile, every offhand comment. Those messages sit dormant. Then, as we get older, they become self-relevant, and they start operating largely without our noticing, through three channels at once: psychological (how much stress and threat you feel about your own capability), behavioral (whether you keep moving, keep showing up, keep trying), and biological (measurable physiological effects — chronic stress raises cortisol, and cortisol degrades muscle over time).

The 2002 study tracked outcomes over decades, which makes it powerful but a little abstract as well. It’s hard to feel 23 years of consequence. A more recent study makes the mechanism easier to see close up and show’s beliefs can have immediate impact.

Researchers with a large Irish aging study (TILDA) followed almost 4,800 adults over 50 for two years and measured something concrete: how fast people walked, using a standard timed mobility test. People who held negative beliefs about aging, specifically the belief that decline is uncontrollable and inevitable, not just that aging exists, got measurably slower over that two-year window than people who didn’t hold those beliefs. The gap wasn’t subtle: people with strong negative beliefs slowed down by about 1.38 seconds on the test, versus 0.54 seconds for everyone else. And this was after accounting for where people started — their baseline health, their existing mobility, and their medications.

What actually happens

The researchers proposed two things were happening at once. One is behavioral: when you write off a new ache or a bad week as “well, that’s just what happens at this age” you quietly stop pushing against it. You skip the walk. You put off calling the doctor because it feels like a foregone conclusion rather than something worth investigating. That’s confirmation bias doing its job, once you expect decline, you notice the evidence for it and allow it to happen. You stop noticing the evidence against it. The other is more directly physiological: believing that your body is on a track you can’t influence is itself a chronic stressor, and chronic stress has a real biological cost.

Neither of these requires you to delude yourself. That’s what makes it hard to catch. The belief doesn’t feel like avoidance or excuses. It feels like realism. Believing the opposite is what makes you stick out, what makes you seem delusional even. This research doesn’t stop there, it gets better. A 12-year study of adults 65 and older found that a meaningful share of people didn’t just hold steady, they *improved* on measures of cognition and physical function over that period. About 32% improved on cognitive measures, and 28% improved on walking speed.  Positive age beliefs reliably predicted who ended up in the group that improved.

That’s a different claim than “a positive attitude slows the decline”.  The data suggests you can with your beliefs move the needle toward getting better, not just declining more slowly. Which means “I’m too old for that now” isn’t just possibly premature. It might be actively foreclosing an outcome that was still available.

Back to the water

So here’s where this connects to the original question. When I said the “surfer who never surfs” isn’t lazy, I meant that the excuse, whatever it is, is usually standing in for something harder: grief, fear, the thing you don’t want to face when you paddle back out. Age turns out to be one of the most convincing versions of that excuse, because it doesn’t feel like an excuse at all. It feels like biology. Nobody questions biology.

But the research says the line between “my body genuinely can’t do this anymore” and “I believe my body can’t do this anymore and therefore it can’t” is a lot blurrier than it feels from the inside. Believing decline is inevitable changes your behavior. You paddle out less, you push less hard when you do. This changes your physiology, through the same stress pathways that show up in a slower walking test two years later. The belief doesn’t just describe the surfer who never surfs. In a real, measurable number of cases, it’s part of what wrote the story.

I don’t think the answer is pretending your body is 25 when it isn’t. It’s noticing when “I’m too old for this” starts showing up and allow it a little less. Keep believing and you can keep doing. Don’t avoid finding out what’s actually still possible, because it’s easier not to look.

What to do

The science on what to do to change your beliefs is less thick, sadly. From the research presented, the beliefs we talk about are deeper beliefs that have formed over a life time. Those are not changed through simple tricks and positive mantras. 

However, through my years of practicing I have found that when it comes to changing deeply rooted beliefs, hypnotherapy is the most effective method. If you want to know more about that, book in for a consultation and we can talk about what that looks like. It’s free of charge and there’s no obligation towards further comitment. 

Sources:

Levy, B.R., Slade, M.D., Kunkel, S.R., & Kasl, S.V. (2002), “Longevity Increased by Positive Self-Perceptions of Aging,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology / [Yale News summary](https://news.yale.edu/2002/07/29/thinking-positively-about-aging-extends-life-more-exercise-and-not-smoking).

Robertson, D.A., King-Kallimanis, B.L., & Kenny, R.A. (2016), “Negative Perceptions of Aging and Decline in Walking Speed: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,”

PLOS ONE. “Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs,” (2026), Journal of Ageing and Longevity, MDPI.

Levy, B.R. (2009), “Stereotype Embodiment: A Psychosocial Approach to Aging,” Current Directions in Psychological Science.*

Do you want to shift your beliefs?

Our beliefs didn’t develop over night and can need a bit of deeper work to shift. Book in for a free consultation and let’s have a conversation about what that work looks like.