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IT’S A FUNNY OLD WORLD

by | Jan 7, 2025 | Articles, It's a funny old world

In this column, we provoke fresh thinking and round up some of the weird, wonderful, quirky, surprising – and shocking – stories out there

 

70 is the new 64

Those who celebrated Christmas and welcomed in the New Year at the end of December may be feeling ‘older’ than before the festive period – perhaps through over-indulgence, tricky family times or loneliness. 

As it turns out, perceptions of old age are malleable. According to a 25-year longitudinal study carried out in Germany, as life expectancy increases, so does our idea of when old age begins. The study, published in Psychology and Aging, reveals that perceptions of old age have changed over the decades. Analysing survey data from 14,056 participants aged 40-85, the researchers found several factors which influenced when we perceive old age to start.

When participants hit 64, their perception of old age increased by 1.9 years (or 2.5%) over the next decade, and by the time they were 74, perceived old age increased by 3.4 years (or 4.6%) every decade.

Those born more recently were more likely to see old age as starting later – study participants whose birthday fell after 1935 saw old age as beginning approximately 0.6% later per decade than those born before, whereas when participants born in 1911 were 65, for example, they saw old age as starting at 71. People born in 1956 saw old age as starting at 74. Women saw old age as starting on average 3.2% later than men.

Psychosocial and health factors also shifted perceptions – participants born in East rather than West Germany saw old age as starting 1.9% earlier. The researchers suggested this was down to previously studied differences between the two areas, highlighting that East Germans have “less positive views on ageing, older subjective ages, and substantially lower life expectancy”. The study suggests that how we think about age is closely connected to our social contexts.

Those who experienced the highest levels of loneliness thought old age started 1.3% earlier than those who weren’t lonely. Participants rating their health as poor also experienced a 0.8% earlier perceived onset of old age. Participants who felt old themselves thought old age started 8.7% earlier, suggesting that what we think of as old age is heavily influenced by our personal context.

The team suggests that this “postponing” of old age could reflect either positive or negative trends in attitudes towards older people. As they note in their paper, older people are becoming more savvy with technology and the internet, generally associated with younger people, making them appear subjectively younger, and further postponing perceptions of old age. On the other hand, people may see being older as an undesirable state, and nudge their ideas of when they might hit old age further down the line as they approach their own ‘cut-off’.      

 

Procrastinate at your peril

Is your or your client’s New Year’s resolution to stop procrastinating at work?

Difficult though this may be for some, including those with neurodivergent conditions, it may be worth persevering – research reveals that people who leave things to the last minute find work submitted late tends to be judged more harshly than when a deadline is met, even if it is only a little over.

Work completed late was viewed as significantly lower quality than the same piece of work delivered on time, finds the study of thousands of people in the US and UK, including managers, executives, HR and those whose jobs involved evaluating others.

Professor Sam Maglio, from the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, both in Canada, said: “All the research that we could find looked at how deadlines impact the minds and actions of workers. We wanted to know how a deadline impacts the minds and actions of others when they look at those workers.” 

Study participants were invited to rate pieces of work but first told whether the work was submitted early, on deadline or late. The ‘late’ work was consistently rated as worse in quality than ‘early’ or ‘on-time’ work. Raters believed missing deadlines meant an employee had less integrity. They reported they would be less willing to work with or assign tasks to that person in future.

 

Sleep hygiene

Another New Year’s resolution of yours or your client’s may be to improve personal ‘sleep hygiene’ and may include an intention to avoid exposure to smartphone blue light in bed. It’s well known that the blue light is disturbing sleep….isn’t it?

Apparently, it’s not that simple. Blue or short-wavelength light (such as daylight or that emitted by technology) does affect our circadian rhythm but sleep is complex. According to Stuart Pierson, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, receptors in our eyes that tell our brain when to be awake are indeed triggered by cells that absorb blue light. However, they’re also triggered by receptors which absorb longer wavelengths of light (such as red). So it’s not so much the colour of the glow we need to worry about but the amount of brightness and length of time we’re exposed to it. 

And actually our phone screens are not very bright. Daylight is 1,000 times brighter than the average light emitted by a phone, and room lighting around 10 times brighter. So although blue light from smartphones can affect sleep, the effect is small unless you are using your phone for hours with a bright screen and already have sleep problems, according to Pierson. Our sleep is more likely to be affected by the content we consume. 

Pierson recommends that those who think light is impacting their sleep should decrease screen time and turn down phone brightness.