Are You Really Only As Old As You Feel?

If it's true that you're only as old as you feel, then this guy must be in his early 300's

Who currently living on this planet hasn’t heard the statement that you are only as old as you feel?  I know: deaf people.  The rest of us have heard it over and over and over and over again until we wish we were deaf, too.

All of us actually have several ages.  The first age is our chronological age.  If you were born on January 1, 1960, then on January 1, 2005, you turned 45 – no ifs, ands, or buts.  You have about as much leeway fiddling with your chronological age as you do making time run backwards.   You can lie to other people about your chronological age or get a facelift to conceal it, but that doesn’t change anything.  Your body is still that age.

The second age is our biological age.  Basically, how well do we measure up in terms of fitness, weight, and mental acuity against an average cross section of people of similar chronological age?   There are various tests you can find on the internet that purport to assess your biological age, your real age as they describe it, by asking a series of questions.   For more accurate results, you could visit a medical office which could check your body for arterial plaques, bone density, body pH, skin laxity, and breathing capacity.  These tests are meant to measure how fast your body is aging.

All of us chronologically age at the same rates.  Any person born on January 1, 1960 is 45 years old on January 1, 2005.  But we don’t biologically age identically.   If you were to meet two men, both born on January 1, 1960, one could look significantly older than the other.

When someone asks us to guess his or her age, they mean their chronological age.  How we assess that age, on the other hand, comes down to what I call someone’s physical age, the third type.  If we saw a twenty-year old with gray hair, we’d age him as older; a sixty-year old with brunette hair and few wrinkles, as younger.  A person’s physical age is usually related to his biological age, but not always.  A thirty-year old man may be in fantastic physical shape and have a biological age of twenty-three, but if he’s completely bald, we’ll still guess him to be thirty-five.

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