No, this is not about eating well, exercising regularly, getting plenty of sleep…

I simply need to feel like I’m younger than my actual age.

You’ve seen the aphorisms on Hallmark birthday cards: You’re only as old as you feel or Age is only a state of mind.

What if this turns out to be partially true?

A recent research letter in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) reported that older people who said they felt three or more years younger than their chronological age had a lower death rate during the next eight years than those who felt their age or older.

Skeptical? So was I.

After all, the study reported correlations (perceived age is associated with longevity), rather than causal relationships (perceived age causes longevity). Maybe the people who felt younger than their age were less depressed, more socially engaged and more active than the comparison groups, factors we know can lead to a healthier and longer life.

Then I read on. Even after statistically accounting for those key health factors, the research showed that feeling older than one’s chronological age was a significant independent predictor of mortality.

Does Simply Feeling Younger Prolong a Healthy Life?

But the question, until recently, remained: Does simply feeling younger actually prolong lives that are healthy and vibrant?

Dr. Jeanyung Chey and her team of researchers from Seoul National University in Korea have begun to shed important light on this question.

As we age, our brains show a number of changes that reflect declining neural health, including reductions in the volume of gray matter. Using various techniques to identify brain features associated with aging, Chey and her colleagues examined the link between subjective age (how old I feel I am) and brain aging (my brain’s actual gray matter volume).

They performed MRI brain scans on 68 healthy people aged 59 to 84 to measure gray matter volumes in various brain regions. Sure enough, people who felt younger than their age showed greater gray matter volume in key brain regions than those who felt older.

“We found that people who feel younger have the structural characteristics of a younger brain,” said Chey. “Importantly, this difference remains robust even when other possible factors, including personality, subjective health, depressive symptoms, or cognitive functions, are accounted for.”

This interesting study was published just this year in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. We still have a long way to go to fully understand the relationship between feelings about our age and our brain’s health.

But these initial findings offer exciting new possibilities regarding the power of our thinking to potentially impact not only longevity, but also enhanced brain health as we age.

But…it’s neither quick nor easy to change a belief as deeply engrained as my subjective age.

If the benefits of changing a set of beliefs are as substantial as greater health and longevity, shouldn’t my rational mind choose to do so? Though optimistic, this view is probably naïve, and ignores a large body of social science evidence that many of my most basic beliefs aren’t even conscious and available to the rational mind. And even if I am aware of them, they’ve often become so much a part of who I am that I don’t think of them as mere beliefs. They’ve become my reality.

So if I command myself to think “I’m younger than my actual age,” yet my deeply held core belief is that I’m actually older, my brain will be quick to start an inner war and likely remind me of the many ways my body is falling apart, or any number of other cognitive distortions. Just to keep my beliefs intact.

It’s no surprise that the web is full of advice about how to do one of the most challenging things in life:

15 Ways to Change Your Thoughts

10 Tips to Overcome Negative Thoughts

The Four Keys to Overcoming Negative Thinking

8 Tips to Change Negative Thinking

So, as appealing as these longevity study results are, they probably offer no quick fix for a longer and healthier life.

But quite possibly it wasn’t simply a youthful feeling that was associated with health and longevity. It seems likely that even just thinking about feeling younger may lead to better health habits, like regular exercise and a healthy diet. If I try to feel younger (even if I don’t succeed), I may adopt more of a future-orientation that will lead toward a lifestyle with my future health in mind. This, in turn, would lead to a longer, healthier life.

Here’s my take.

Behaviors are usually easier to change than beliefs. Improving my lifestyle by incorporating regular exercise and a healthy diet, as challenging as this is for me, is probably a quicker and easier way to prolong a healthy life than trying to change core beliefs about myself.

So no matter how hard I try to avoid it, maybe it’s all about eating well, exercising regularly and getting plenty of sleep after all.