Becca Levy > Quotes

“There is actually no single biological marker to identify when someone has reached old age, which means that old age is a somewhat fluid social construct. This is one of the reasons age beliefs, with their associated expectations, are so powerful: they define how we experience our later years.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“In study after study I conducted, I found that older people with more-positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more-negative perceptions; they were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better, they walked faster, and they even lived longer.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Most of us like to consider ourselves as capable of thinking fairly accurately about other people. But the truth is, we are social beings who carry around unconscious social beliefs that are so deeply rooted in our minds that we don’t usually realize they’ve got their hooks in us. This can result in an unconscious process called “implicit bias,” which automatically influences us to like or dislike certain groups of people.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“these doctors tend to be far less likely to recommend treatments for the older patients compared to the younger patients.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“SET Mechanism 2: Unconscious Operation”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“An example of the psychological pathway is the low self-esteem that develops among elderly people who have assimilated negative age beliefs.18 A letter I recently received from an older Englishwoman states in its opening: “Frankly I feel ashamed to be old. Why? Because society tells me it is shameful.” The”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“And as you finally enter your own old age, whenever you can’t recall something, you blame it on aging. When you do this, you’re actively manifesting the stereotype you grew up hearing applied to older people, but now you’re directing it at yourself. This, in turn, can lead to stress, which can reduce memory performance.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“I will also explore the anatomy of negative age stereotypes—how they build up in us, how they operate, and how they can be changed. Although these stereotypes are developed within cultures over hundreds of years, and assimilated across the lifetimes of individuals, they are in fact quite brittle: they can be chipped at, shifted, and remade.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“There exists a similar culture-based racial bias:”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Structural bias refers to policies or practices of societal institutions, such as corporations that discriminate against workers or hospitals that discriminate against patients. It is frequently intertwined with implicit bias.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“First, their sheer prevalence; according to the World Health Organization, ageism is the most widespread and socially accepted prejudice today.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“There exists a similar culture-based racial bias: studies show that job seekers who added typical “white” identifiers to their résumés received significantly more calls for interviews than those without these identifiers.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“As the psychoanalyst Carl Jung observed: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” A reason age stereotypes are so effective at impacting our health is that they often operate without our awareness.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“It is important to note that age beliefs are not the same thing as pessimistic or optimistic thinking. You might think positive age beliefs are just one facet of positive thinking, and negative age beliefs a form of negative thinking. But in my research, I have found that above and beyond general emotions, such as happiness or gloominess, age beliefs are what drive outcomes, including how well we recall information, or how quickly we walk around the block.25 That is, it’s age beliefs, above and beyond the emotional outlooks of whether, say, you are a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person, that harm or improve our health.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Age beliefs are mental maps of how we expect older people to behave based on age. These mental maps, which often include pictures in our heads, become activated when we notice members of the group in question.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“An example of the psychological pathway is the low self-esteem that develops among elderly people who have assimilated negative age beliefs.18 A letter I recently received from an older Englishwoman states in its opening: “Frankly I feel ashamed to be old. Why? Because society tells me it is shameful.” The behavioral pathway plays out as older people take in negative age beliefs and develop fatalistic attitudes about the inevitability of declining health in later life. They’ll sometimes then cut back on healthy behaviors, which in this grim light appear to be pointless.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Most of us like to consider ourselves as capable of thinking fairly accurately about other people. But the truth is, we are social beings who carry around unconscious social beliefs that are so deeply rooted in our minds that we don’t usually realize they’ve got their hooks in us.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“SET Mechanism 4: Three Pathways Age Beliefs Follow to Get Under Our Skin”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“In almost every case, male applicants were more likely to be hired and offered much higher salaries”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“The past is dead and gone, the future stops being the future once it gets here, so the present moment's the only thing you're responsible for.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Grandma Horty never let you forget that she was there, so her absence rang loudly when we went through her things to find new homes for them after she died.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Expectations can be quite useful in many situations. When we come across a closed door, we can expect, based on previous experiences, that it will either be locked or unlocked. We generally don’t have to ask ourselves whether the door will fall down flat or burst into flames if we give the handle a wiggle. We can thank our brains for this ability to process situations quickly, visually, and often automatically, which is why there’s no need to relearn how a door works. Instead, we can rely on what we already know to be familiar. This is pretty much how we get through the world every single day: by generating and then relying on expectations.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“SET Mechanism 1: Internalization Across the Life Span”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“Activating just one stereotype about a group, in this instance, the stereotype of women as focused on appearance, can open the floodgates to a slew of other stereotypes and associations, one of which is that women are not good leaders.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“SET Mechanism 3: Self-Relevance of Age Stereotypes”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“According to SET, there are four mechanisms involved in how age stereotypes affect our health. They are internalized from society starting in childhood and continuing throughout the life span; operate unconsciously; increase in power as they become more self-relevant; and impact health through psychological, biological, and behavioral pathways.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“SET Mechanism 4: Three Pathways Age Beliefs Follow to Get Under Our Skin There are three pathways age beliefs use to act on health outcomes: psychological, behavioral, and biological.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“This is one of the most harmful things about negative age stereotypes: they don’t only color our actions and judgments toward other people; often, they influence how we think about ourselves, and these thoughts—if they are not counteracted—can impact how we feel and act.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“doctors tend to be far less likely to recommend treatments for the older patients compared to the younger patients.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live

“important than gender, income, social background, loneliness, or functional health—was how people thought about and approached the idea of old age.6 Age beliefs, it turns out, can steal or add nearly eight years to your life. In other words, these beliefs don’t just live in our heads. For better or worse, those mental images that are the product of our cultural diets, whether it’s the shows we watch, the things we read, or the jokes we laugh at, become scripts we end up acting out.”
― Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live