Here’s an exercise for you: Think of an old person—someone your grandparents age, say—and list the first five words or phrases that come to mind. Now consider your list. Were your words positive or negative? This is an exercise that Dr. Becca Levy has her students complete on the first day of the Health and Aging class she teaches at Yale, where she is a professor of public health and psychology and has become one of the country’s leading researchers on aging. Her students’ answers range from “senile” and “stubborn” to “walks a lot” and “kind.” But the majority of words, and especially the first few, tend to be negative.

As she argues in her new book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live, that’s a problem. Her research has shown that the way cultures tend to think negatively about age—what she calls “negative age beliefs”—can adversely impact our health as we age. In other words, constantly thinking that we will decline physically and cognitively as we get older will bring about that decline more quickly. In one particularly shocking study, Dr. Levy found how you think about age can increase or decrease you lifespan by up to seven and a half years. “Societally-based age beliefs influence our health and the biological markers of aging,” she writes. “When it comes to how we age, society is often the cause and biology the effect.”

Dr. Levy says she’s not denying aging’s detrimental effects—only that not all of those effects are inevitable, and, more importantly, we can improve our chances of avoiding them by changing how we think about aging. In her lab, she has been able to improve test subjects’ balance, memory, and even their will to live by exposing them to more positive. It’s research that’s relevant to everyone with a pulse, since we are all, as Victor Hugo once said, “under sentence of death, but with an indefinite reprieve.” GQ recently spoke by phone with Dr. Levy about her book—and how the interventions that have worked in her lab could help us all extend our own reprieve just a bit longer.

GQ: Can you give an example of the difference between a positive age belief and a negative age belief?

Dr. Levy: So the words that get at “positive age beliefs” would be those that are rated as positive and representative of old people. For example, “wisdom” and “creative.” Negative age beliefs would be “frail,” “senility,” “decline.”

Generally, American society tends to have more negative age beliefs than positive age beliefs, correct?

Correct. The good news is that although there is a prevalence of negative age beliefs, most people are aware of the positive age beliefs. When we ask people, “When you think of an old person, what are the first five words or phrases that come to mind?” we found that the first couple phrases or words are more negative, but often by the fourth or the fifth, they will mention something positive.

What are some of the things people get better at as they age?

There’s been some research to suggest that there’s an improvement in metacognition, or thinking about thinking. There can be an improvement in resolving interpersonal conflicts and political conflicts, coming up with different creative solutions. Mental health qualities can improve: emotion regulation, being more aware of different emotions and then drawing on them in a helpful way. Life review has been found to increase in later life—the ability to evaluate different parts of one’s life in a meaningful way and then draw lessons from it.

In the book, you write, “This popular narrative of aging as a time of inevitable mental and physical decline is incorrect.” Are you saying that we don’t decline as we age, or just that it’s in different ways, or less pronounced, than we think?

The key in that is the word inevitable. There’s a lot of signs that we can see growth and improvement in some physical and mental health outcomes. We’ve found that if we strengthen positive age beliefs that [people] show improvement in the kinds of outcomes that are associated with aging as inevitable problems that happen in aging. For example, we found that episodic memory can improve in older participants.

What are some ways we can intervene and change the negative stereotypes we have about the elderly?

One of the methods is to develop a portfolio of diverse, positive images of aging. I suggest people generate about five positive older role models, examples of older people that you admire. Some from one's own life—grandparents or relatives—and some from the greater world. Then, think about a quality or two that you really admire about that person and that you would like to grow and strengthen in yourself: humor, work ethic, sense of social justice.

Would it be fair to say that the idea here is not necessarily that having negative age beliefs—believing that old people are weak or senile—causes things like Alzheimer's or dementia, but that it can make us less likely to do things that can help prevent those diseases? I'm trying to understand it in layman's terms.

There are three mechanisms that I've examined in my research. Behavioral mechanisms: Somebody who's taken in more positive age beliefs is more likely to engage in beneficial or preventive health behaviors, like eating well and exercising. Then there's the psychological level: Somebody who’s taken in more positive beliefs might have a greater sense of mastery or wellbeing. The third is the physiological level: Stress is a big one. We’ve looked at different stress biomarkers, and we found that people who take in more positive age beliefs tend to have lower levels of cardiovascular response to stress and lower levels of cortisol, the stress biomarker. So if somebody has taken in more positive age beliefs, it leads to these beneficial mechanisms, and those in turn can improve health or lower risk of some of those [negative] health outcomes.

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So if people want to know, as they’re aging, how they can increase their health span or lifespan, it would be this three-pronged attack: focusing on the psychological, physiological and behavioral aspects. Is that fair?

Well, I would say that the book looks at age beliefs as an upstream factor. By changing an upstream factor, such as age beliefs, it could have a ripple effect and then impact things further down the stream. One could argue that some of the interventions are not always effective because they're not taking into account the bigger structural, societal, cultural background to some of those factors. If we can strengthen the positive age beliefs, we will have this ripple effect going forward, that can positively impact some of those [behavioral, psychological, and physiological] mechanisms, which in turn could impact the health outcomes.

What you’re saying, and what your research has shown, is that we are all aging ourselves faster by living in a culture where we have a society-wide denigration of the elderly. We’re all aging ourselves through these portrayals in some ways?

Right. We also know that these can operate without our awareness. If we can increase our awareness, take control, and curate the messages that we are exposed to, and how we question them when we are exposed to them, that can be important. On a societal level, if we could find ways to reduce structural ageism, that would be the ideal.

To get into that idea a bit more, can we talk about Botox? How does the surge of interest in Botox intersect with some of these ideas on aging and cultural age beliefs?

There has been this surge in use of Botox, and different cosmetic procedures around reducing physical signs of aging. Unfortunately, there is an increasing number of advertisements that are focused on younger people. There’s a profit in creating fear around aging. That messaging unfortunately is promoting some of the negative age beliefs in society.

I’m wondering if that’s an example of structural ageism, or if it’s just that some people have a preference to not have wrinkles.

What I’ve focused on in the book is the role of advertising and the large profit that it’s made through advertising that has promoted negative age beliefs and a fear of aging. That is one of the places we could intervene on a structural level: to make advertising much more age positive and show much more heterogeneity in the types of advertising and images that are presented.

What are some common forms of structural ageism?

There’s terms that people don’t think too much about, like using the term “senior moment” to describe somebody who’s forgetful when that could happen at any age. But that’s a tendency to categorize forgetfulness as something that’s intrinsic to aging. There’s also something called elder speak, which is a tendency to speak to older people as if they’re babies or children. It’s really easy for people to switch into that language.

You suggest that another way to combat structural ageism here in America is to take lessons from other cultures that think of themselves less as individuals and more as part of a larger network. How does that change the way we might experience aging?

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Some of the age positive cultures have collectivist ideas, and part of that can be to have a culture that embraces different generations coming together. In the United States, we’ve gone from being one of the most age-integrated countries to being one of the most age-segregated countries. One of the ideals of these age positive countries is having greater contact and meaningful contact between the generations. There’s research to suggest that one of the best ways to overcome prejudice and discrimination between [ages], and also negative beliefs, is by having meaningful contact or shared meaningful activities between the generations. It can break down some of the misconceptions and myths about aging by actually seeing real examples of how people defy those age beliefs. There’s some research that shows that intergenerational workplaces can be more productive and more innovative.

You teach a Health and Aging class at Yale. What surprises you most about how young people tend to respond to this research?

Younger people often aren’t aware of the ageism that exists in the culture, in part because we live in such an age segregated society. There’s often limited opportunities for younger people to interact and encounter older people in everyday life, and this ageism can operate implicitly or without our awareness in so many places that it’s often hard to see what’s right in front of us. But I found that most younger people, when they become aware of ageism, start to get really angry about it. They often will want to find ways to challenge it and overcome it. So that's been gratifying to notice that there's all these potential young allies of the social movement out there.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQHealth