What is psychological age and how to determine it

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The younger you feel, the longer you can to live.

What is psychological age

Psychological age is the number of years that can be attributed to a person according to his way of thinking and behaving.

Psychological or mental age which is always equal to the passport age. For example, younger teenagers often behave and think like young men and women who have already formed. And people over the age of 60, fascinated by gadgets, social networks, and travel, may be similar to 30-year-olds in terms of behavior.

Why determine psychological age

Many quite physical things depend on how many mental years you have.

Yes, there are studies that establish an interesting connection: the younger you feel a person, the stronger his health, the better his memory and learning abilities. And even longer life.

However, scientists are still debating what is the cause and what is the consequence. Perhaps the feeling of well-being and a quick mind stem from a young psychological age. Or maybe it's the other way around: a person subjectively feels younger only because he has excellent health and a strong memory for a long time.

Be that as it may, information about how you are psychologically young, may clarify some points in your well-being. In addition, psychological age is adjusted.

For example, if you find that you are too “old” mentally, this is a good opportunity to add more physical activity to your daily routine. And force yourself to lead a “younger” lifestyle: communicate more actively, be interested in new gadgets and scientific breakthroughs, do everything to stop associating yourself with old age. All this will help you feel younger. And then the connection established by research will work and, according to scientists, your physical and mental health will be adjusted to your psychological age.

However, a young mental age is not always a good thing. Youth is characterized by emotional outbursts, unrestrainedness. If this is about you, then maybe you should mature psychologically.

How to determine psychological age

Perhaps the easiest way to find out was proposed by the American athlete and baseball legend Setchel Paige. It's enough to answer a simple question.

How old do you think you would be if you didn't know how old you are?

But more often than not, people hesitate with the determination of one's psychological age. And this, in general, is expected: even psychologists definitely cannot answer the question of how many mental years a particular person has.

There are many tests for this. Some of them are based on well-being and the model of behavior that a person expects from himself.

Others, such as this Buzzfeed, take into account not so much well-being as a person's background: how aware he is of various events in the world, what one is interested in, what level of education one has.

The third are based on the brightness of the worldview. For example, here's a clip that lets you guess your mental age based on how you perceive shades:

But in fact, all these tests are rather nonsense.

Today there is only one study that has a more or less scientific basis. This is a questionnaire developed by Deep Longevity. This company is the creator of a program based on artificial intelligence, whose goal is to monitor the aging process and help people continue a healthy and productive life.

The test methodology is described in detail in the specialized scientific journal Aging. Experts trained the neural network by uploading more than 10,000 questionnaires of people aged 25 to 75 to it. Artificial intelligence analyzed their answers to the same questions, correlated them with the passport and subjective psychological age of the participants. And found out which considerations are most characteristic of representatives of different mental age groups.

The test consists of 18 simple questions. Answer them and the trained system will tell you approximately how many mental years you have. However, the questionnaire is currently available only in English and Spanish. If you do not speak any language, use, for example, Google Translate.