You may have seen this headline on your favourite social media platform: “We age in two distinct periods in our lives”. It seems that human ageing doesn’t happen at a gradual pace, but instead accelerates during two distinct periods in life. The first is in the mid 40s, and the next is early 60s.
Turns out a study in the Nature Aging journal by researchers at Standford University in the United States and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore analysed over 135,000 molecular markers from 108 adults aged 25 to 75. The study found that most of these markers showed nonlinear changes, with significant shifts happening in the mid 40s and early 60s. So, yes. This is apparently how we age.
I can testify to this. I am 47 years old. And for a while in my 40s, I felt fine. It was like my 30s, which were like my 20s but with slightly more fat percentage. I thought, hey, I’m ageing great! I’m in my early 40s and still feeling good. But then 44 hit.
No joke. At 47, my right bicep seems to have lost the ability to flex. My shoulder doesn’t want me to raise my hand over my head. And my knees feel like I jumped off a 10-storey building and they ate the impact.
Not to mention my eye sight. I can’t see sheet (yes, I’m cursing here but please just read sheet and be OK with it). I can’t read ingredient labels. I toyed with turning my phone letters old person gigantic but stopped because everyone made fun of me, and I also noticed people on the bus were reading my messages over my shoulder. And who can blame them? With letters that big, they can’t help but read.
This tracks with what the study showed.
In the mid 40s our metabolism really starts to go. We put on weight, if we drink alcohol we find that we can’t handle as much as we used to. Our muscles and skin start to decline. Cardio-vascular risk increases. But thankfully our cognitive abilities are more or less stable.
In the early 60s, our metabolism continues to decline, we get fatter and weaker. Our muscles and skin deteriorate at a deeper level. Kidney function declines and we have weakened immunity. This is also where we start to see the decline of cognitive abilities.
Which makes me ask, could we not have aged just a little more in the years from one to 43? It would have made this less abrupt. I’ll also say that I’m pretty sure I’m not as sharp as I was a few years ago, but that could just be stress and lack of sleep – because being in your 40s is “fun” for lots of other life crisis reasons that seem to happen at this age.
In any case, we all know we’re getting older. But now we can really put a finger on when, and what is happening to us. And let me tell you (unless you’re older than me, then you can tell me) it is not fun. It really feels like my wonky knees, bad eyesight, and general increase in aches all just came on out of nowhere.
I honestly blamed having a child at 42 for it. But it turns out science had an answer for that. The truth is I’m probably getting the double whammy of ageing from raising a young child and hitting 44.
But I’m not taking this limping around forever.
The key to maintaining health is to eat well, work out, and get enough sleep. I can tell you I’m doing zero out of three at the moment. But it’s time to get back on the horse. I have to. I have a young child. He’s going to turn 20 at about the same time that this second bout of debilitating ageing hits at 61. If I want to be of any use to him, I have to keep healthy.
The other thing is, it is easy to take all the aches and pains I currently have and let it sideline me. But then I think about how hard the next age cliff at 61 is going to hit. Yeah, I need to prepare myself for that.
In the meantime, I need to get glasses. I’m tired of reading labels by guessing.
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