Feeling older than your years? You’re not alone, survey finds

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Blame the pandemic, cost-of-living woes or just a decade of change, including wars overseas and the first Trump presidency, but more Canadians these days are feeling older than their years compared to nine years ago.

In a new survey released by Angus Reid, a quarter of Canadians (25 per cent) say they feel physically older than their chronological age, while a slightly smaller number (21 per cent) claim to feel mentally older. These figures compare to 23 and 19 per cent, respectively, in a similar survey conducted in 2015.

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The good news is that many Canadians continue to report feeling physically and mentally younger than their age as well, at 31 and 47 per cent, respectively. But even here, the numbers are worse than in 2015, when more than a third (38 per cent) said they felt physically younger than what their birth certificate told them, and more than half (53 per cent) felt mentally younger.

“Certainly people’s stress levels have risen,” said Dave Korzinski, research director at Angus Reid, discussing the change. “Finances have become a significant problem.”

He also noted that those aged 35 to 54 experienced the biggest rise in how many reported feeling older than their years between the two surveys.

“It’s quite a significant change among both men and women,” he said, adding that this age group is “mostly likely to have young children and mortgage payments and all that fun stuff.”

And perhaps not surprisingly, the numbers tend to skew at either end of the age spectrum in the new survey. That is to say that the old tend to feel younger than their years, while the young feel older.

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For instance, among 18-to-24-year-olds, almost half (49 per cent) said they felt older than their age, while a further 15 per cent reported feeling “way older.” But those numbers dropped off quickly in the next age group, and when the 65-and-older segment of the population was surveyed, only 27 per cent said they felt older than their chronological age, and just 4 per cent felt way older. More than a quarter (26 per cent) reported feeling younger.

There were regional disparities as well, with Quebecers most likely to report feeing mentally and physically more spry, followed closely by British Columbians . Prairie Canadians were feeling their oats, however, with Saskatchewan trailing the statistics — there, only 18 per cent of people felt physically younger than they were, and 31 per cent felt mentally younger.

The survey asked a number of other questions about aging, such as what age respondents felt was the best stage in life, and how long people wanted to live. Fully half of Canadians say your twenties and thirties are the place to be, while 15 per cent chose childhood or teenage years, and another 20 per cent picked the forties and fifties.

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A few outliers went with sixties and beyond, but few seemed to think those would be the best years in life. However, lots of respondents wanted the chance to find out for themselves. One of the survey questions was: “Not knowing and with no guarantees how healthy you would be, if you could chose, what age would you want to live to?”

More than half (57 per cent) went for a high number, with 31 per cent choosing 90 years old, 16 per cent opting for 100, and 10 per cent picking 110 or older. Life expectancy in Canada is currently about 81 years.

Korzinski noted that those kinds of high numbers were also seen in the previous survey from 2015. He attributed at least some of it to young respondents assuming that, by the time they’re into their eighties, advances in health care will make that time not only more reachable, but not as beset by illness and decline.

“Certainly there are people that thrive in their 90s,” he added.

As to whether another survey in nine or 10 years might see a continuing trend of people feeling older and wearier, he was optimistic.

“We’re in a pretty disruptive period because of the pandemic and the lingering effects of that,” he said. “You’d like to think that we solve these problems. And I think that there’s hope, with some policy prescriptions and different leadership. The hope is that 10 years from now, no matter who’s in charge, we manage to change these numbers. And they do tend to rebound. History kind of works out that way.”

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