A few years ago, a social media trend challenged if they could rise from the ground without using their hands. Now it all depends on the duration of balance on one leg while brushing your teeth. These eccentric “tests” promise to tell us how old we are – but do they really do it?
When we talk about “aging well”, we generally refer to physical and psychological well-being. This understands the good to feel good (hedonic well-being) and to find a meaning and a goal (eudimonic well-being). Getting involved in activities and monitoring us plays a role in both.
But aging is not only the strength of your grip or the speed at which you can walk. It is a complex mixture of physical, cognitive, emotional and social changes – and no unique test captures the whole image.
Physically, a simple measure that receives a lot of attention is the power speed. According to a famous study, people who walk faster than 1.32 meters per second were less likely to die for the next three years – joking as “too fast for the Grim Reaper to catch”.
Get your news from real experts, directly in your reception box. Register for our daily newsletter to receive the whole conversation of the latest news coverage and research by the United Kingdom, politics and affairs in the arts and sciences.
On the other hand, a slower walking speed – below 0.8 meters per second – can be a sign of sarcopenia, a condition involving a reduction in muscle mass, muscle strength and physical function. These are all important indicators of age -related decline.
But although these markers are useful, they are not easy to measure at home. Most research is based on specialized equipment and your local general practitioner probably does not have a handle power dynamometer seated in a drawer. But they could for a while how long you need to get up and sit five times with a chair.
How to make a DIY word
So what can you do realistically to follow your own aging?
To really understand how you age, it helps think beyond physical health. Mental clarity, emotional resilience and social connection count as much. A useful idea is to assess your cognitive physical form, which includes skills such as attention, memory and flexibility.
Here are some cognitive tests that you can try at home:
Trail manufacturing test: Connect the numbers and letters in sequence (1, A, 2, B, etc.) and how long it lasts. This measures your ability to switch between tasks.
Stroop task: defies your ability to ignore competing information. Try to say the color of a word, not the word itself – like saying “red” when you see the word “blue” printed with red ink. It is more difficult than it seems!
Double task challenge: Walk at your normal speed while counting backwards from 100 out of three. If your power speed changes considerably, this could indicate cognitive tension.
These types of tasks test how your brain manages competing requests – a key capacity that becomes even more important as we age. This skill is known as cognitive flexibility and helps you adapt to the modification of situations, to switch between tasks and to manage distractions.
Trying these tests is great, but how do you know if you improve? After all, when you have spent time trying to improve your walking speed, or settle – or even rub your head, tapping your belly while saying the Finnish alphabet aloud – it is important to know if you see advantages.
Some measures, such as a single leg position, may vary a lot from day to day – or even from time to time. You could improve just by repeating it, which does not necessarily mean that you get better, just that you have practiced.
Others, such as the strength of adhesion, change very slowly even with regular force training. And some improvements are specific to tasks: improving the trail manufacturing test does not necessarily make you clear to make prizes.
This is why it helps to finish the test several times at the start, then to test yourself once a month – again, to do it several times – to follow the improvements. Cognitive changes may be slower to notice than physical controls, so regular controls can help reveal progress over time.
More than one puzzle than a test
There is no unique test or score that can capture the way you get older. Think more like a puzzle. Physical health, mental agility, emotional balance, social connection – they all count and they all interact. And, of course, even if you succeed well now, certain changes in the future may be out of your control. No test can predict what awaits us.
At the end of the day, maybe the best sign of aging is not how fast you are walking or how long you can stand on a leg – that’s what you feel in your life. Do you feel engaged, content, connected?
Tools like the scale of a positive and negative experience can help you take stock of your emotional well-being. This short investigation with 12 questions asks questions about your daily feelings – from joy and calm to sadness and frustration – offering an overview of both pleasant (hedonic) and significant (eudaimonic) sides of well -being.
Aging is not to beat a stopwatch or pass a memory test. It’s about knowing – your body, your mind and your values - and make significant small changes that help you feel more.
So go ahead, stand on one leg if you want. But don’t forget to check with your brain, your body, your emotions and your sense of lens.
