Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

On this episode, we explore how we think about aging and how those beliefs impact our health.

Our guest is Dr. Becca Levy, professor of public health and psychology at Yale.

She says your age beliefs are so powerful that they define how you experience your later years.

Dr. Levy is credited with creating the field of study that focuses on how positive and negative age stereotypes can have beneficial and adverse effects, respectively,

on the health of older people. Her new book is called Breaking the Age Code,

how your beliefs about aging determine how long and well you live. Dr. Thank you so much for

joining us. Thank you so much for happy meeting on your show.

This is such an important topic and it's a huge topic. It affects all of us. Why did you

decide to write the book? And what is your goal for your readers? Yes. Well, that's a great question.

So I decided to write the book because I think we're in the middle of a public health

crisis. We know that ageism has become worse and worse in our country. And even during the

pandemic, we've seen many signs of it. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic,

you probably saw the popular mean calling COVID the boomer remover. So there's just been a lot of, which makes fun of the

idea of older people dying from COVID. But at the same time, my research has some findings that

show that these negative messaging can have a real impact on our health, but also the hopeful finding is that there's something

that we can do about it.

So we can actually shift these age beliefs around so that we can become empowered and actually

have better health.

You went to Japan to investigate how people think about aging there, and it's very different

than how they do here.

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