Worrying About Getting Old Might Be Making You Age Faster

Here's a cruel irony: the more you worry about getting old, the faster your body seems to age.

That's the takeaway from a new study out of NYU School of Global Public Health, published this week in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. Researchers looked at 726 women and found that those who felt more anxious about aging showed signs of faster biological aging — not in how they looked or felt, but in their actual cells.

The finding sits at the intersection of two questions that longevity science has been circling for years. First: why do some people age faster than others? And second: how much does what happens in your mind shape what happens in your body?

The answer, it turns out, might be more than most of us expected.

What the Study Actually Found

The research team, led by PhD student Mariana Rodrigues and senior author Adolfo Cuevas, used data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study — a long-running survey that tracks how Americans experience middle age.

Participants answered questions about specific aging-related worries: becoming less attractive, developing health problems, being too old to have children. Then researchers analyzed their blood samples using two established tools called epigenetic clocks.

Epigenetic clocks don't measure your birthday age. They measure something more interesting — how fast your body is actually aging at the molecular level. They work by reading patterns of DNA methylation, tiny chemical tags that sit on top of your genes and change as you get older. Think of them as mile markers on a biological road: the further along you are, the more wear your body has accumulated.

The study used two clocks. DunedinPACE measures the speed of aging — how fast you're moving down that road right now. GrimAge2 estimates total accumulated biological damage — how far down the road you've already gone.

Women who worried more about aging showed faster biological aging on DunedinPACE. Their cells were, in effect, ticking faster.

But here's where it gets specific. Not all worries were equal. Anxiety about declining health — "will I get sick, will I lose my independence?" — was most strongly linked to accelerated aging. Worries about appearance and fertility? Those didn't show the same biological footprint.

The researchers think that makes sense. Concerns about looks and childbearing tend to fade with time. Health worries don't. They persist, they compound, and they may quietly reshape biology year after year.

The Mind-Body Loop

This isn't the first time science has caught psychology leaving fingerprints on biology. Elizabeth Blackburn's Nobel Prize-winning work on telomeres showed that chronic stress can shorten the protective caps on chromosomes, effectively aging cells prematurely. A 2021 study in Scientific Reports found that adolescents with anxiety disorders already showed signs of accelerated epigenetic aging. Research from Translational Psychiatry demonstrated that psychological resilience could buffer the effects of stress on biological aging.

What the NYU study adds is a sharper lens. It's not just "stress ages you" — it's that specific fears about aging seem to age you. The irony is almost too neat: the thing you're afraid of is the thing your fear may be creating.

"Our research suggests that subjective experiences may be driving objective measures of aging," Rodrigues said. "Aging-related anxiety is not merely a psychological concern, but may leave a mark on the body with real health consequences."

Why Women?

The study focused exclusively on women, which is both a strength and a limitation. Women face particular pressures around aging that men largely don't — social expectations about youth and appearance, concerns about fertility windows, and the reality that women in midlife often become caregivers for aging parents.

"As they see older family members grow older and become sick, they may worry about whether the same thing will happen to them," Rodrigues explained.

That caregiving angle matters. Watching a parent decline isn't abstract anxiety — it's a daily, lived preview of what aging can look like. And the study suggests that preview might carry a biological cost.

Whether the same pattern holds for men is an open question. The MIDUS dataset gave the researchers a large, well-studied female cohort to work with, but future research will need to test whether aging anxiety has similar epigenetic effects across genders.

The Caveat That Matters

Here's what the researchers are honest about: they can't prove cause and effect. The study is cross-sectional, meaning it captures one moment in time. It's possible that women who are already aging faster biologically sense that decline and become more anxious about it — the arrow could point either way.

There's another wrinkle. When the team controlled for health behaviors linked to anxiety — smoking, alcohol use, poor sleep — the association between aging anxiety and epigenetic aging weakened and lost statistical power. That suggests some of the biological impact might flow through behavior: you worry about aging, so you cope in ways (smoking, drinking, sleeping badly) that actually accelerate the process.

That's not a debunking. It's a clarification. The mechanism may be indirect — anxiety changes behavior, behavior changes biology — rather than anxiety directly flipping epigenetic switches. Either way, the worry is still the starting point.

What This Means for Longevity

The longevity field is in a fascinating moment. Last week, researchers at Duke published work showing that six tiny RNA molecules in blood can predict who's likely to live longer with 86% accuracy. Custom CRISPR therapies are saving individual lives. Epigenetic clocks are getting precise enough to measure the pace of aging in real time.

But the NYU study is a reminder that some of the most powerful forces shaping how we age aren't in a lab — they're in our heads. The $50 billion brain health supplement industry sells capsules and apps. This research suggests that addressing the fear might matter more than any pill.

"We need to start a discourse about how we as a society — through our norms, structural factors, and interpersonal relationships — address the challenges of aging," Rodrigues said.

That's not a call for positive thinking or pretending aging doesn't happen. It's something harder and more honest: building a culture where getting older isn't something to dread. Where aging is treated as something to prepare for with clear eyes, not avoid thinking about until it arrives.

Because the data now suggests that the avoidance itself has a cost. And it's measured in your DNA.