My landlady in London was seventy-eight and lived on the top floor of a building with no lift. Four flights, narrow, with a turn at the second landing that ate suitcases. She carried her own shopping up twice a week, plus a small dog that refused to use its own legs past the second floor. The one time I reached for her bags, she gave me a look I still think about a decade later.
She was not a wellness person. She smoked for thirty years and quit at fifty-five, badly, in her own telling. Her bathroom cabinet held three things: sunscreen, moisturiser and a tub of something for her knees. And she looked extraordinary. Not young. Just unmistakably switched on.
I asked her about the stairs once. She said she didn’t climb them for her face. She climbed them because she wanted to keep climbing them.
The Artful Age
A weekly letter on aging well, family across generations, and the creative life after the kids leave home.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about people who age visibly well. Most of them aren’t vain. Vanity would be easier. What they have is stranger and far less flattering to the beauty industry: a plain, unsentimental respect for the machine they live in, formed years before anyone gave them a reason.
Watching your body is not the same as knowing it
Psychologists have a name for the habit of monitoring yourself from the outside. It’s called self-objectification: you take up a spectator’s seat on your own body and start tracking how it looks to other people rather than how it feels from the inside. Sounds harmless. It isn’t. Habitual body monitoring goes with more shame and appearance anxiety, and with reduced awareness of your own internal states. Hunger. Fatigue. The twinge in your shoulder that’s been asking for attention since March.
The opposite isn’t confidence. Researchers call it body appreciation: holding favourable attitudes toward your body and respecting it, while refusing to treat one narrow beauty standard as the only version available. And it shows up in behaviour. Higher body appreciation tracks with things like sun protection and turning up for cancer screening.
Read that again. The people who like their bodies are the ones who go get the mole checked.
The mirror is a terrible coach
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Training because you want to look better is one of the least reliable engines available. In a study of 571 women at fitness centres, exercising for appearance reasons was the mechanism linking certain workouts to worse body image and more disordered eating. Health and enjoyment motives ran the other way.
I’ve watched this play out in gyms in three cities. The appearance crowd trains hard for six weeks and evaporates, usually somewhere around the point the results stop arriving on schedule. The people still there at year five are chasing something duller: sleeping properly, carrying a kid up a flight of stairs, surviving a fourteen-hour flight without falling apart. Appearance pays you in comparison, and comparison always finds someone better lit than you. Function pays you in evidence.
Respect looks incredibly boring from the outside
The habits are unglamorous, which is exactly why they work. Sunscreen is the standout. In a randomised trial in Queensland, adults told to apply broad-spectrum sunscreen daily showed no detectable increase in skin ageing over four and a half years, roughly 24 per cent less than the group who used it whenever they felt like it.
Four and a half years. A tube of cream. I live in Bangkok now, where the sun does not negotiate, and I put it on for the same reason I lock my front door.
The rest of the list is equally dull. Sleep you actually defend from your phone. Legs used daily rather than saved for weekends. None of it photographs well, which is why it never trends, and none of it requires believing anything flattering about yourself first.
Your body is equipment, not a display case
There’s a writing exercise I like out of Maastricht, called Expand Your Horizon. Participants spend a few structured sessions writing about what their bodies can do, from senses and physical capability to creative work and communication, instead of how they appear. Women with negative body image who went through it came out with higher body appreciation and lower self-objectification.
You can run a rough version tonight for free. Write down five things your body did today that you never consciously ordered it to do. Digested lunch. Healed a cut. Recognised a friend’s walk from behind at fifty metres. It sounds twee. It’s also the only honest inventory most of us never bother taking.
The belief doing most of the heavy lifting
I’ve said before that most of ageing is expectation management, and this is the study underneath that claim. Yale researchers followed 660 people aged fifty and over. Those with more positive views of their own ageing, recorded up to 23 years earlier, lived 7.5 years longer on average than those with the gloomiest outlook. Yale’s own write-up on the study noted the effect was larger than low blood pressure, low cholesterol, not smoking, or regular exercise.
My landlady knew none of this, I’m certain. She simply never handed her body over to anyone else’s opinion, so she never had to win it back. She wore her age plainly on her face, no apology in it. It never once touched her stairs.