Attitude Towards Ageing and Its Effect on Lifestyle Choices

I wanted to know if the fear of ageing actually shows up differently between men and women, or if that’s just something we say without checking it. So I built a comparative study, ten women and ten men across adolescence to middle age, and gave them two checklists — one full of positive statements about getting older, one full of negative ones, worry, loss, and decline. The idea was simple on paper: see who agrees more with which list. But underneath that, there was a bigger question about where that fear actually comes from, whether it’s biological or whether it’s something media and culture hand us before we’ve even had the chance to feel old. I went in with a hypothesis that women would show more anxiety than men, and I wanted the data to either hold that up or take it apart.

I started with the theory side before I touched the survey. The ABC model, how attitudes form through affective, behavioural, and cognitive components, and then how they shift through cognitive dissonance, persuasion, the central and peripheral routes. I needed that scaffolding before I could even write a checklist that made sense.

From there, I moved into the actual topic, ageing and lifestyle, and that’s where it got more interesting to me — the gendered double standard, how men are read as “ageing gracefully” while women are expected to stay visibly young, the idea of social invisibility for older women. I pulled in media examples to ground that, The Substance, Black Swan, Mai, the witch archetype in things like Tangled, just to see the pattern show up outside of academic language, too.

Then methodology. I built two checklists, A for positive statements, B for negative ones, and ran them through Google Forms. I had to think through consent, confidentiality, controlling for gender balance and age spread in the sample. Once the responses came in, I tallied everything by hand, ran the means per question, then the aggregate mean per checklist per group, then did question-by-question analysis for both groups before finally laying the two genders side by side in the comparative section with bar and pie charts.

The numbers actually held up the hypothesis, which surprised me a little because I half expected the data to be messier than that. Women came in higher on the negative checklist than men did, and men scored higher on the positive one, so the gap wasn’t subtle; it was a clean directional split. What that confirmed, more than anything, is that the anxiety isn’t really about ageing itself, it’s about who’s allowed to age without being penalised for it. Men get to treat ageing as something closer to growth, women experience it as something closer to threat, and that gap traces straight back to the cultural weight placed on female visibility and youth.

If I did it again, I think I’d want a bigger sample, ten and ten is barely enough to generalise from, and I’d want to dig more into why the men’s numbers were so consistently high on the positive side, whether that’s genuine acceptance or just less social pressure to think hard about it at all. But the core finding stood — attitude shaped lifestyle far more than biology did.