By Brian French | FloridaMedicalNews.com | Opinion
Quick Answer: Stress tends to energize younger people and wear down older ones. As the body’s stress-recovery system slows with age, the smartest move for most people over 60 is to avoid unnecessary stress rather than “push through” it. Laugh more, drop the impossible goals, and make living longer the main objective.
A Confession From a Former Stress Junkie
I used to love stress. I don’t mean I tolerated it. I mean I went looking for it like a raccoon looking for an unlatched garbage can.
In my twenties and thirties, a looming deadline was the best thing that could happen to my week. Phones ringing, problems piling up, a report due at 8 a.m. — my body answered every alarm with a fresh tank of high-octane fuel. I slept less, thought faster, and somehow got more done. Stress was a supercharger bolted onto an engine that was already running hot.
It was a lot like a ten-year-old with a pillowcase full of Halloween candy. Sugar hits, the kid sprints around the block three times, bounces off the couch, and wakes up the next morning ready to do it again. No crash worth mentioning. No consequences anyone could see.
Now I’m in my sixties. Same candy. Different kid.
Today a “big important deadline” doesn’t feel like rocket fuel. On a good day it feels mildly unsettling, like hearing a noise in the attic. On a bad day it feels like something a cardiologist might want to hear about. Somewhere along the way, my relationship with stress quietly flipped, and nobody sent me the memo. So I wrote one.
The Science Agrees: Stress Has an Expiration Date
It turns out my personal experience has a scientific explanation, and it’s not just that I’ve gotten soft.
The inverted U. More than a century ago, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson described what’s now called the Yerkes-Dodson law: performance improves with arousal up to a point, then falls off. Picture an upside-down U. A little pressure sharpens you. Too much scatters you. What nobody puts on the poster is that the peak of the curve seems to shift as we age. The sweet spot gets smaller, and the downslope gets steeper.
Allostatic load. Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen popularized the idea of “allostatic load,” the cumulative wear and tear that builds up when the body’s stress response gets switched on too often or doesn’t switch off cleanly. Young bodies run the stress response, mop up afterward, and move on. Older bodies are slower to mop. The cortisol lingers, blood pressure takes longer to settle, and sleep gets interrupted. Do that enough times and the bill comes due.
Slower recovery. Research on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s stress command center, suggests that its feedback system becomes less efficient with age. Robert Sapolsky and colleagues described a “glucocorticoid cascade” in which prolonged stress hormone exposure may damage the very brain regions that help turn the stress response off. In plain English: the brakes wear out.
Stress shows up in your cells. A landmark 2004 study led by Elissa Epel at UCSF found that women under chronic caregiving stress had shorter telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that are associated with cellular aging. The most stressed participants showed telomere shortening equivalent to roughly a decade of additional aging.
And in your heart. The international INTERHEART study, which examined heart attack risk factors across 52 countries, found that persistent psychosocial stress was significantly associated with heart attack risk, alongside familiar culprits like smoking and high blood pressure.
So no, I didn’t imagine it. The candy really does hit differently now.
| Stress at 25 | Stress at 65 |
|---|---|
| Energizing fuel | Unsettling at best |
| Quick recovery | Slow, lingering recovery |
| Sharpens focus | Disrupts sleep |
| Builds a career | Raises health risk |
| “Bring it on” | “Please don’t” |
Stress Is Now a Negotiation, Not a Sprint
At 30, stress was something you powered through. You put your head down, white-knuckled the deadline, and came out the other side a little tired and a lot more accomplished.
At 65, stress is a negotiation. Before I agree to any stressful situation, there are terms to discuss. How long will this last? What will it cost me in sleep? Is there a less aggravating way to get the same result? And most important: can I walk away from the table?
Trying to push through without negotiating is like strolling into the gym and grabbing a 200-pound dumbbell because you remember handling the heavy stuff back in the day. Could it build a little muscle? Technically. Is it far more likely to land you flat on your back at the chiropractor, popping ibuprofen like Halloween candy? Absolutely. The weight hasn’t changed. The odds have.
Negotiating With Intention: A New Set of Terms
Here’s what I’ve learned about negotiating: the side that shows up without knowing what it wants usually loses. For years I walked into every stressful situation with the same old playbook, written by a younger man with different priorities. Of course stress kept winning. I was bargaining with goals that no longer fit.
So I’ve become intentional about it. I rewrote the terms. I now have a new set of goals and objectives for this chapter of life, and every stressful request gets measured against them before I say yes.
| Old Objective | New Objective |
|---|---|
| Win every deadline | Protect my sleep |
| Build more muscle | Keep moving, pain-free |
| Grow the account | Keep worry low |
| Say yes to everything | Say yes to joy |
| Toughest in the room | Still laughing in the room |
The rule is simple. If a stressful situation advances one of the new objectives, I’ll hear it out. Helping a friend through a hard week? Worth it. A road trip that’s a hassle to plan but ends with old friends, a sunset and a plate of stone crab? Worth it. If the stress serves only the old objectives, the negotiation is short, polite and over before the coffee gets cold.
Being intentional doesn’t mean being rigid. It means deciding in advance what you’re willing to trade your peace for, instead of letting every ringing phone decide for you.
Doing the Math on Worry
I never made a grand vow to worry less. For most of my life, stress and worry were reliable members of the cast, and frankly, they earned their billing. It’s only in the last few years that I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a legal pad and did what I should have done long ago: I ran the numbers. What does accepting stress give me now, and what does it take?
For decades, that ledger came out comfortably in stress’s favor. Today it doesn’t. Not even close.
When you’re young with kids, worry isn’t a character flaw. It’s part of the job description. You’re hauling a heavy load uphill: a mortgage, a career, and a back seat full of small people asking “are we there yet?” Somebody has to think about the braces, the fever at 2 a.m., and whether that kid down the street is a good influence. That somebody was you.
Back then, worry occasionally earned its keep. Worrying about the fever got you to the pediatrician. Worrying about the leaky roof got it fixed before hurricane season. Worry was ugly and it stole your sleep, but every so often it actually solved something.
Fast forward to your sixties. The kids are grown and handling their own 2 a.m. fevers. The load is lighter. And, if we’re being honest, you can see the finish line. Not right around the corner, I hope, but visible on a clear day.
That’s where the math stopped adding up. Nobody in the history of the human race has ever pushed the finish line out by fretting about the track. You cannot worry your way into an extra lap. If anything, given everything we know about cortisol, blood pressure and telomeres, worry pulls the finish line closer.
Back when I managed money, I would have fired any fund manager with worry’s track record in a single afternoon: guaranteed negative returns, year after year. So I’ve fired the worry instead.
These days I schedule my worrying like a dental cleaning: twice a year, and I usually reschedule.
What Fills the Space Where Worry Used to Live
It turns out that when you stop worrying, you suddenly have a lot of free time. Those hours once spent lying awake rehearsing worst-case scenarios can go to things that actually make the day better: the tomato plants that refuse to cooperate, the fishing rod in the garage, the half-finished woodworking project, the pickleball game where everyone over 60 is suddenly, alarmingly competitive.
Then there’s the underrated pleasure of a museum on a weekday morning. Florida is loaded with them: the Dalí in St. Petersburg, the Ringling in Sarasota, the Norton in West Palm Beach, the Morse in Winter Park with its glowing Tiffany glass. You wander at your own pace. You read every placard, or none of them. You sit on a bench in front of a painting and nobody rushes you along. No deadline. No conference call. Just you and something beautiful that somebody made a long time ago, quietly reminding you that worrying was never the point.
The science backs up the bench, too. A 14-year study of more than 6,000 older adults in England, published in The BMJ, found that people who visited museums, galleries, concerts or the theater every few months had about a 31 percent lower risk of dying during the study period than those who never did. I’m not saying the Ringling will add a decade to your life. I’m saying it beats lying awake at 3 a.m.
And then there’s the simplest pleasure of all: a slow walk. Not a power walk. Not a race against the step counter on your wrist. A slow one. Down Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa as the sun comes up, along a riverwalk in the evening, or around the neighborhood once the afternoon heat finally gives up. You notice the herons. You notice the neighbor’s new mailbox. You say good morning to people you don’t know, and they say it back. In all my years, I have never once come home from a slow walk more stressed than when I left.
That one is backed by science as well. A large 2022 analysis in The Lancet Public Health, pooling data from 15 studies, found that more daily steps were linked to a lower risk of death, and for adults 60 and older the benefit leveled off at roughly 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day. In other words, you don’t need to march. You just need to keep strolling.
The Goals I’m Officially Retiring
New objectives only work if you make room for them. That means retiring a few old ones, and I’m giving up on two lifelong goals. I feel fantastic about it.
Goal No. 1: The Adonis Body
For decades I carried around a vague plan to someday look like a Greek statue. Chiseled. Bronzed. Possibly holding a discus for no reason.
That plan is canceled. Not because exercise doesn’t matter (it matters enormously), but because chasing an idealized body in your sixties is a terrific way to manufacture stress you don’t need. The punishing diet, the comparison to people half your age, the low-grade guilt every time you see a fitness influencer flexing on a yacht. None of it extends your life. Walking every day, lifting moderate weights a few times a week, and sleeping well do. The statue can stay in the museum, where I’ll happily admire it from a bench.
Goal No. 2: The Bulletproof Retirement Account
For years I chased the idea of a retirement account so flush with capital that it could survive virtually any economic scenario. Recession, inflation, a meteor, a sudden national shortage of grouper sandwiches. Name the catastrophe and the account would shrug it off.
I can now report, with some hindsight, that this account does not exist. There is always another scenario. There is always one more “what if.” Chasing total financial invulnerability is like trying to bail out the Gulf of Mexico with a coffee mug: noble, exhausting, and fundamentally a stress-generating machine.
Sensible planning? Absolutely. A reasonable cushion? Yes. But the pursuit of savings that protect against everything costs something no bank statement measures: years of worry. And worry, as we’ve established, is no longer free.
Why Avoidance Is Underrated After 60
We are told, constantly, to “embrace” stress. Reframe it. Lean into it. See it as a challenge. That advice may serve a 28-year-old launching a startup in Tampa. For a lot of us on the other side of 60, I’ve come to believe the healthiest response to optional stress is simpler: walk away from it. Slowly, preferably.
Skip the argument you don’t need to win. Decline the board seat that comes with three emergency meetings a month. Let somebody else drive I-4 at rush hour. Mute the cable news channel that exists mainly to elevate your blood pressure. Not every battle is your battle anymore, and that’s not defeat. That’s strategy.
To be fair, a few kinds of stress are still worth keeping. Exercise is technically a stressor, and it’s one of the best things you can do for your body. A challenging crossword or learning a new skill stresses the brain in useful ways. And the stress of making a doctor’s appointment you’ve been putting off is nothing compared to the stress of the thing you were avoiding. The rule isn’t “avoid all discomfort.” It’s “stop volunteering for the kind that only takes.”
Humor: The Best Medicine Nobody Prescribes
If avoidance is defense, humor is offense.
A large Norwegian study of more than 50,000 people, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that a strong sense of humor was associated with lower mortality over a 15-year follow-up, particularly from cardiovascular disease and infection among women. Laughter won’t replace your blood pressure medication, but it appears to be good company for it.
There’s also striking research from Yale’s Becca Levy, who found that people with more positive views of their own aging lived about 7.5 years longer than those with negative views. Seven and a half years. No supplement aisle in Florida sells that.
So I’ve adjusted my approach. When my knee makes a noise like a cracking walnut, I laugh. When I walk into a room and forget why, I treat it as a free surprise. When a younger colleague explains a new app with great patience, I accept the patience as a gift and not an insult. Mostly.
Florida Is the Perfect Place to Get This Right
Roughly one in five Floridians is 65 or older, one of the highest shares of any state in the country. We have more retirees, more sunshine, more golf carts, and more people who have every right to stop proving things.
This state already has the infrastructure for low-stress longevity: walkable beaches and waterfronts, world-class museums, year-round outdoor activity, active senior communities, and some of the best geriatric and cardiology care in the nation. What it sometimes lacks is permission. Permission to stop chasing. Permission to say no. Permission to treat a quiet Tuesday as a win rather than a wasted day.
The Only Goal That Still Matters
When I was young, the goal was more. More deals, more money, more muscle, more everything.
At this stage, all my new objectives point in one direction: live longer, and enjoy the time. Everything else is decoration. If a goal adds stress without adding years or joy, it goes in the donation pile next to my old neckties.
The Halloween candy used to make me run around the block. Now it gives me heartburn. And honestly? I’ve decided to skip the candy, take a slow walk around the block instead, and laugh about the kid I used to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does stress affect older adults differently than younger adults?
Research suggests it does. The body’s stress-response system tends to recover more slowly with age, so stress hormones like cortisol may stay elevated longer, contributing to sleep disruption, higher blood pressure and cumulative wear on the body.
Can older adults still “push through” stress?
They can, but the risk-reward balance changes. Much like lifting a weight that’s too heavy, forcing through high stress later in life is more likely to cause harm than build resilience. Weighing whether a stressful commitment is worth it, and walking away when it isn’t, is often the healthier choice.
How can older adults be more intentional about managing stress?
Set a new list of personal goals for this stage of life, such as protecting sleep, staying active without pain, keeping worry low and spending time on things that bring joy. Then measure each stressful commitment against those goals and accept only the ones that support them.
Is all stress bad for people over 60?
No. Exercise, learning new skills and social challenges are healthy forms of stress. The concern is chronic, unnecessary stress that offers no benefit, such as ongoing conflict, financial worry and overcommitment.
Why does stress stop paying off later in life?
For many people, the heaviest responsibilities of raising children and building a career have lightened, while the body’s ability to recover from stress has slowed. With fewer problems that worry can actually solve and a higher physical cost, the trade-off shifts against accepting stress.
Do hobbies, museum visits and walking help older adults live longer?
Research links regular arts and cultural engagement, such as visiting museums and galleries, with lower mortality in older adults. Studies also show that more daily steps are associated with lower risk of death, with benefits for adults over 60 leveling off around 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day.
Can humor really improve health?
Studies have linked a strong sense of humor and positive attitudes about aging with lower mortality. Humor isn’t a medical treatment, but it appears to support healthier stress responses and better quality of life.
Is it unhealthy to avoid stress?
Avoiding necessary tasks, such as medical care or important decisions, can backfire. Strategically avoiding optional stress, like unnecessary conflict or unrealistic goals, is a reasonable approach for many older adults.
This opinion column is for general information and does not replace advice from your physician. If stress is affecting your sleep, heart or mood, talk with your doctor.
Sources and Further Reading
- Yerkes, R.M., and Dodson, J.D. “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation.” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 1908.
- McEwen, B.S. “Protective and Damaging Effects of Stress Mediators.” New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.
- Sapolsky, R.M., Krey, L.C., and McEwen, B.S. “The Neuroendocrinology of Stress and Aging: The Glucocorticoid Cascade Hypothesis.” Endocrine Reviews, 1986.
- Epel, E.S., et al. “Accelerated Telomere Shortening in Response to Life Stress.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004.
- Rosengren, A., et al. “Association of Psychosocial Risk Factors with Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction in 11,119 Cases and 13,648 Controls from 52 Countries (the INTERHEART Study).” The Lancet, 2004.
- Fancourt, D., and Steptoe, A. “The Art of Life and Death: 14 Year Follow-Up Analyses of Associations Between Arts Engagement and Mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.” The BMJ, 2019.
- Paluch, A.E., et al. “Daily Steps and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis of 15 International Cohorts.” The Lancet Public Health, 2022.
- Romundstad, S., Svebak, S., et al. “A 15-Year Follow-Up Study of Sense of Humor and Causes of Mortality: The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study.” Psychosomatic Medicine, 2016.
- Levy, B.R., et al. “Longevity Increased by Positive Self-Perceptions of Aging.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002.
- U.S. Census Bureau. Population estimates by age, State of Florida.
