Secret #76: Ageism with Claudia Drossel
Recommended Episodes
What if aging isn’t the problem—but our beliefs about aging are?
In this episode, we discuss ageism with Dr. Claudia Drossel. Together, we explore how aging is often misunderstood as decline, when in reality many of the challenges we associate with aging are shaped by cultural bias, environment, and access to support.
This conversation reframes aging as a form of diversity, challenges common myths about loneliness, health, and capability, and explores how our environments, relationships, and societal structures influence quality of life across the lifespan.
We also examine how subtle forms of ageism show up in everyday language, healthcare, and social systems—and what we can do to change them.
Highlights:
Why ageism is one of the most overlooked forms of bias
The difference between aging and disease
How culture shapes our experience of getting older
Why quality of relationships matters more than quantity
How to create more inclusive, intergenerational communities
ORDER Max Cross Gets Unstuck from Anger: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Workbook for Ages 8-12 (ACT Workbook series for kids)
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
01:51 Aging as a form of diversity
05:42 Ageism and cultural stereotypes
11:56 Myth busting loneliness in older adults
12:52 Aging vs disease
17:00 Ageism in healthcare and provider bias
26:13 Age washing and social determinants of health
28:21 Quality vs quantity in relationships
36:00 Recognizing everyday ageism
46:20 Community as the real “biohack”
More about Claudia Drossel:
A Call for Action: Awareness and Advocacy
Ageism is one of the most pervasive and accepted forms of bias, prejudice, and
discrimination. Awareness of bias is a first step in noticing when cultural assumptions creep into personal lives and into our roles as scientist-practitioners. To generate an anti-ageist community, consider the following:
• Learn to think of aging as a lifelong process.
• Acknowledge complexity and heterogeneity when encountering adults who are older.
Because of shared social and physical environments, children in one neighborhood or high schoolers are still more alike; differences amplify as people’s lives diverge. Given that the adjective “older” spans three or more decades of the lifespan, “older adults” constitute a population whose members differ significantly.
Read broadly on ageism (e.g., Ayalon & Tesch-Römer, 2018) and aging (e.g., Baars, 2012).
• Familiarize yourself with campaigns that reframe talking about aging, to model and promote awareness (e.g., https://www.reframingaging.org/).
• Recognize the intersectionality of ageism with other aspects of diversity, such as gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity or race, religion, immigration status, sexual orientation, or disability status (Hays), that marginalize perceived group members or silence them in certain contexts.
• Get involved – support legislation, policies, and procedures that enhance non-age-based rights and access, for example to behavioral and physical/dental health services including those for sensory loss, meaningful employment, safe housing, walkable neighborhoods, and so on.
Such steps could be the first toward an anti-ageist community. Everybody, one day if fortunate enough, may fall into the category of “older adults.” Initiating action to improve our personal and professional stances toward age will benefit all.
Adapted from: Drossel, C., & Bookman, L. (in press). Ageism. In L. Hayes & M. Fryling (Eds.), Foundations of cultural psychology – behavior science in context (working title). New Harbinger.
Follow us on Facebook @lifesdirtylittlesecretspodcast and on Instagram @lifesdirtylittlesecrets
Reach out and let us know you are listening and what you would like to hear on the show - email:lifesdirtylittlesecretspodcast@gmail.com
-
Secret #76: Ageism with Claudia Drossel
[00:00:00]
[00:00:40] Meet Dr Claudia Drussel
[00:00:40] Emma Waddington: Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington.
[00:00:45] Chris McCurry: I'm Chris McCury, and today we are delighted, thrilled, privileged to be meeting with Dr. Claudia Drussel. Claudia is a professor in the psychology department at Eastern Michigan University. She has two [00:01:00] PhDs. One from Temple University in experimental psychology and one from the university to Nevada Reno, my alma mater in clinical psychology. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and a researcher who specializes in behavior analytic approaches to case management. And her life work focuses on late life behavioral health. She's the co-editor of a. Edited volume, applications of behavior analysis in healthcare and beyond 2021. And with my wife Sue, she wrote a book called Treating Dementia in Context, A step-by-step guide to Working with individuals and Families that came out in 2011.
[00:01:40] Chris McCurry: It's hard to believe it's been 15 years since that book came out. But anyway we're delighted to have you here. Welcome, Claudia.
[00:01:48] Claudia Drossel: Thank you very much for the introduction.
[00:01:51] Aging as Diversity
[00:01:51] Chris McCurry: Well, aging is something that's very near and dear to my heart more so every day, and you've done a lot of work in this area. [00:02:00] Decades worth of work. And today we're gonna talk about just some aspects of aging. 'cause it's a broad topic. And one of the things that struck me about a chapter that you wrote recently was aging as an aspect of diversity. Tell us more about that. I tend not to think of aging as an aspect of diversity, but if one does think about it, it does make sense.
[00:02:24] Claudia Drossel: Right. So, if you think about age then how old we are very often determines other people's reactions to us. And in terms of social, cultural. Determinants. There are these reactions really change our interactions in the world. And so, the American Psychological Association has, tagged, age as an issue of diversity, intersecting, of course, with race, ethnicity, and other kinds of [00:03:00] things. But think about what cohort you are. You brought up your own age, Chris. For me, it's the same kind of thing depending on on whether we're women, men, what gender we are. We might actually have very, very different encounters. Some people complain about being invisible. The American Psychological Association has lots of data that show that older adults don't really have the same healthcare access and mental health access as other adults. And so this is how it becomes an aspect of diversity, something to be trained in because people underestimate the effect of age on our lives.
[00:03:42] Chris McCurry: I didn't know when it was that people in stories started calling me, sir, but sort of struck me as like. What? But here I am. No, it's, it's, it's really true. I mean, I've had people of late asking me, you know, are you okay? Can you, you know, can you do [00:04:00] this? You know, are these stares too much? And it's like, you know, am I an old person? But 'cause in my own mind I'm like 23. So it's, but on the outside, of course, I look far alter.
[00:04:13] Claudia Drossel: Yeah.
[00:04:14] Felt Age and Culture
[00:04:18] Claudia Drossel: And that's of course the interesting thing that culturally the responses to age shift so much. Becca Levy is a researcher, for example, who has found that not in all cultures, to people speak about feeling younger. So like you just said, you know, in your own mind, you are in your twenties. And then the question that we have so from my psychological perspective, which is like a behavioral contextual perspective, is why would people bring up being younger? And what is the function of this? So what kind of purpose does it have? So if you say, you know, like I would say I'm in my, in my [00:05:00] sixties, but I'm feeling like in my twenties. Well, is that, an invitation, an offer to include me, to let me participate. What kind of function does it actually serve, and if it does not happen in all countries, so not in all countries, do people have a distinction between their actual chronological age and their Fed Age. What is the difference in those cultures and in those countries? Am I expected to participate even though I'm in my seventies and eighties in cultures where I don't bring up my felt age or my perceived age?
[00:05:36] Chris McCurry: So where does the US fall in that continuum in terms
[00:05:40] Claudia Drossel: Uh, we're pretty, we're pretty ageist,
[00:05:42] Ageism and Stereotypes
[00:05:42] Claudia Drossel: so yeah, we're in a youth culture where, where everybody wants to live longer, but nobody wants to grow old because we associate a lot of really negative things with age. So if [00:06:00] you think of all the stereotypes of of people as they age dotage, frailty. Illness burden, you know, just some of the words that pop up for people when they think about older adults. And of course these are all myths because most older adults live very full in rich lives independently and very competently until, until they pass.
[00:06:30] Emma Waddington: So as you were speaking about this idea of ageism and how we all want to, you know, stay young and.
[00:06:37] Emma Waddington: Um, Live longer, as long as we stay young. , what are the cultures where there isn't the ageism? Like, if I think of, you know, most European cultures I, I'd say are pretty ageist.
[00:06:50] Claudia Drossel: I would say so too.
[00:06:52] Emma Waddington: What examples do you have of cultures that are not.
[00:06:55] Claudia Drossel: I think in general they're the cultures in which there's more reverence or [00:07:00] respect. There's a different
[00:07:01] Claudia Drossel: narrative with age. Aging is a form, you know, of of bringing wisdom, of having more experience, of being able to contribute. With experience and kind of learned facts to to decision making.
[00:07:19] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:07:19] Claudia Drossel: So, so I think Becca Levy for example, studied mostly also Asian cultures
[00:07:25] Claudia Drossel: that might differ in reverence. And when you think about Europe, I just returned from a stay in Germany. I'm always. A little bit worried about people being forced into transitions to retire because there you might have, you know, mandatory retirement ages, for example, which we don't have here in the United States. So even though we're such a youth culture, people are not necessarily, not, not in all jobs, forced into retirement.
[00:07:56] Life Transitions in Aging
[00:07:56] Claudia Drossel: Some occupations of course, have forced retirement, but what we're concerned about are the transitions.
[00:08:02] Claudia Drossel: How do people manage, you know, transitions from working to not working? How do parents transition from having their children at home to, to not having kids at home?
[00:08:13] Claudia Drossel: How do you transition from being of childbearing status to not. Being of childbearing status anymore. And I think about this a lot because particularly, for example for people who have had children, it's very easy to have social contacts around children. But once you're child free. Making new friendships and having different social contacts does not come automatically anymore.
[00:08:41] Claudia Drossel: I think a lot of people enter new relationships related to the children that they have, children's schools, children's activities, and so when you think about aging, then aging brings about a lot of constellations of different kinds of factors that we don't necessarily [00:09:00] anticipate. when we're younger, because we get things, if you want to think about it this way for free, so for example, the social skills you need to have as a child free person might be very different from the social skills you are having, you know, as a parent, where you have this parallel engagement in different kind of activities.
[00:09:24] Chris McCurry: and I, when we were writing our first books, you know, we were doing a little research and we found that there were, at the time 66,000 parenting books out there. Probably way more now I wonder how many books there are about how to be an old person. you know, I spent. Decades being an adolescent, I mean, I know how to do that, but you know, how do I, how do I do this old person thing?
[00:09:48] Chris McCurry: You know? It's like, where's the playbook
[00:09:50] Older Adults Are Diverse
[00:09:50] Claudia Drossel: Well, and presumably there you spent a lot of more time being an old person than you did spend being an adolescent, [00:10:00] as most of us can count on living until well into the nineties now. And so thinking that in this culture, people typically are considered old when they're over 60. That's a third of your life. Being kind of spending it in the, in the old camp. And of course the problem with having a book on how to do this is that older adults are the most heterogeneous population. They're much more diverse really than younger adults because we still have younger adults all in the same context. They go through school, so if you think of adolescents, lots of adolescents have very similar experience, but they diverge more and more. So if you're thinking of the people you went to high school with you have diverging life paths. And as, as you have different experiences, you become more different from one another. And so when we, as general psychologists work [00:11:00] with, with what we term older adults, so typically 60 and older. Or adults in midlife and older they're really a diverse group of people with very different histories, very different preferences, very different values. And so there is not a situation in one, one way does it because it needs to be dynamic and flexible to fit lots of different and unique kind of individuals. So I think the secret if we want to reveal a dirty little secret is that change is kind of possible at any age and seeing where you are at and what best fits you. You can do that in adolescence as much as you can do it when you are an older adult.
[00:11:52] Myth Busting Loneliness
[00:11:52] Emma Waddington: I think one exercise that would be super cool for, for our listeners is to bust some age myths because we've [00:12:00] already bused a few and this is feeling really good. Another myth that I remember reading was this idea that older adults are lonelier of the loneliest group and actually the loneliest group are the younger adults.
[00:12:14] Emma Waddington: That's
[00:12:14] Emma Waddington: a big myth, isn't it? It is stunning. 'cause we, we made this huge assumption. You have these sort of awful images of, these frail old ladies, living alone in their apartment. Hmm. And, it's this sort of images of nightmares
[00:12:32] Emma Waddington: for
[00:12:32] Emma Waddington: many
[00:12:33] Claudia Drossel: It's what everybody is.
[00:12:34] Claudia Drossel: yeah,
[00:12:35] Claudia Drossel: It's what people are scared of. Yeah.
[00:12:37] Emma Waddington: yeah.
[00:12:38] Emma Waddington: Dying alone. I think that's the, the biggest fear
[00:12:41] Aging Versus Disease
[00:12:41] Claudia Drossel: Well, and I wonder if some of the fear of age is actually a fear of disease and suffering.
[00:12:48] Claudia Drossel: That we tend to associate with age. But it actually turns out this is where we have the difference between correlation and causation, right?
[00:12:58] Claudia Drossel: That some [00:13:00] diseases might correlate with age, meaning as you are being exposed to all kinds of factors as you age, you might be at higher risk, but aging does not cause any of these kinds of
[00:13:12] Claudia Drossel: diseases. And, and so again, you know, what people might be very scared of are, um, really stereotypes and misassumptions about, about aging itself. So
[00:13:29] Claudia Drossel: aging itself does not lead to disability. Disease does and can
[00:13:35] Claudia Drossel: and
[00:13:35] Claudia Drossel: might.
[00:13:36] Emma Waddington: Right.
[00:13:37] Emma Waddington: So it's not actually that your body has aged, it's more that you're exposed to more experience. It's like saying as you get older you'll experience more loss.
[00:13:47] Claudia Drossel: And. Right. And so in the same way that your age does not cause anybody to die,
[00:13:56] Emma Waddington: Yes,
[00:13:57] Claudia Drossel: it's just correlated that you have
[00:13:59] Claudia Drossel: moral [00:14:00] losses and people
[00:14:01] Claudia Drossel: around you will pass. But as you know, loss also happens to teenagers.
[00:14:08] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:14:08] Claudia Drossel: Loss happens really during any time in life. And and we don't spend much time acknowledging. In our society.
[00:14:20] Claudia Drossel: you know, as losses become more frequent, that might also then be problematic. When people don't have a lot of patience, we talk about in terms of affect tolerance. But you know, do you have patience for a person who is, who has lost somebody and is mourning that loss not for three months and not for half a year, but might actually be mourning that loss for the rest of their lives?
[00:14:48] Emma Waddington: I was thinking the other myth about the, the piece around, you know, you can live a full life up until the moment you die. I think that's [00:15:00] invigorating to hear. Because it's another big fear that people have that, you know, with age comes, you know, the loss of family and friends, but also the loss of your physical strength and therefore the loss of your quality of life.
[00:15:14] Claudia Drossel: Right. And so being being engaged, feeling passionate,
[00:15:22] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:15:23] Claudia Drossel: seeking. Looking for meaning having intimate relationships, continuing sexual relationships, all those kinds of things we typically don't talk about and we don't associate with aging.
[00:15:36] Emma Waddington: Yes.
[00:15:37] Emma Waddington: And those continue to matter. Yes.
[00:15:40] Emma Waddington: exactly. Yeah.
[00:15:42] Claudia Drossel: Yeah. And continuing to matter.
[00:15:45] Emma Waddington: Yeah,
[00:15:46] Claudia Drossel: you, you continue to matter about things.
[00:15:49] Claudia Drossel: Those are the things we don't talk about.
[00:15:51] Provider Bias and Segregation
[00:15:53] Claudia Drossel: And I think what we do have kind of provider biases because those folks who come to the attention of providers [00:16:00] are usually
[00:16:00] Claudia Drossel: the folks who have more difficulties, who might have laws that they have difficulties coping with or they don't get social support for. They might have, different traumas in their histories that are continuing to affect them throughout their lives. And so to the extent that those are the folks who come to the attention of providers, I think those are the biases,
[00:16:27] Emma Waddington: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:28] Claudia Drossel: we see throughout society. I read an interesting study, and I don't know if that continues to be so, but I read that medical students, for example, who are supposed to get education about aging and ageism after gerontology, rotations have been more instead of less ages. And that might be because again, it's this kind of selection bias in which [00:17:00] we as providers only see people who are ill, who are frail and then and it's basically providers then who also maintain the biases. That's why it's so important for providers also to get education.
[00:17:16] Chris McCurry: But, but it, it sounds like the education that the medical students got actually pushed them in the wrong direction.
[00:17:23] Claudia Drossel: it was a little bit counterproductive
[00:17:25] Claudia Drossel: we would have to kind of look that up. I don't know how it is with your work with adolescents, whether you also find that if you are somebody who is specializing in conduct disorders, for example, has more biases about adolescent.
[00:17:40] Chris McCurry: I was just always amazed how normal kids could be hanging out with. Ian's house, you know, when he was growing up compared to what I was experiencing,
[00:17:50] Claudia Drossel: a really interesting point. So then your exposure that you had in your life. Gave you enough of a different context that you [00:18:00] could see when stereotypes emerged. And I wonder if our living in age segregated societies were.
[00:18:08] Claudia Drossel: Where you might not have grandparents or great grandparents that you're interacting with on a routine basis might actually then maintain some of these biases because you don't see the other examples that frequently.
[00:18:22] Chris McCurry: and so many older adults are now living in these communities with just other older adults. And, you know, some places are getting the grandkids and the multi-generational families and things, but a lot of people are just segregated. And you know, there was even my mother. Was offended by this one aging community in her area in southern California where she pointed out that they had barbed wire on the top of the fences that were pointing in. So to keep the people from escaping. But yeah, if if we did have a society where [00:19:00] people were living in these mixed communities, I think that would go a long way to. Bust some of these myths.
[00:19:06] Building Inclusive Communities
[00:19:06] Claudia Drossel: And I think that goes back to, how do we actually structure our environments? How do we live, how are environments zoned? You know, how walkable are there people out and about? Are there opportunities for people in different kind of cohorts and generations to meet each other? So we can actually influence a lot. In terms of in what kind of environments we live.
[00:19:38] Emma Waddington: Could you talk more about that? because I live in Singapore you know, there, there are. There are homes, but
[00:19:45] Claudia Drossel: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:46] Emma Waddington: mostly families. You have intergenerational families and grandparents do a lot of the childcare. Parents go to work and grandparents do the childcare.
[00:19:57] Emma Waddington: They also have sort of, if you can afford it, [00:20:00] additional help at home. But grandparents are very involved and.
[00:20:04] Emma Waddington: there's a lot of, we call it, they call it the philio piety. A lot of respect for the, your elders and, you know, there's, there's lots of traditions and times during the year where you go and you give your respects to those who have passed.
[00:20:20] Emma Waddington: So
[00:20:20] Emma Waddington: actually the community here in that sense appears quite inclusive. Of the older adults, but I'm, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking of the inclusion more from a workplace environment or much more cross um. our day as opposed to, in our homes. And having relationships with those in our family, you know, like you were saying about, you know, the diversity piece.
[00:20:45] Emma Waddington: I find that really interesting. So I'd love to hear more about how we create these communities that are more inclusive.
[00:20:51] Claudia Drossel: Yeah, and these are really interesting. Interesting. Problems to solve.
[00:20:55] Claudia Drossel: So I, of course, as a psychologist, work with people [00:21:00] at an individual level. And yet very often what we have to start when people come with problems is to actually look at what does their, what does their environment look like?
[00:21:12] Claudia Drossel: And advocacy is then really important to, to make sure that people have, really what we're talking about is social power and stratification in, in kind of public life.
[00:21:28] Claudia Drossel: So, are there, and I, I keep on thinking are there means to engage. In parallel ways. It doesn't need to be the same. But the question is, what can you contribute at different times of your life? And I think we always have to ask ourselves that, you know, we make a lot of transitions. I'm very privileged in that I'm holding an academic position at a university and I teach and I [00:22:00] can, choose projects that I want to be involved in, but then the question that I have to ask myself is, at different stages and times in my life, what can I contribute and where is my time best spent
[00:22:15] Claudia Drossel: and what matters to me most? And I think this idea of giving this choice, that is kind of what I'm, what I would wish for people. to have to be in that space where you can say, okay, this is what I can contribute now. And it's
[00:22:34] Claudia Drossel: not only being based upon family,
[00:22:36] Claudia Drossel: but it's being based upon how society kind of operates. And to the extent that we all live in different kind of communities.
[00:22:44] Claudia Drossel: It will depend on what kind of community you're living in and what kind of role you conceive for yourself, what your preferences and values are. But here, the idea. It's really an idea that has been around [00:23:00] in disability and rehabilitation communities for a really long time. It's, it's always it.
[00:23:06] Claudia Drossel: The question is how can you live your values and what
[00:23:09] Claudia Drossel: matters to you?
[00:23:10] Claudia Drossel: And is there a cho can you choose how to best do that?
[00:23:15] Claudia Drossel: and why should that choice be restricted
[00:23:19] Claudia Drossel: based upon age? Chronological number.
[00:23:22] Emma Waddington: Yes.
[00:23:23] Workplace Support and Menopause
[00:23:23] Emma Waddington: There's a lot of conversation here and I know globally too about women in their transition to menopause.
[00:23:30] Claudia Drossel: Yes.
[00:23:31] Emma Waddington: And there's a lot of conversations around making workplace more comfortable more accessible for women as they transition. And sort of how can you.
[00:23:42] Emma Waddington: Allow, depending on what the needs are, how the woman, you know, transitions well or not well, or whatever happens. But it's raising awareness that this can be a very difficult stage for many. And that I, I don't have the stats on the top of my head, but you know, quite a considerable number of women choose to give up [00:24:00] work during this time because it's
[00:24:01] Claudia Drossel: because then also there's a lot of shame and embarrassment and having these kind of public hot flashes that you just can't hide.
[00:24:09] Emma Waddington: That's right.
[00:24:10] Claudia Drossel: And so the question then becomes if you are, if change and you change your routines and you change the support you are getting, for example, during, if you have childbearing age during a pregnancy.
[00:24:26] Emma Waddington: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:27] Claudia Drossel: And you can make things work. Is there a way to make things work throughout,
[00:24:35] Claudia Drossel: Major changes, whether it's adolescents and all, you know, these other folks that you're working with, whether you, you where you have those major changes and you might need more scaffolding and support. And how do you arrange the scaffolding in such a way that it doesn't? Diminish your quality of life and it allows you for equitable to have equitable input. That's really the question. [00:25:00] Yeah, and I've read those studies too.
[00:25:03] Claudia Drossel: We are starting menopause work in my research lab right now,
[00:25:07] Claudia Drossel: because what we are interested in. Is what the environment and what the context looks, looks like.
[00:25:14] Claudia Drossel: So, how many how many women and how many people who are going through menopause are having social supports? How often are things attributed to hormone changes that might actually not be due to hormone changes, but might
[00:25:31] Claudia Drossel: be? Um. Untenable aspects, basically of life and demands of life.
[00:25:37] Claudia Drossel: So, these are all questions that I don't think we have an answer for at this time.
[00:25:42] Age Washing and Weathering
[00:25:42] Chris McCurry: I mean, that's similar to something that you talk about in your chapter about age washing.
[00:25:47] Claudia Drossel: Right. And that term I adopted from a researcher at university of Michigan. Her name is, professor Geronimus. And she wrote a [00:26:00] book that is called Weathering and talks about how, weather differently depending on structural oppression and structural factors too. So minoritized populations, for example, might be under a lot more a lot more pressure, a lot more stress and age differently.
[00:26:22] Quality of Life Not Age
[00:26:23] Claudia Drossel: And and then what happens is that as we see these things, we attribute them to we might attribute them all to different patterns of aging instead of asking why. And so what kind of social determinants of health can we actually identify? That might affect, and to me, this is really interesting. It's not only, it's not how people age.
[00:26:51] Claudia Drossel: We age all our lives, but how people live, what we really are talking about is high quality of life and maintaining [00:27:00] quality of life throughout different kinds of transitions in life. Whatever those are, whether they're, you know, child bearing whether they're children moving out of the house, empty nesting losses that we have or later on or even early in life diseases that we get, so we are really asking how can we maintain quality of life and how can we not attribute things to aging? This is the where age washing comes in that are actually not part of aging, but that they're changeable. And a lot of our work, when folks come in for therapy, is to really try to. Do this kind of distinction, what is really part of age and what, so we cannot change it and what can be changed?
[00:27:50] Depth Over Quantity
[00:27:50] Emma Waddington: I was looking at a statistic about, you know, the amount of social contact that we have throughout our life, and it's pretty high when you're a [00:28:00] kid, adolescence, and then it starts to drop throughout. You know, as we get older and older and older, we actually see fewer people. But that doesn't necessarily, that doesn't mean that you're lonelier necessarily.
[00:28:15] Claudia Drossel: Now. And there's also something we know that older adults very often so if you think about statistically, older adults are much more emotionally stable. They have a lot less
[00:28:26] Claudia Drossel: depression than younger adults do.
[00:28:29] Claudia Drossel: And they might be much more selective,
[00:28:33] Claudia Drossel: you know. that's right.
[00:28:34] Claudia Drossel: As you have a different temporal perspective, if you think, well, I might have 10 more years, I might have five more years, you might be much more selective as to who you're spending your time with
[00:28:46] Claudia Drossel: and how you are spending your time. So then what we really are talking about is also depth
[00:28:56] Claudia Drossel: rather than kind of frequency.
[00:28:58] Claudia Drossel: So you might have a [00:29:00] few friends, but those friends might be very dear and intimate friends. Very different from having, you know, lots of friends or hundreds of people around you with very superficial relationships.
[00:29:13] Claudia Drossel: So it's, it's quality versus
[00:29:17] Claudia Drossel: quantity.
[00:29:19] Emma Waddington: Yes, the adult, the Harvard Adult Development Study was, was talk talks about that, doesn't it? That actually, that's the one of the biggest predictors of happiness is the depth of your relationships versus, you know, the quantity, but even sort of your career or your financial success, ultimately it's that.
[00:29:42] Claudia Drossel: Yeah, so. Other people.
[00:29:45] Burnout and Values
[00:29:45] Claudia Drossel: There is a Korean German philosopher, his name is B Han, and he wrote a book that is called the Burnout Society.
[00:29:56] Claudia Drossel: So in German was the Moish Kites Khat. And basically [00:30:00] what what he pointed out is that we don't have time for deep reflection anymore,
[00:30:05] Claudia Drossel: but instead are consistently multitasking. So it's more like frequency of engagement than
[00:30:12] Claudia Drossel: depth of engagement.
[00:30:15] Emma Waddington: I spoke to my father. And he frequently says, you just don't need very much , when you get to my age, you don't need very much. But he has a lot of clarity on
[00:30:28] Emma Waddington: what matters, and that's what he does.
[00:30:30] Claudia Drossel: that's, I think is very important. Yeah. So this idea that values clarification occurs
[00:30:38] Claudia Drossel: as part of life and as you are at different points, you might ask yourself, what, what matters to me now? I think, those are the things that we wanna pay attention to, but not everybody. Not everybody has the privilege to stop and contemplate.
[00:30:57] Claudia Drossel: And I think noticing that too,
[00:30:59] Emma Waddington: [00:31:00] Yes. And
[00:31:00] Claudia Drossel: because that
[00:31:01] Emma Waddington: aged gives you.
[00:31:02] Claudia Drossel: it does take time.
[00:31:03] Claudia Drossel: In general, I think we underestimate the amount of satisfaction, life, passion and power that can come with age.
[00:31:18] Emma Waddington: Mm-hmm.
[00:31:19] Claudia Drossel: And I think particularly now we're we are really chasing kind of topographical.
[00:31:28] Claudia Drossel: Youth
[00:31:29] Claudia Drossel: in terms of plastic surgery, in
[00:31:31] Claudia Drossel: terms of you know, hair color.
[00:31:34] Emma Waddington: Yes. Yes. That's so true.
[00:31:37] Age Myths and Dementia
[00:31:45] Emma Waddington: How do you explain though that sort of age seems to be such an important factor when it comes to the choice of presidents and there's something about wisdom and experience that plays a part there that seems to be quite respected and perhaps in academia too.
[00:31:55] Chris McCurry: I think it should. Of a factor in the choice of presidents than it [00:32:00] seems to be,
[00:32:03] Emma Waddington: Well age. There seems to be a, a sort of correlation with
[00:32:06] Chris McCurry: okay, well maybe I'm talking about, maybe I'm talking about maturity. Um.
[00:32:12] Claudia Drossel: Oh, here we're talking about decision making and so I don't know. You know, bad decisions can be made at all ages
[00:32:19] Claudia Drossel: and very often we believe that particularly older people might become more incompetent. That's also one of the myths and stereotypes
[00:32:29] Claudia Drossel: and,
[00:32:30] Claudia Drossel: and make poor decisions. But we don't ask, has this person made poor decisions basically all of their lives?
[00:32:37] Emma Waddington: true. Yeah
[00:32:39] Claudia Drossel: um,
[00:32:40] Claudia Drossel: and
[00:32:40] Claudia Drossel: then,
[00:32:40] Emma Waddington: more of the same.
[00:32:42] Claudia Drossel: and I think the worry of course that people have is that the onset of a lot or the detection of a lot of the neurodegenerative diseases correlates with age. So even though prodromal phases may be there already when a person is, [00:33:00] is in their thirties and forties. Meaning they're not showing symptoms yet, but have very subtle shifts in behavior that might be interpreted as depression or anxiety. and then later on when they hit their sixties, they might get diagnoses of things like Lewy bodies, disease, frontotemporal, lower degeneration, has been in the news Alzheimer's disease, those kinds of neurodegenerative diseases. And we tend to we tend to attribute those diseases to age.
[00:33:33] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:33:33] Claudia Drossel: When age is again a correlation but not causation,
[00:33:40] Emma Waddington: If you, if you live long enough, you can get many things. Mm.
[00:33:45] Claudia Drossel: right? And lots of people live very long without any chronic diseases,
[00:33:51] Claudia Drossel: which is kind of amazing when you think. How many people actually make it to the end of their lives without having any of the prototypical age [00:34:00] related diseases,
[00:34:01] Claudia Drossel: high blood pressure,
[00:34:02] Claudia Drossel: high cholesterol,
[00:34:04] Claudia Drossel: diabetes.
[00:34:04] Claudia Drossel: So those things are true too, but we just don't talk about it
[00:34:09] Claudia Drossel: again. You know, we see less of those cases than we see. We see fewer of those cases than we see the others.
[00:34:18] Emma Waddington: Yes.
[00:34:18] Chris McCurry: We don't think of them as cases,
[00:34:20] Claudia Drossel: Right, But from a statistical perspective, if you counted numbers.
[00:34:25] Reframing Aging Biases
[00:34:25] Emma Waddington: what does this world look like? Like what, what can we do? What changes can, can we make?
[00:34:32] Emma Waddington: I sort of certainly wish my grandparents were still alive. I think I'd learn a lot from them. And. I really love this idea that we have a role at each stage, you know, of life and we can play a part, and that, as we age, we continue to matter and about things and what is, what, what can we do
[00:34:58] Emma Waddington: in our communities
[00:34:59] Emma Waddington: [00:35:00] To sort of start thinking about age differently.
[00:35:03] Claudia Drossel: Yeah. To me, if we think about the function of the word age,
[00:35:09] Claudia Drossel: it very often just denotes the passage of time. And if you thinking about how I need to change my own behavior, so for example, from a provider perspective, I find myself talking to somebody who's in their nineties and they're telling me about their hobbies. And I'm saying things like, oh, you are still playing tennis and notice, right, what I'm doing? I'm, I'm showing surprise and I insert the word still as if I expected the person kind of to have stopped already, you know, 20 years ago. So these are the biases that kind of show up and I think what we need to, we need to see how we participate in communities that. Propagate stereotypes [00:36:00] and biases. That's from birthday cards that you might buy. Think about lots of birthday cards, you know, over the hill. You can teach an old dog new tricks, you
[00:36:12] Chris McCurry: I I just got one that said you can cross dying young off your list of things to worry about.
[00:36:19] Claudia Drossel: There you go.
[00:36:20] Chris McCurry: One of my lovely sisters. But but even when you said, oh, you're still playing tennis, you, you used that, that tone of voice of, I think you call age speaking. What is the term used for that?
[00:36:31] Claudia Drossel: Right.
[00:36:32] Claudia Drossel: So, so there there are different kinds of ways that you might show disrespect.
[00:36:42] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:36:43] Claudia Drossel: and I love a quote by Donald Hall who was a poet laureate. And he said basically that a lot of, condescension toward the age, aged toward older people [00:37:00] presents itself as benignity. We try to be so benevolent. And and that's what you can see. When people shift their voices, their intonation, when they speak to older adults, they might use terms of endearment that are really not appropriate. They might use infantilizing words. So for example Donald Hall has a, has a short story. It's really in his essays at 80, it's a recollection where somebody asks him, you know, how was your den, for example?
[00:37:37] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:37:37] Claudia Drossel: But those kinds of interactions are really the ones that we don't only receive when we're older because, you know, hopefully we will all live longer and then we become the person, the persons that the [00:38:00] stereotypes are being applied to. While at a younger age, we might actually kind of recklessly apply the stereotypes and noticing when we do so noticing when we are engaging in, in a different intonation, different word choice, because we are with somebody we we consider older. I think getting that awareness is really, really important and we do it automatically.
[00:38:31] Ageism in Healthcare
[00:38:34] Claudia Drossel: I mean, ageism is one of the most pernicious forms of bias in really in this country.
[00:38:39] Claudia Drossel: And when age washing occurs, then meaning when we apply ages stereotypes to ourselves, we may not seek out healthcare. I might think that my feeling tingly and weird is part of aging,
[00:38:52] Claudia Drossel: uh, and not get a diagnosis of diabetes. might actually, I might not get healthcare for pain [00:39:00] because I think arthritis is something that I just need to live with and every older person gets. And so those are the kinds of dangerous consequences of ageism in society.
[00:39:10] Chris McCurry: and along the lines of, you know, being more selective in who you spend time with, finding a physician that is not gonna just blow you off because you've got an ache here or a pain there. That somebody who's gonna take you seriously and actually investigate these things and not attribute it to the fact that you, okay, you're in your seventies now. My physician keeps using the phrase, well, at your age.
[00:39:37] Claudia Drossel: Right. Yeah. And having the courage. But, but that's also, it's not only courage, but it's also privilege to be able to change physicians if a physician does not attend to changes that you're noticing.
[00:39:52] Emma Waddington: Yeah.
[00:39:53] Claudia Drossel: So I think so we can all play our part because, we can change a [00:40:00] lot because these things are so small and ubiquitous that they're basically noticeable almost anywhere, so you can make a change.
[00:40:11] Claudia Drossel: I. I work with older adults and I still notice, and I'm an older adult now myself, by definition, and I notice how how I have to work on my own behavior because of course, we're always members of the community and so we reflect the biases of the community.
[00:40:28] Claudia Drossel: So it's ongoing work.
[00:40:30] Claudia Drossel: And we can make a lot of changes.
[00:40:33] Claudia Drossel: And if you look at the Gerontological Society of America, they have a guide, it's called reframing aging.org.
[00:40:41] Chris McCurry: On in the show notes.
[00:40:44] Emma Waddington: Because I think, you know, when we think about aging, like you said, it's, you know, we're, we're aging from the minute we're born. And some of these sort of stereotypes are applied to women much, you know, younger, you know.
[00:40:57] Emma Waddington: know?
[00:40:57] Claudia Drossel: Yes, and they apply them to [00:41:00] themselves too much younger and
[00:41:01] Claudia Drossel: women tend to report becoming invisible.
[00:41:05] Emma Waddington: Yes, that's right.
[00:41:07] Claudia Drossel: And that also happens at different ages
[00:41:11] Claudia Drossel: for women.
[00:41:12] Claudia Drossel: and again, here we're really talking about social practices and to the extent that we are all engaging in them as part of society, we all can carry our part in making changes.
[00:41:27] Chris McCurry: Final thoughts. That in and of itself was great. Final thought.
[00:41:32] Chris McCurry: We can all, we can all make changes.
[00:41:35] Claudia Drossel: Well, uh,
[00:41:36] Intersectionality and Support
[00:41:36] Claudia Drossel: and I think this all escalates when people have a cognitive impairment, and
[00:41:43] Claudia Drossel: so as people might have diseases or injuries or other events that affect their memory, attention or a decision making.
[00:41:55] Claudia Drossel: If we talk about intersectionality, that disability then [00:42:00] combined with age basically escalates and worsens all the stereotypes. And here too, and this could be a completely separate, Show really in talking about this, because there's a lot of change that that can be made there too.
[00:42:17] Claudia Drossel: So you can live with high quality of life, even when cognitive impairment is present, but it depends very much on the scaffolding and support you're getting.
[00:42:26] Emma Waddington: Yeah.
[00:42:27] Chris McCurry: That will be another podcast.
[00:42:28] Claudia Drossel: Right.
[00:42:29] Emma Waddington: Yes, because it is true. It is true that people, when they do have, you know, any decline, mild, cognitive impairment, as you know, we start to talk about it. There is a lot of fear, but there is a lot of restrictions that happen and not a lot of scaffolding, and therefore, life does get small
[00:42:46] Claudia Drossel: And we really need physicians who know how to do all the rule outs and make sure that. All these preventable and reversible factors
[00:42:57] Claudia Drossel: are being addressed
[00:42:58] Claudia Drossel: any age though. [00:43:00] So this goes, you know, across the lifespan.
[00:43:02] Claudia Drossel: And I think a lot of things that we talked about today really are not particular to age, but they are really important across the lifespan.
[00:43:12] Claudia Drossel: And paying attention to them across the lifespan would be a good thing generally.
[00:43:17] Emma Waddington: Yes.
[00:43:18] Lifelong Skills and Advocacy
[00:43:18] Emma Waddington: As acceptance and commitment therapist, we talk a lot about, you know,
[00:43:23] Emma Waddington: Individual differences and adapting context. And you know how to help each individual really understand how to build your own life. That's as meaningful as it can be. And
[00:43:37] Emma Waddington: you're right, that when we think about age, it's a context
[00:43:40] Claudia Drossel: Yeah, and we need to pay attention to our relationships.
[00:43:43] Emma Waddington: Yes. Yes.
[00:43:44] Claudia Drossel: So if some relationships might need work,
[00:43:47] Emma Waddington: Hmm.
[00:43:48] Claudia Drossel: because they also have shifted because of life changes and life transitions.
[00:43:54] Claudia Drossel: It's not directly. Again, we can engage in age washing and say with age it's different, but it might well [00:44:00] be that life transitions make it, that things need work at different times and they just need a little bit more attention and problem solving.
[00:44:08] Emma Waddington: I do think it would be useful to have some, a life guide of some kind of all these skills. Like you really can't stop learning this idea that, amongst us. You've got two PhDs, but we've got quite a lot of years of studying
[00:44:23] Emma Waddington: this this podcast just amongst us.
[00:44:26] Emma Waddington: You know, we're obviously lifelong learners, but I realize that there's so much I still don't know and how nimble we need to continue to be with these life skills as sort of life, you know, keeps moving along. And we have different experiences. I, think of myself as, someone
[00:44:44] Emma Waddington: has to continue to, to question my assumptions and what I know about life and relationships in the world because, you know, things change and I need to keep moving.
[00:44:54] Claudia Drossel: I agree. I work in the field and I find that every single day I also get [00:45:00] inspired by the people I work with.
[00:45:03] Emma Waddington: that's right.
[00:45:04] Claudia Drossel: And I learn a lot from them.
[00:45:05] Claudia Drossel: and if I said, you know, here is a starting point. I think it's waking up, finding finding how we perpetuate kind of ages practices,
[00:45:17] Claudia Drossel: trying to advocate and to work against them.
[00:45:20]
[00:45:20] Claudia Drossel: Trying to educate ourselves all the time and seeing how we can generate, um, more accepting and participatory and engaging kind of setting and environment for people to live their values.
[00:45:36] Community Over Biohacks
[00:45:36] Emma Waddington: So is this like the ultimate biohack at the end of the day?
[00:45:41] Claudia Drossel: Yeah, it's the bio-psychosocial hack,
[00:45:44] Emma Waddington: That's the bio-psychosocial hack, you know, where we're looking for the answers. You know, people are popping pills and sitting in incredibly cold ice baths and, you know, infrared saunas. But actually what really works, what really works [00:46:00] to keep us living full and meaningful lives
[00:46:03] Emma Waddington: it's community.
[00:46:04] Claudia Drossel: and. Noticing when we're looking for individual solutions, when the problem is actually not on individual basis,
[00:46:14] Claudia Drossel: it's on a larger social and communal basis.
[00:46:18] Claudia Drossel: I think that is really important too, because particularly in our work, you know, where a lot of people might have a, still a cognitive dysfunction model. They might say, oh, you know, you have these beliefs about yourself and. There a sign of, you know, your thinking is just off.
[00:46:36] Claudia Drossel: It might well be that you're just resonating with all the biases and stereotypes within society.
[00:46:43] Claudia Drossel: And the and the starting point is a different kind of point. The starting point is advocacy and engagement, rather than trying to kind of change yourself.
[00:46:53] Chris McCurry: Right on that note, go forth.
[00:46:56] Emma Waddington: Yes,
[00:46:59] Emma Waddington: [00:47:00] Yes,
[00:47:00] Claudia Drossel: have our work cut out for us. Yes.
[00:47:03] Emma Waddington: that's
[00:47:03] Chris McCurry: Wow.
[00:47:04] Closing Resources and Thanks
[00:47:10] Chris McCurry: I mean, you know, going back to finding something meaningful in life at any age, you know, back, that could be something that people could get involved in and will. We'll put some resources in the show notes for people to do that, to get engaged, to get, you know, more information to get inspired.
[00:47:26] Chris McCurry: Thank you, Claudia. This has been wonderful.
[00:47:28] Emma Waddington: you.
[00:47:29] Emma Waddington: Really has been inspiring.
[00:47:31]
[00:48:08]
