Deans' stroke musings: Why You Should Lie (to Yourself) About Your Age

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, July 27, 2026

Why You Should Lie (to Yourself) About Your Age

At 70 I feel like 40 when I stated playing the sax. No longer care about my baldness, in college it was a real downer. My younger insecurities around women are totally gone now. As a friend says; Dean, I count 7 women you seem to mention.

Why You Should Lie (to Yourself) About Your Age

By all measures, I should feel old. I was born in the year The Graduate came out, and Elvis Presley married Priscilla. Holy hell, I predate the Egg McMuffin! But while I’ve been around for more than five decades, I actually feel about 38. The sense of feeling younger than our years is called our “subjective age.” It’s a psychological construct that allows us to make sense of something existentially terrifying and uncontrollable: the passing of time. (For context, our “chronological age” aligns with the number of candles on our birthday cake.)

Subjective aging is as slippery as a Salvador Dali painting, though. When we’re teens and young adults, we think of ourselves as older. That continuum flips when we hit midlife. “In middle age, most of us start to think of ourselves as 20 percent younger than we are,” says psychologist Dayna Touron, PhD, an aging specialist and the Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Louisville. She adds that the notion of subjective age is also momentary. For instance, if you’re over 40 and you don’t get carded at a bar on a Friday night, you might roll like a millennial all weekend. Catch yourself singing along to The Pixies on Sunday, and you’re back to feeling medieval.

“To gauge how old they feel, some people think about their perceptions of others, and some people think about their own experiences,” says Touron. Most of the time, I feel about 33 percent younger than my chronological years.

“In middle age, most of us start to think of ourselves as 20 percent younger than we are,”—Dayna Touron, PhD

It’s not arbitrary that I’m 38 in my own mind. My subjective age stems from a profound personal shift. In 2006, I began to radiate confidence when I walked into a room full of strangers or asked a boss for more money. It was around the time I came into what I call my “hyena power.” (Take a moment to Google these fierce, feminist mammals and you’ll understand.) I started putting women first. I quit bemoaning my wide ass in the mirror when I slid into tight jeans. I announced “I don’t share food” when someone tried to order for the table at a restaurant—and I didn’t apologize for it either.

Middle age—technically, the years between 45 and 65—feels like a new beginning, a rebirth without the insecurity of my 20s and much of my 30s. But when it comes to subjective aging, a 2023 study from the University of Exeter found that women in midlife tend to feel a few years older than their male peers due to negative stereotypes about mature women. I think that means we get stuck on the physicality of aging. We can’t see ourselves as younger when beauty ideals call for what we no longer have: glass-smooth skin and naturally shiny hair. (Research shows women claim they start to fade from relevance like T-shirts washed too many times around the age of 51 or 52.)

Photo courtesy Kate Jones

Honestly, I don’t believe I look like a woman 20 years younger. But I definitely think I look better. Hotter, even. My theory about that cocky self-perception is two-fold. First off, my inner critic is too tired to heckle me at this point. She’s just sitting back with her dusty feet up. When I look in the mirror—or even at a selfie—I don’t fixate on my laugh lines or sparse brows. I just smile and think, “Works for me.” Secondly, for a straight cis gender woman, there’s an exhilarating freedom in not caring if men check me out. Back in my 20s, I waltzed into a club and clocked how many guys looked my way. Sadly, my self-worth could be crumpled like a cocktail napkin. Now, I validate myself. Besides, the lingering gaze of a stylish woman means so much more to me now.

Do I look as young as I feel? My 54-year-old husband says I look around 50; my teenage daughter, 15, screams from her room, “I don’t know! 47! Who cares?” Determined to get an unbiased read, I created a “Guess My Age. Win a Donut” stand on a busy boulevard in a hip area of L.A. I camp out and wait. A mailman guesses “37 for sure,” and I give him two donuts. A middle-aged mom squints at my features and quickly puts me at “56.” (Not surprisingly, women around my age are the most accurate in their predictions.) A Gen Z girl, wearing a velvet choker and space buns, gently takes me aside: “Okay, your face is 48, but your jeans are giving me retired art teacher.” I offer her a donut, but she’s gluten-free.

“Your subjective age has overall consequences in how you live,” says Touron. Feeling younger also buffers stress and halts the decline in your functional health. A younger subjective age extends your lifespan, too. Another marker of your lifespan, known as your “biological age,” measures, in essence, the pace at which your body is loping towards death. Right now, longevity is all the rage in biotech, and there are a dozen companies that will gauge the age of your insides—like your brain, liver, hormones and heart—by analyzing your blood or spit. I turn to Superpower, a digital clinic that measures your biological age, for my own reading—and share a blood sample for analysis. “Psychology has an impact on biology. People who act and look younger have younger biological ages,” says founder Max Marchione. A week later, I find out that I’m actually only six years younger, which still proves my point. Next year, I’ll celebrate with one candle and keep everyone guessing.