When people think about getting older, many picture an inevitable decline in health.
But that isn’t always the case. You can improve with age, both mentally and physically. This mindset may even be beneficial; having negative ideas about aging is linked to worse health outcomes, almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While the aging process, like life as a whole, varies from person to person, research shows that there are aspects of brain health that can actually continue improving well past your midlife. Here are three examples of the silver linings to going gray.
Fewer regrets
Living without regrets is a common maxim but an uncommon reality. About 90 percent of people say they have at least one major life regret, research shows.
“Many of us might worry that we will reach the end of life and have these really big regrets that we can never resolve, and they may take some solace in knowing that that is a very, very common experience,” said Julia Nolte, an assistant professor of economic psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
But getting older seems to lessen both the sting and the frequency of regrets.
In a recent study published in the journal Emotion, Nolte and her colleagues analyzed how age affected feelings of major regret in 90 adults ranging in age from 21 to 89. Older adults reported they had fewer major regrets within the past year than younger adults. In fact, older adults were more likely to say they didn’t have any recent regrets. And when older adults did have a major recent regret, they were less likely to be about relationships or their dealings with other people.
In older adults, major regrets both recent and lifelong were more likely to be about missed opportunities or the road not taken. Also, older adults had fewer “hot” emotions such as anger or frustration in response to thoughts of what might have been.
“Older adults tend to be more likely to say, ‘I don’t have recent big regrets,’” and when they do, the negative emotions are less impactful, said Nolte, who conducted the study when she was a psychology graduate student at Cornell University. “I think that that’s something to look forward to and to help decrease these age-related negative stereotypes a lot of us carry.”
More knowledge
As you age, you might be more forgetful and slower at mental processing. But on average, older adults actually perform better on tests requiring knowledge or language.
For example, adults in their 70s and 80s scored higher on vocabulary knowledge than those in the 20s, 30s and 40s, according to a large 2019 study.
Your ability to quickly reason through and adapt to new situations — called fluid intelligence — tends to peak in early to middle adulthood, around your 20s by some measures. But your ability to apply all your accumulated experiences, facts and skills — known as crystallized intelligence — remains stable or continues to improve through the seventh decade of life, research finds.
A 2022 study, which followed almost 9,000 adults for up to 18 years, found normal age-related decline of fluid abilities was still largely linked with increased crystallized abilities.
As you get older, your hard-won knowledge and experience may still be growing.
More wisdom
Older people may not only continue to grow in knowledge, but also in wisdom.
Wisdom is a complex personality trait that includes having empathy and compassion, as well as the ability to self-reflect, self-regulate and accept different perspectives, said Dilip Jeste, a geriatric neuropsychiatrist and president of the World Federation for Psychotherapy, who has researched wisdom since 2008.
Having higher wisdom is linked to better overall health and emotional well-being throughout the lifespan, research shows.
There’s evidence that older adults on average measure higher than younger adults on different components of wisdom, including empathy, emotional regulation and self-reflection, Jeste said.
Not everyone who gets old is necessarily wise — there are many ready examples to the contrary. But by and large, “people who have these components of wisdom, as they get older, they tend to become wiser,” said Jeste, who wrote a 2025 review on wisdom and aging.
For example, during the isolation and uncertainty of the covid-19 pandemic, everyone felt lonelier. But unexpectedly, older people generally fared better with their mental health than younger people.
When researchers asked why the older people had better resilience despite being at higher risk, “they said, we have been through problems like this before when we were growing up,” said Jeste, who wrote about this finding.
And they had made it through.
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