Keep calm and carry on - that's if you want to stay sane. Neurologists have recently discovered that aggression and negativity accelerates brain aging by more than 10 years.
A new study on young adults revealed that those who harbor hostile attitudes or deal poorly with stress are significantly more likely than their calmer counterparts to experience memory and thinking problems in middle age.
"Worse cognition in midlife was independently associated with 2 psychological characteristics measured in young adulthood. This suggests that interventions that promote positive social interactions may have a role in reducing risk of late-age cognitive impairment," researchers wrote in the study.
The latest study involved 3,126 participants with an average age of 25 at the start of the study. Researchers determined hostile attitudes through questionnaires that measured participants' personalities, attitudes and ability to deal with stress.
Examples of hostility include aggressive behavior, lack of trust for others and antagonistic feelings toward social relationships. Stress management was measured through effortful coping, or how actively participants tried to reduce stress in a series of experimental tasks.
Researchers noted that participants' memory and thinking skill were also assessed at the beginning and end of the study 25 years later.
The study revealed that participants with the highest levels of hostility and effortful coping performed significantly worse on memory and thinking tests 25 years later than those with the lowest hostility and effort coping levels.
"We may not think of our personality traits as having any bearing on how well we think or remember things, but we found that the effect of having a hostile attitude and poor coping skills on thinking ability was similar to the effect of more than a decade of aging," lead researcher Lenore J. Launer, of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.
"If this link is found in other studies, it will be important to understand whether these personality traits are amenable to change that would lead to interventions that promote positive social interactions and coping skills to see if they could play a role in reducing people's risk for memory and thinking problems in middle age," she explained.
The findings are published in the journal Neurology.
