The 7.5-year longevity advantage you already have

If you were to look at the cultural stories including women beyond 50, you might assume that we have faded quietly into the background. After all, women in this age range account for only 8% of television screen time and represent fewer than a quarter of movie characters. But, if you are (or know) a woman in her 50s and beyond, you understand this is not a time of quiet fading. It’s a time of immense reinvention for many of us.

Maddy Dychtwald, author of Ageless Aging: A Woman’s Guide to Increasing Healthspan, Brainspan, and co-founder of Age Wave, isn’t surprised. She says that women often want to find a new path as they hit 50, 60, 70, and beyond. This week, we dive into what reinvention looks like at different stages of life, and what it actually means to live a long, vital life as a woman.

For many women, something profound shifts around 50 or 60. After decades of raising families, building careers, and taking care of everyone else, many finally have the space to ask one of life’s most important questions: what comes next? In this stage, Dychtwald says, many women can sometimes feel paralyzed, believing they now need to discover some grand new mission—a new career, a non-profit, something that changes the world. But aging expert Marc Freedman introduced her to a distinction she finds essential: purpose with a “capital P” versus purpose with a “lowercase p”. And they each are valuable to our health and longevity.

This isn’t just a feel-good idea. A growing body of research shows that purpose is biological. A 2025 study published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that people with a higher sense of purpose were about 28% less likely to develop memory and thinking problems as they aged. And earlier research using MRI data from the Midlife in the United States study found that a greater sense of purpose was associated with measurable markers of better brain health, in both white matter and the hippocampus, the brain structure most involved in learning and memory.

Purpose ultimately gives us something to look forward to. It tells our body and brain that we’re still needed, still growing, still contributing. And that’s one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves so that we can live better longer.

Women have won the longevity lottery, but may have lost the health outcomes battle. At the same time we have advantages that aren’t always as present in conversations around health and longevity.

One such example is social connection. Women, on average, are better at building and sustaining the kinds of deep relationships that science consistently links to longer, healthier lives. Research from psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University found that lacking social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day which means that the community women tend to build throughout their lives is biologically protective.

Another is how women respond to strength training. If there's one lever that matters most for living better longer, it's building muscle mass. And research shows that women's relative gains in strength and muscle are nearly identical to men's, with one edge: women are more fatigue-resistant, recover faster between sets, and can handle higher training volume. You don't have to out-train anyone. You just have to train, period. It may be the closest thing we have to a longevity superpower.

Dychtwald reminds us that aging is a lifelong process. “We have been given a cultural script that tells us that as we live longer, we're on this downward slide after age 50. But that script is based on outdated models of aging. Science tells us a different story. Genes matter, but they are NOT our destiny. In fact, scientists estimate that roughly 80-90% of how we age is influenced by our lifestyle and environment. We have far more agency over our own health, well-being, and vitality than we ever thought possible.”

The data backs her up. A landmark study from Dr. Becca Levy at Yale followed 660 adults over 23 years and found that people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive views. The effect held even after controlling for age, gender, health, and socioeconomic status.

“The old story says aging is about decline and winding down,” Dychtwald says. “The new story, the one the science is actually telling, is about possibility. It’s about reinvention, resilience, purpose and growth. It’s about a future that's powerful and meaningful.”

For women in their 50s and beyond, that's not a distant possibility. It's already happening. And I see it every day in the Livelong Women’s community.

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