We mustn´t confuse "mental age" with "how old, we feel". We tend to feel younger, when interest in life and need to do things with our energy is the motor, and we tend to feel much older in periods of depression and disinterest.
I am 59, and feel like I am somewhere around 36, so I could assume, that my mental age would be 36. My 35 year old neighbor thinks, that I act every bit as "36 years old", as he does, - but if I were to handle sudden change in life situation, I would probably use all of my 59 years of experience and react accordingly.
What would my mental age be then?
In ordinary questions of life, I typically reflect like a 40-45 year old, but at times I can react like a 10 year old.
We carry within us all our developmental stages, so we can defend ourselves from crisis by retreating back to earlier patterns, - sulking when hurt, retreating to our safe private sphere until we feel fit to meet the world again, falling back to old, comforting habits for a while?
If we chose to stay there, we would have a problem.
The ability to go back and forth between different aged ways of handling life is really mental plasticity and health. It is a ressource, a tool.
Could the "mental age", that we feel, that we have, reflect the degree of energy and interest in life? Is it a mindset? Does it correlate to our biological age?
Don´t we have somewhat stiff, conventional perception of mental age?
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Femaline
Special Interest: Beethoven
03 Jun 2013, 4:06 am
