Handling Stress Better In Middle Age (If You're A Rat, That Is)

Here's a positive to middle age: you might deal with stress better than you did when you were younger.

If you're a rat.

Researchers at Rutgers found that middle aged rats arent' as affected by stress as their young adult counterparts. Induced stress caused young male adult rats to learn a conditioned response faster than an unstressed rat, but young adult females learned slower. Middle age rats weren't affected by the stress, and learned the conditioned response just as fast as the younger rats.

What does this mean if you're not a rat ... say if you're a forty- or fifty-something human?

Other researchers have found that while early adulthood and midlife are about equally stressful, middle age has unique problems. Financial risk is greater at midlife, and many issues involving children can also cause sleepless nights. On the positive side, people tend to feel more in control at midlife, and have a sense that these stresses can be dealt with.

So it may be that those middle age rats have the sense of perspective or control that it takes us humans so long to achieve.

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The new research is published in the November 2007 issue of Neurobiology. The abstract is here.

see also "Is Daily Life More Stressful in Middle Adulthood?" Almeida and Horn, in "How Healthy Are We," Brim, Ryff, and Kessler, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 2004).