Commentary: The DIY guide to checking how well you're ageing

CNA

24-05-2025

ABERYSTWYTH, Wales: A few years ago, a social media trend challenged people to see if they could stand up from the floor without using their hands. Now, it's all about how long you can balance on one leg while brushing your teeth. These quirky 'tests' promise to tell us how well we're ageing – but do they really?
When we talk about 'ageing well', we're usually referring to both physical and psychological well-being. That includes feeling good (hedonic well-being) and finding meaning and purpose (eudaimonic well-being). Engaging in activities and monitoring ourselves plays a role in both.
But ageing isn't just about how strong your grip is or how fast you can walk. It's a complex mix of physical, cognitive, emotional and social changes – and no single test captures the whole picture.
Physically, one simple measure that gets a lot of attention is walking speed. According to one famous study, people who walk faster than 1.32m per second were less likely to die in the next three years – jokingly framed as 'too fast for the Grim Reaper to catch'.
On the flip side, a slower walking speed – below 0.8m per second – can be a sign of sarcopenia, a condition involving reduced muscle mass, muscle strength and physical function. These are all important indicators of age-related decline.
But while these markers are useful, they're not easy to measure at home. Most research relies on specialist equipment and your local GP probably doesn't have a grip-strength dynamometer sitting in a drawer. But they could time how long it takes you to stand up and sit down five times from a chair.
HOW TO DIY
So, what can you realistically do to track your own ageing?
To truly understand how you're ageing, it helps to think beyond physical health. Mental sharpness, emotional resilience and social connection matter just as much. One helpful idea is to assess your cognitive fitness, which includes skills like attention, memory and flexibility.
Here are some cognitive tests you can try at home:
Trail making test: Connect numbers and letters in sequence (1, A, 2, B, etc) and time how long it takes. This measures your ability to switch between tasks.
Stroop task: Challenges your ability to ignore competing information. Try saying the colour of a word, not the word itself – like saying 'red' when you see the word 'blue' printed in red ink. It's harder than it sounds!
Dual-task challenge: Walk at your normal speed while counting backwards from 100 in threes. If your walking speed changes significantly, it could indicate cognitive strain.
These kinds of tasks test how well your brain handles competing demands – a key ability that becomes even more important as we age. This skill is known as cognitive flexibility and it helps you adapt to changing situations, switch between tasks and manage distractions.
Trying out these tests is great, but how do you know if you're improving? After all, when you have spent time trying to improve your walking speed, or Stroop ability – or even rubbing your head, patting your belly while saying the Finnish alphabet out loud – it's important to know if you are seeing benefits.
Some measures, like single-leg stance, can vary wildly from day to day – or even hour to hour. You might get better just from repeating it, which doesn't necessarily mean you're ageing better, just that you've practised.
Others, like grip strength, change very slowly even with regular strength training. And some improvements are task-specific: getting better at the trail making test doesn't necessarily make you sharper at doing Wordle.
That's why it helps to complete the test a few times at the start, then retest yourself once a month or so – again, doing it a couple of times – to track any improvements. Cognitive changes may be slower to notice than physical ones, so regular checks can help reveal progress over time.
MORE OF A PUZZLE THAN A TEST
There's no single test or score that can capture how well you're ageing. Think of it more like a jigsaw puzzle. Physical health, mental agility, emotional balance, social connection – they all matter and they all interact.
And, of course, even if you perform well now, some changes in the future may be beyond your control. No test can fully predict what lies ahead.
At the end of the day, maybe the best sign of ageing well isn't how fast you walk or how long you can stand on one leg – it's how you feel about your life. Are you feeling engaged, content, connected?
Tools like the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience can help you take stock of your emotional well-being. This short, 12-question survey asks about your everyday feelings – from joy and calm to sadness and frustration – offering insight into both the pleasurable (hedonic) and meaningful (eudaimonic) sides of well-being.
Ageing well isn't about beating a stopwatch or acing a memory test. It's about knowing yourself – your body, your mind and your values – and making small, meaningful changes that help you feel more you.
So, go ahead, stand on one leg if you like. But don't forget to check in with your brain, body, emotions and your sense of purpose too.