Nelvin C. Cepeda / U-T San Diego via ZUMAPRESS.com

Gordon Shields, shown in 2011 at age 93, was among more than 1,000 participants in a study that found despite the problems of aging, the older we get, the better we feel.

Growing old is not for sissies, as the bumper sticker says, and as anyone who has entered midlife can attest. But a new study finds that despite the physical and mental toll of time, people actually feel better as they age -- not worse.

In fact, when California researchers asked more than 1,000 people aged 50 to 99 in San Diego county to rank how well they were aging on scale of 1 to 10, the mean score was 8.2 -- and even higher for those in their 90s.

“I think I ranked myself pretty high. I think it was up around 10. Why not?” said Gordon "Gordy" Shields, 94, one of the participants in the Successful AGing Evaluation Study, or SAGE, conducted by scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford University.

To Shields, who became a world-class cycling champion after age 50, aging is just another part of the life process.

“You can enjoy aging as long as you accept it,” said Shields, a former high school and community college teacher and counselor.

That’s despite the undeniable declines in physical and mental abilities that come with age. Study participants were divided into groups by decade from those in their 50s to those in their 90s. People in the older age groups scored progressively worse on measures of health and cognitive function, even as they scored higher on their own ratings of successful aging.

Those results were not what the researchers were expecting, said Dr. Dilip V. Jeste, a UCSD professor of psychiatry and president of the American Psychiatric Association, who described the findings as “eye-popping.”

“We were astounded by how physical disability and self-rated successful aging went in diametrically opposite directions with aging,” Jeste told NBC News.

The results also suggested that the more resilient people are -- or able to cope with acute stressors -- the better they aged. Conversely, people who reported higher levels of depression were less likely to say they were aging well.

“Increasing resilience and reducing depression might have effects on successful aging as strong as that of reducing physical disability,” the study authors wrote.

The researchers recruited 1,006 study participants in San Diego county using a large telephone database to ensure they were randomly selected. They screened out anyone who was in a nursing home, or who needed daily nursing care, and those who had dementia, a terminal illness or required hospice care.

The idea was to survey older people who weren’t necessarily healthier than average, but who weren’t predisposed to disability and illness, either. They conducted telephone interviews and then administered detailed written surveys to assess the effects of aging.

What the researchers found was that in their 50s, participants who were asked how well they were aging posted a mean score of 7.7 on the 10-point scale, and 49 points on a 100-point scale of physical function. 

Those in their 90s, however, rated themselves at 8.6 for aging successfully, even though their mean score was only 37.3 for physical ability. The results were similar for cognitive function measured during the telephone interview.

“I think this should really change people’s outlook about aging,” Jeste said. “Usually when we think about aging, we think it’s bad.”

The participants were mostly white and mostly better educated than average, the study reported. Cynics might ask whether healthy, well-educated people living in sunny San Diego might be more likely to report aging well than seniors in less desirable circumstances. 

But Jeste said that the results should hold up nationwide. "We don't think our findings are restricted to the population living in San Diego." 

The new results are consistent with previous research that shows that people are depressed in middle age, but then become happier as they get older, Jeste said.

That may be because older folks likely have grappled with the most contentious questions of life -- work, family, finances -- and come to some resolution.

“As people get older, they are less bothered by negative stimuli,” Jeste said. “You take things in stride. Regret becomes less common.”

That makes sense to Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, who was not involved in the SAGE study. Older people with shrinking horizons know their time is limited and they seem to appreciate what’s left.

“They tend to focus on the here and now,” she said. “That’s good for mental health.”

For Gordon Shields, who was recently sidelined from cycling because of heart problems, aging well is all about accepting the next challenge of life.

“The main thing is to keep involved, not only physically but mentally and socially,” the great-great-grandfather said.

“You accept the process and adapt to it,” he added. “Don’t fight it.”

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This, finally, may explain our cultural obsession with zombies: Long after dark, millions of Americans basically become one.

Without warning, they suddenly rise from their silent, supine states then roam aimlessly, eyes open and mouths sputtering gibberish.

About 8.5 million U.S. adults -- or 3.6 percent of the grownup population -- have taken at least one sleepwalking jaunt during the past year, according to research released today by the Stanford University School of Medicine. That figure, calculated via a survey of nearly 20,000 people, means there are far more nocturnal wanderers than scientists previously suspected.

“It’s something, we were thinking, that was not frequent among the general population. And here, big surprise, it is,” said Dr. Maurice Ohayon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and lead author of the paper. A previous report done a decade ago in European adults showed that 2 percent of that population were sleepwalkers. “It’s astonishing.”

The finding offers American doctors their first, solid sleepwalking benchmark, Ohayon said. Earlier speculation on how often the phenomenon occurred were based on anecdotal clinical reports as well as court cases and media tales of people who had gone sleep-driving, sleep-shopping or sleep-eating. Typically, those more sensational examples were linked to Ambien use.

But Ohayon and his colleagues found no significant link between prescription sleeping pills and increased sleepwalking. What they did discover: Folks who take certain anti-depressants (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are three times more likely to also take a snoozy stroll than the general population, and people who swallow over-the-counter sleeping pills have a higher likelihood of experiencing sleepwalking episodes at least twice a month month.

Brand names for anti-depressants in the SSRI category include Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro and Celexa. Non-prescription sleep aids linked to increased sleepwalking by the Stanford team contained diphenhydramine. Products laced with that chemical include 40 Winks, Simply Sleep, Sleep-Eze, Sominex, Unisom Sleep, Advil PM, and Tylenol PM, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

Chronic sleepwalking also runs (rambles?) within certain families, Ohayon learned: Nearly one-third of individuals who often do it can point to parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts or siblings who have a history of shuffling while slumbering.

To assess the sleepwalking rate in America, Ohayon and his Stanford colleagues used phone interviews conducted with 19,136 randomly selected individuals from 15 states. The participants offered baseline information on their mental health, medical histories and use of medications. They were quizzed on the frequency of any sleepwalking episodes as well as whether they had ever suffered any inappropriate or possibly perilous behaviors while asleep.

What's more, participants were asked if they'd sleepwalked when they were kids and if any family members were known to take unintended, nighttime strolls. In addition to the more more than 3 percent of the U.S. population who sleepwalk chronically, the researchers found that 29.2 percent of the test sample had gone sleepwalking at least once during their lives. 

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Robert Budd, a personal trainer from Southern California, takes sleeping strolls about once a month, as do almost all the men in his family.

Personal trainer Robert Budd figures he sleepwalks about once a month. When he gathers with his kin, sleepwalking lore is a common topic: while seemingly in dreamland, his grandfather once urinated in a friend’s drawer, his uncle often meandered the decks of navy boats, and his dad dismantled tents and ceiling fans.

“All the boys in the family do it,” said Budd, who operates a gym called PHYZYKS in Encinitas, Calif. “I've done it since I was a kid. I would walk out the door and my parents had to grab me and get be back inside. The commonality with my family and myself is it seems to happen when we’re really tired, really drained. When you really need sleep, that’s when you get up and sleepwalk.”

Budd has sleepwalked out of a tent at the Grand Canyon (on the floor, not near the rim). His friends spotted him heading off alone -- apparently wide awake -- but he remembered nothing the next day. While dozing, he once packed for a vacation, even remembering his toothbrush. And there was the night he tried to climb out a second-floor window only to be stopped by the woman who is now his ex-wife.

Was that intended exit possibly symbolic, even for a sleeping man? “It might have been,” Budd said with a laugh.

“It drives my girlfriend drives nuts because sometimes we have conversations and she doesn’t know if I’m awake. Like, I can’t be accountable in the middle of the night.”

Sleepwalkers typically have their eyes open and may speak, making detection tricky. But Ohayon isn’t certain, he said, if they are actually seeing what’s in front of them or if sleepwalkers’ brains have simply mapped out their homes in their minds, allowing them not to bump into walls or furniture. He is sure they’re not dreaming, though, because sleepwalking coincides with a period of “slow-wave sleep” or SWS when brain activity is diminished.

During another sleep phase called REM (rapid eye movement), brain neurons are firing as if a person is awake. This is when you dream. A mechanism within the brain blocks stirring and shifting when you’re in REM sleep, Ohayon said.

“During slow wave sleep, you can move,” he added. “This is an old function of our brain, (possibly a evolutionary leftover). You know, when birds fly, they can sleep with one half of their brain, while the other half is analyzing the flight.

“That is why you see the bird going for thousand of kilometers without any problem. They sleep when they fly.”

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