It’s time to retire some of the most common ways we talk about aging: the “senior moment” excuse when we fumble for a word; the cheerful “young lady” from a stranger at the grocery store; the matter-of-fact “it's all downhill from here” we sigh at every birthday.

These reflexive clichés do more than trigger an eye roll: They can affect your health. Decades of research from Becca Levy, a professor of public health and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, and author of Breaking the Age Code, show that the messages we absorb about aging and then repeat to ourselves are linked to how long and how well we live. People who hold more positive beliefs about aging tend to walk faster, heal quicker, take better care of themselves, and show fewer of the brain biomarkers associated with dementia. Levy’s research has even found that older adults with positive beliefs about aging can reverse mild cognitive decline.

“Those who take in more negative age beliefs are more likely to show worse physical, mental, and cognitive health outcomes,” Levy says. “Conversely—and this is the good news—it goes the other direction too. If people are able to take in more positive age beliefs, or switch from the negative to the positive, that can have health benefits in a number of different ways.”

That's why rethinking our language is so essential. Here are the phrases experts wish we'd stop saying—about other people and ourselves.

“I’m too old for that.”

Think you’re “too old” to join a band? That's not necessarily because of the year you were born. “It’s never about age,” says Ashton Applewhite, an activist and author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. “There’s always someone your age who did it yesterday.”

Instead, Applewhite challenges you to replace “old” with the more specific word that describes what you mean. (Maybe, for example, you’re just not interested.) The same advice applies to what might seem, on the surface, like an innocuous statement: “I don’t feel old.” What does that mean? she asks. “You don’t feel incompetent, you don’t feel invisible, you don’t feel useless?” Use the word that describes how you actually feel: “I feel energetic, I feel optimistic, I feel hot.”

“I’m having a senior moment.”

Many people do experience some cognitive slowing as they get older. But forgetting where you put your keys isn’t always an aging problem—it’s also a being-human problem. “Kids forget things too, all the time,” Applewhite points out. Calling mistakes or lapses “senior moment” treats forgetfulness as inevitable, when, in fact, that’s not the case. “There are a lot of factors that contribute to being forgetful,” Levy says. “If somebody’s distracted looking at their cell phone while somebody’s talking to them, it’s going to be hard to encode what they’ve said and then hard to recall it. That can happen at any age.”

Her research has also found that people with more positive age beliefs tend to show better memory performance over time. Plus, certain cognitive skills—like metacognition, or the ability to think about thinking—actually tend to improve in later life.

“I’m 70, but I feel 50.” 

Every time Tracey Gendron gives a talk about aging, at least one well-intentioned person approaches her afterwards and offers up the same line: “I’m 70, but I feel 50.” 

It’s meant as a kind of triumph—proof that they’ve defied the aging script. But Gendron, chair of the department of gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It, gently pushes back. “No, you’re 70, and you feel like you’re 70,” she tells them. “It’s just not what you expected it to feel like.” Your 70 is going to look different from somebody else’s 70—but it’s still, indisputably, your 70.

The problem with insisting you feel decades younger is that it reinforces the very idea you might think you're rejecting: that younger is better, and your actual age is something to distance yourself from. "It continues to devalue what it means to be of our own age," Gendron says. A better move? Resist the urge to translate how you feel into a younger number altogether. If you feel energetic, curious, and in love with your life, that’s not 50 talking, she says. That's you, at 70.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

People can learn new things at any age—and science backs it up. “Older people can benefit from the same cognitive strategies that people of all ages benefit from,” Levy says. “There’s also some nice research on neuroplasticity, so we know that in later life, older people can continue to form new neuronal connections when they have challenges.”

The same goes for one of the most common excuses people make for opting out of learning something new: that it's "too technologically advanced" for them. Plenty of older adults are active on social media, glued to their smartphones, and adopting new tools as readily as anyone else, Levy points out. So the next time you catch yourself reaching for this one, swap it out for something more honest—like, "I haven't tried that yet."

“It’s all downhill from here.” 

It doesn’t have to be. In a recent study, Levy and her colleagues followed a nationally representative group of older adults for up to 12 years and tracked two markers of function—cognitive function (including memory and mental-processing tasks) and walking speed, a key indicator of physical health. Almost half of people showed improvement on at least one of those measures over time. “A meaningful number of people are defying that statement,” she says. 

That doesn't mean every ache and ailment is optional, of course. But it does mean the assumption of inevitable decline is simply wrong. “There are all these different trajectories," Levy says, and yours is still being written.

“You look good for your age.”

Applewhite has a go-to response to this backhanded compliment: “You look good for your age too.” Or she might simply ask: “What do you mean by that?" “Then they have to reflect,” she says.

Commenting on someone’s appearance often courts trouble—particularly when you attach it to an aspect of their age. Another faux pas, she adds: telling someone they look “youthful.” 

“How are you today, young lady?”

When people call Applewhite, who’s 73, a “young lady,” they probably think they’re being nice. “But intention does not let you off the hook,” she says. That’s why she always points out the ageism baked into the compliment. “It gets uncomfortable,” she says. “But if we don't say anything, and if everyone stays in their comfort zone, nothing changes.”

Applewhite is still savoring the sweet victory of inspiring her ophthalmologist to change his language around aging. The doctor, who’s also in his 70s, told her that he no longer asks his senior patients how “young” they are. “I was like, ‘Hallelujah, dude,’” she recalls. “I told him it’s not good for us. All it does is emphasize the mother of all age stereotypes, which is that young is better.”

“I’m not old, I’m just vintage.”

Go ahead and groan the next time you hear this one. Gendron thinks of euphemisms like this as red flags that someone is afraid to identify as old. “Until we destigmatize what it means to be old, there's never going to be a word that replaces it that makes it OK,” she says. “So stop saying ‘I'm not old, I'm just seasoned or vintage or mature or experienced.’ No, you’re old, and there’s nothing wrong with being old.”

“That’s not age-appropriate.”

Applewhite doesn’t wear miniskirts. But that’s because she doesn’t like them—and she didn’t in her 20s, either. The idea that there’s a right way to dress, behave, or live at a given age is one of her biggest pet peeves. “There is no such thing as ‘age-appropriate’ for adults,” she says. “Adults do not revert to children. There are styles, but, hello, people of all ages have access to the style pages and can decide whether or not they want to dress like Sabrina [Carpenter] or Alicia Keys.”

The same goes for the activities you're "supposed" to age out of—or into. There's no expiration date on getting a tattoo, taking up skateboarding, or starting a new career, just as there's no minimum age for taking a nap or buying sensible shoes. So if you want to wear that miniskirt at 70, wear it, Applewhite says. And if you don't, don't—just make sure it's because you genuinely don't want to, not because someone decided it wasn't for you anymore.

“Can you believe she’s still working?”

That little word—still—is doing more damage than you might think. “It implies that it’s unusual at your age for you to want to work, or for you to be this active,” Gendron says. And that assumption is increasingly out of step with reality: More older adults need to keep working than ever before, both because of finances and shifting demographics. “Fewer younger people are working, so we’re going to need older people in the workforce,” she says. “The word ‘still’ is kind of ageist, ableist, classist. It can be seen as a microaggression.”

The same goes for its close cousin, “When are you going to retire?” The question assumes both that you want to and that it's anyone else's business. It also rests on a flawed premise: that retirement is a natural endpoint to adult life. “Retirement is not a life stage. Retirement is a social institution,” Gendron says. "It doesn't tell me who you are. It doesn't tell me who you're becoming. It tells me that you used to work."

“Welcome to the diapers-and-dentures years.”

You know where you last saw this gibberish? Plastered all over the birthday cards at the drugstore. “Shopping for a birthday card makes me shudder,” Gendron says. She points to a lack of options that truly celebrate getting older, instead focusing on how hilarious it is that “you have to wear diapers and blow out a million candles.” She usually opts instead for a blank card and writes her own message inside. (She is a fan, however, of Age-Friendly Vibes, which specializes in stationery that reinforces age-positive beliefs. “Every year you’re one candle hotter,” one card reads.)

“Now that’s successful aging.”

The phrase sounds like a compliment—who wouldn’t want to age successfully?—but Gendron isn’t a fan. “If you woke up this morning and you’re breathing, you’re succeeding at aging,” she says. The problem with framing it as something you can ace is that, by definition, it means other people are flunking. “There is nobody who’s failing at aging,” Gendron says. The phrase also promotes ableism, suggesting that staying mentally sharp and physically active is the only way to age well—a standard that ignores the reality that most of us will, at some point, age into some form of disability.

There's another problem, too: "Successful aging" assumes you already know what a good life will look like for you decades from now. You don't. "Don't project your current self onto your future self," Gendron says. The activities you can't imagine living without today may matter less to you at 80—and you may have picked up a whole new set of passions by then.