Anxiety in later life: what's distinct after 60

What gets called worry, or just being a bit anxious in older age, is sometimes anxiety in a specific sense, distinct from the general worries of a difficult life stage, and worth recognising as such.

Written and reviewed by Natalia Cajide, Registered Psychologist (AHPRA PSY0002474316). 10 min read. Published 14 May 2026. Last reviewed 14 May 2026. Next review 14 May 2027.

The picture that often gets in the way

There are a few reasons anxiety in later life gets overlooked. Some of them belong to the older adult themselves. People who grew up in a generation when psychological problems weren't talked about may not have a habit of describing their internal experience in those terms. The language they use for what we would now call anxiety tends to be physical. I haven't been feeling right. I've been a bit off. My stomach has been giving me grief. The description is accurate. It's just that the assumed cause is something physical, when it's often only partly physical.

Some of the reasons belong to the people around them. Family members may attribute changes to ageing. Mum's just been a bit more worried since Dad died. GPs, who are often the first point of contact, may attribute symptoms to the medical conditions older adults frequently have, or to the medications they're taking. The somatic story is plausible. It is rarely the whole story.

And some of the reasons connect back to the picture set up in the opening, the one in which what older adults experience is the reasonable distress that comes with a stage of life. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes what looks like a reasonable kind of distress is anxiety that has gone unnamed for a long time.

What late-life anxiety actually looks like

The research describes a different picture, with quite a bit of texture. Anxiety in adults over 60 is common, although exact prevalence estimates vary depending on how it's measured. A recent review by an Australian research group describes generalised anxiety as the most common form of anxiety in later life, alongside specific patterns less seen in younger populations, including a marked fear of falling that meets criteria for a phobia in some older adults (Johnco, Matovic, & Wuthrich, 2024).

The presentation tends to differ from anxiety in younger adults in a few specific ways. The somatic side, the body experiencing the anxiety, is often more prominent. Sleep changes. Appetite changes. Restlessness. A vague unwellness that doesn't quite settle on any one thing. Verbal worry is often present, but it can be less prominent than the physical experience, and sometimes harder to access in the language people are used to using.

The overlaps with other things in later life make the picture more complicated. Anxiety can be a feature of early cognitive change, and cognitive change can also produce anxiety. Anxiety often co-occurs with medical conditions, particularly cardiac, respiratory, and endocrine ones, in ways that can be hard to disentangle without proper medical assessment. Bereavement, which is common in this age group, produces grief reactions that are not the same as anxiety but can include anxious features, and that can over time slip into a more sustained anxiety. And the medications older adults are often taking, sometimes several at once, can produce anxiety-like effects or interact in ways that change someone's baseline.

This is part of why a careful assessment for anxiety in an older adult tends to be a longer conversation than the same assessment in a younger one. There is more to attribute carefully, more to rule out, more context to gather. The picture, when it's built well, is more layered than the picture for someone in their thirties or forties. Once it is built, though, the work has good evidence behind it. A recent Australian ten-year follow-up of cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety and depression in older adults found that the changes people made in therapy tended to be sustained well past the end of treatment (Johnco, Zagic, Rapee, Kangas, & Wuthrich, 2024). A separate Australian-led review of lower-intensity interventions, useful for people who do not want a full course of therapy or who cannot easily access one, found that these too can help many older adults (Wuthrich et al., 2024).

What this means in practice

What does this mean for someone who is reading this either about themselves, or about someone in their life?

If you're an older adult yourself, what may be most useful to notice is that the description above does not require you to have had what you might call a breakdown, or to fit a particular picture of anxiety, to take it seriously. The vague unwellness, the sleep change, the restlessness, the worry that doesn't quite let you settle, the increased physical complaints, the sense that something is off and you haven't been able to put your finger on it: these are descriptions the research recognises.

You are not making a fuss. You are taking accurate notice of what your body and mind have been telling you for a while.

They are worth raising with your GP, and worth considering as something a psychologist could help with.

If you're a family member, what may be most useful is to notice the changes and gently ask. Not to diagnose, and not to attribute the change automatically to ageing or to grief, even though grief and ageing are real parts of the picture. A short conversation that opens space for the older person to describe what they have been experiencing, in their own words, is more useful than any single observation about their behaviour. The Meet and Greet at this practice is one way to have that conversation with a psychologist before committing to anything, and it can happen in person if the online option is not preferred.

There is one more thing worth saying here. The cultural picture in which older adults don't need or want psychological help has, over the years, kept many older people from seeking out help that would have been useful to them. The research is fairly clear that this picture is incomplete. Anxiety in later life is treatable. The research from the Australian work cited above indicates that the changes people make in therapy tend to hold over time. The older adult who decides to do this work is not stepping outside the bounds of what is reasonable for someone their age. They are doing exactly what someone their age might benefit from doing, given what's now known about the field.

Late-life anxiety is one of the areas of psychology where the gap between what is known and what reaches the people who could benefit from it is still quite wide. I've written this guide partly to narrow that gap. There is no neat ending to offer, because each person's picture is built from different layers. What I would say in closing is that if any of what is described here resembles your own experience, or the experience of someone close to you, it is worth taking seriously. You are not too old. It is not too late. The picture has more in it than ageing alone.

This content is general information only. It is not a substitute for individual psychological or medical advice. The themes in this guide, including bereavement and physical illness, can be personal for many readers. If something here is bringing things up for you, please reach out to someone you trust, or to one of the support lines listed at the top of this guide. The Meet and Greet is a free 15-minute call or in-person meeting, with no obligation, to see if we are the right fit. If you are in crisis or at immediate risk, contact 000, or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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