Beyond diet and exercise, your thoughts, beliefs, and behavior can add years to your life

By Richard Laliberte

The hard science of medicine gets all the credit for staving off disease and adding on years. But practices that strengthen your inner life - your mind, mood, and sense of connection - count, too, often as much as any solution that comes from a scalpel or prescription pad. "There's good evidence that emotional, spiritual, and social factors are all important for longevity," says Gary Small, M.D., director of the Center on Aging at UCLA. Research shows that these four strategies help the most.

Let The Sunshine In

? What we know: People who have a positiveoutlook when they're young (measured by a personality test they took as college students) end up living longer, report two recent studies that followed participants for 30 and 40 years, respectively. Even at age 50, just feeling upbeat about getting older is linked, on average, to seven more years of life, research at Yale University has found. What's the connection? "Negative emotions like hostility and bitterness are bad for overall health and specifically for the heart," says Stephen Post, Ph.D., director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. On the upside, women with sunny dispositions enjoy better heart health - over a 10- to 13-year follow-up, they had far less arterial narrowing than more dour women, a study from the University of Pittsburgh reported.

What you can do: Become an extrovert - join a community group, try a new activity, strike up a conversation with a stranger. Acting gregarious can make you feel more outgoing, which is linked to a more positive mood, researchers at Wake Forest University have found.

Do Good Works

What we know: People who volunteer at two or more organizations have a 44 percent lower death rate than those who don't do any charitable work, the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, CA, reports. "That's comparable to exercising four times a week," Post points out. Like working out, helping others seems to boost antibodies. "We're establishing a biology of compassion involving the immune system, brain, and hormones," says Post.

What you can do: Sign up for Big Brothers Big Sisters or any other group in which you can be a mentor. "People tend to find greater meaning in activities that pass the torch to a younger generation," says Post. Maybe because their involvement is so rewarding, 87 percent of mentors engage in at least one other volunteer activity - and reap extra health benefits - versus just 40 percent of volunteers who aren't mentors.

Say a Prayer

What we know: Regularly stepping through the doors of a house of worship may slow your progress toward the pearly gates by seven to 14 years, a University of Texas survey showed. Partly, that's due to the fact that faith communities provide support, and religious people tend to avoid life-shortening vices like smoking or drinking excessively. But even when you factor out healthy habits, older people who attend religious services once a week are 46 percent less likely to die over six years than people who go to services less often, a study from Duke University Medical School found. Attendance is only part of the picture; it's the underlying belief system that provides comfort and improves health, says Duke researcher Harold G. Koenig, M.D.

What you can do: Bolster public worship with private spiritual practices like meditation and prayer. "The combination of the two is linked to the best outcomes," says Dr. Koenig. Even if you harbor doubts, join a congregation: The spiritual wisdom you'll gain may change your outlook - and boost your health.

Socialize (Selectively)

? What we know The landmark MacArthur Study of Successful Aging established that people with strong social connections enjoy better health. Other studies have since shown that this translates into longer life. But having good relationships matters more than seeing friends or relatives often. "The support of solid relationships boosts immune function," says Dr. Small. Marriage may be the most important relationship: Studies consistently find that married people live longer - about four years more for women, 10 for men, say researchers from the University of Chicago.

What you can do: Confide in your spouse. In research from Columbia and Yale, elderly women who'd had children and who named their husbands as their primary confidant reduced their risk of dying over the next six years. What's more, men lived longer (continuing to provide that life-extending support) when they felt their wives needed them.

Keep Your Brain Young

The glut of information on the Internet can seem mind-numbing, but the stimulation you get from wading through it exercises your brain, which may keep it more youthful. UCLA scientists who connected older Web surfers (all were 55 and up) to a brain-scanning MRI machine found that searching the Internet, like reading a book, stimulates areas of the brain responsible for language, memory, visual ability, and comprehension. But clicking through online sites goes a step further, triggering parts of the brain that handle decision-making and complex reasoning as well. And the more you do, the greater the benefit: Experienced Web surfers had twice as much brain activity as novices.
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