4 Ways to Live Longer
Beyond diet and exercise, your thoughts, beliefs, and behavior are key in your quest to live longer.
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 positive outlook 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
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