2 key life strategies to help your body repair itself

As we age, our bodies sometimes take longer to repair and re-energize themselves.Thankfully, there are ways to reduce the effects of aging. There is some proof that stress reduction and social connections can have a positive effect on your body's repair system while physical activity can signal your body to grow younger as it repairs, maintains, and regenerates itself. Here are 2 key life tips to help your body repair itself.

The new Fountain of Youth: A daily walk plus three strength-training sessions each week. As mentioned, exciting research is proving that physical activity flips the youth switch, signaling your body to grow younger as it repairs, maintains, and regenerates itself. Among the key body systems that benefit:

• Muscles. In one research study, 70-year-olds who performed regular strength-training exercise were as strong as 28-year-olds who didn't work out. Skip exercise and you'll lose muscle strength with every passing year.
• Brain. Once, experts believed that age-related drops in memory and cognitive skills were the inevitable result of dying brain cells. Now, scientists know that the brain can strengthen old cells and generate new ones. Exercise releases a fertilizer-like substance called BDNF.
• Heart. A heart-threatening lifestyle — replete with high-fat foods, too many calories, little exercise, and smoking — can leave you with stiff, clogged arteries 40 years older than your biological age. Aging also weakens the heart's ability to contract and pump blood. Exercise makes heart muscle contract more forcefully, makes arteries more supple, and slows atherosclerosis.
• Bones. Your skeleton grows lighter with time. But research shows that strength-training pumps up the body's natural bone-building system so that bone density increases. Without it, you can lose two percent of density per year, raising your risk for fractures.

People's brains are hardwired to live in groups. After all, that's where safety was in prehistoric times. And so when we're isolated, our stress levels rise; to our subconscious minds, prolonged periods of isolation aren't safe or natural, and so our brains respond by producing stress chemicals to goad us into action. Some proof of the powerful influence that stress reduction and social connections can have on your body's repair system:

• Men who survive a heart attack are four times less likely to die from a second heart attack if they come home to family members than if they come home to an empty house or apartment.
• Women with more friends and relatives in their lives are more likely to survive heart disease and cancer than those with few.
• People with heart disease who had been anxious, but then lowered their stress levels, significantly cut their risk for a heart attack, according to one Harvard Medical School study.