AGE PROOF YOUR BODY

How To bulid resilience so you can heal faster, feel stronger, and stay healthy longer

- LORA SHINN

It might sound like science fiction if it weren't so ordinary: Our bones break and mend...we burn a hand and it heals...we forget words and remember in a flash. The body has an astounding ability to bounce back that can feel like a miracle of sorts.

That healing power, though, does slow down as we grow older. We lose a few more words, or more days elapse between a scrape and smooth skin.

While our expected life spans have nearly doubled in the past 100 years, our physical bodies exist more or less as always. As we age, our skin and our musculoskeletal and organ systems suffer wear and tear. Resources for repair take longer to marshal their forces.

But we can help our bodies retain resiliency that incredible ability to absorb stress, strain, and pain and then adapt and recover. Physicians and researchers are making fascinating discoveries about how we can build a more resilient system at any age. Here's exactly what you can do to keep your body bouncing back.

THE BRAIN

OUR BRAINS TEND TO SHRINK AS WE AGE, explains Richard Hunter, Ph.D., director of the Lab of Neuroepigenetics and Genomics at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Certain cognitive abilities can suffer: For instance, after age 60 our perceptual speed declines-it takes us longer to notice a shift in the environment like a traffic light change.

Our verbal and spatial memory can suffer too, making it harder to remember names and where we've left things. Sound at all familiar? While this is a normal aspect of aging, you can fight it. "Brain resilience generally means holding on to more brain volume and cognitive function longer," Hunter says. He knows scientists he describes as "supersharp" who have devoted their lives to learning and are cognitively intact well into their 80s.