Want to Live a Long Time? Pay Attention

Long before the age of gene therapy and miracle medical treatments, the secrets of long life were being gathered and revealed in a unique study of 1,500 children born about 1910. By studying these people throughout their lives, successive generations of researchers collected nearly 10 million pieces of observable data and have been able to produce solid insights into human longevity.

"Most people who live to an old age do so not because they have beaten cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or lung disease; rather, the long-lived have mostly avoided serious ailments altogether," Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin said in their 2011 book, "The Longevity Project."

"The best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousnessthe qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person," according to the two professors (he at the University of CaliforniaRiverside, and she at La Sierra University). "Conscientiousness ... also turned out to be the best personality predictor of long life when measured in adulthood."

[Read: Do You Recognize These Lessons of Longevity?]

Since their book was published, Martin recently told U.S. News, the benefits of conscientiousness have been affirmed and even strengthened in other research studies. "This is still a pretty hot topic," she says. "Work that's come out since the book was published has mainly confirmed the importance of conscientiousness."

In particular, she explained, research being done in Hawaii on personality traits over time is producing similar results to Friedman's and Martin's own research, which chronicles efforts begun in 1921 by Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist. He selected 1,500 bright and generally high-performing children and began amassing detailed information about their personal histories, health, activities, beliefs, attitudes, families and other variables.

Over the next eight decades, other academics maintained the Terman Project and assembled exhaustive details on all facets of the original subjects' later lives. It is this unique depth of detail that has permitted Friedman and Martin to reach what they feel are scientifically sound conclusions about what it takes to live a long life. Now, Martin says, more researchers are reaching similar conclusions.

"It was not cheerfulness and it was not having a sociable personality that predicted long life across the many ensuing decades," she and Friedman wrote in their book. "Certain other factors were also relevant, but the prudent, dependable children lived the longest. The strength of this finding was unexpected, but it proved to be a very important and enduring one."

The book presents three reasons why conscientious people live longer:

1. They are more likely to obey the rules, protecting their health and not engaging in risky behaviors such as smoking or driving without a seat belt. If a doctor tells them to take a medicine, they take every prescribed dose.

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Want to Live a Long Time? Pay Attention