Eating well, getting enough sleep and exercising may provide a buffer against stress-related cellular aging. Those were the findings of a new study led by Eli Puterman of the University of California, San Francisco. They measured how these healthy behaviors affected telomere length in hundreds of women. Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age.

"We found that a year’s worth of stressful events that occurred, whether it was a divorce or separation or loss of a job or even all of a sudden becoming a caregiver; these types of events that happened in this one year period, in just these average women, actually led to greater shortening over that one year period."

Shorter telomeres are associated with a variety of age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and many forms of cancer.

"So this is the first study in adult women really demonstrating that things that happen over time actually leads to shortening even more than you would expect based on where they were a year before."