Call off the search for a fountain of youth. "Making simple tweaks to your everyday lifestyle can tack eight to 10 years onto your life," says Dan Buettner in his National Geographic bestseller, The Blue Zones.

With a team of demographers and doctors, the explorer traveled to four corners of the globe—Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda, California; and, Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica—where high percentages of the population are laughing, living and loving well into their 100s. Here are six of their secrets to their supercharged health and longevity.

Laugh out loud. "One thing stood out in every group of centenarians I met—there wasn't a grump in the bunch," says Buettner. Laughter doesn't just reduce worry. It also relaxes blood vessels, lowering the risk of heart attack, says Buettner citing University of Maryland research.

Make exercise a no-brainer. None of the centenarians Buettner and his team encountered ran marathons or pumped iron. The people making it into their 100s had low-intensity exercise—walking long distances, gardening
and playing with kids—woven into their everyday routines. As a result, they exercised regularly without ever thinking about it. To seamlessly work exercise into your schedule: hide the TV remote, opt for stairs over the elevator, park farther away from the mall entrance and look for occasions to bike or walk instead of guzzling gas.