Exercise is the obvious ticket to physiological toughness, but it's also a building block to overall hardiness. A Princeton University study found that rats that exercise generate new neurons that are less responsive to stress hormones, for instance.
Lilly Mujica-Parodi, director of the Laboratory for the Study of Emotion and Cognition at Stony Brook University, tested the heart rates and hormone levels of novice skydivers before, during, and after their first plunge. She found that skydivers with a higher percentage of body fat took longer to return from elevated stress-hormone levels and performed worse on tests of mental ability. "Not only does physical fitness produce stress resilience," she says, "but fit individuals are better able to preserve their cognitive functions."
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