Couple this with ideas like the Placebo Effect, Qigong, Filipino psychic surgery, faith healing, etc. and it seems that people who are pragmatically optimistic would seem to function best. Pure optimism unchecked by pragmatism would have someone trying to pull off a Matrix style roof to roof jump or something else that's going to be detrimental to one's health.

I think I can probably give you the "what" and the "where" for a way to arrest/reverse aging but we'd probably have to build it and use it in order to reverse engineer how it works.