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December 11, 2024 - February 3, 2025
For telomere health, you need to get regular exercise and you need to be fit.
Our cultural standards for fitness are getting higher and higher, and it can be hard to know whether you are fit enough to stay healthy.
significant telomere benefits are gained by having a very moderate, achievable level of fitness.
The less exercise capacity they had, the shorter their telomeres.
Those with low fitness had fewer base pairs by an amount that translates to about four years of extra cell aging, compared to the fit group.
if you can walk vigorously or maintain a light jog for forty-five minutes, three times a week, you are fit enough to support your telomere health. Remember that fitness and exercise are related, but separate.
Moderate exercise and fitness are clearly wonderful for telomeres,
When endurance athletes are compared to more ordinary runners, who might run around ten miles a week, you find that both groups have nice, healthy telomeres compared to the more sedentary group—and
One study looked at older men who had been elite athletes when they were younger. Their telomeres were similar in length to other men their age, so their many years of extremely vigorous training didn’t appear to have had a cumulative wearing effect.
The long-term athletes both looked younger and had less telomere shortening compared to matched controls.
longer telomeres in people who had actively exercised for the past ten years or more.18 It appears important to start exercising when you are young—but don’t be discouraged. It’s never too late to start, and benefits always await you.
Progenitor cells (also known as satellite cells) repair muscle tissue that has been damaged—but it is thought that overtraining damages those crucial cells, leaving them less able to do their repair work. It appears to be overtraining, not extreme exercise, that is damaging to telomeres, at least in the muscle cells. Overtraining is defined by too much training time relative to rest and recovery.
it happens when you don’t support your body with enough rest, nutrition, and sleep. Psychological stress can contribute, too. Some warning signs of overtraining include fatigue, moodiness, irritability, trouble sleeping, and susceptibility to injuries and illness.
Any discussion of overtraining is complicated, because there is no set point that constitutes “too much exercise.”
If telomeres tell us anything, they remind us of how context-dependent health can be. What is good for one person may be harmful to another.
program slowly, gradually working up to better fitness.
But if you overdo it, that counterresponse can be overwhelmed. You’ll end up with more oxidative stress, not less.
Yet it turns out that the most important time to exercise is exactly when you might not want to—when you are feeling overwhelmed. Exercise can improve your mood for up to three hours after working out20 and can reduce stress reactivity.21 Stress can shorten telomeres, but exercise shields telomeres from some of stress’s
The more the women exercised, the less their stress ate away at their telomeres (see figure 17). The exercise actually buffered their telomeres from the insidious and telomere-shortening effects of stress.
Resilience is what keeps you bouncing back after being knocked down and lets stress slide off your shoulders without damaging your mind and body. Eli Puterman’s stress research shows that telomeres can be resilient, too. The more you can practice good health habits—effective emotion regulation, strong social connections, good sleep, and good exercise—the less that stress hurts your telomeres.
Exercise is a potent way to make your telomeres resilient, but when you can’t exercise, step up other resiliency behaviors. Everything you do will help, and that’s an encouraging piece of news.
People who exercise have longer telomeres than those who don’t.
Exercise charges up the cell clean-up crew, so that cells have less junk buildup, more efficient mitochondria, and fewer free radicals.
But those telomeres are not much longer than those with moderate exercise. We don’t need to aspire to extremes.
If you have a high-stress life, exercise is not just good for you. It is essential. It protects you from stress-shortened telomeres.
Simply walk or run at about 60 percent of your maximum ability. You should be breathing somewhat hard, but you should still be able to maintain a conversation.
Warm up (easy): 10 minutes Interval (repeat 4 times): Run (fast): 3 minutes Run (easy): 3 minutes Cool down (easy): 10 minutes
Walk fast (on a exertion scale of 1 to 10, be at a 6 or 7): 3 minutes Stroll gently: 3 minutes
it had a much more beneficial effect on multiple measures of fitness than just moderate, steady walking.
Activity that is woven into your daily life lifts you out of the dreaded “sedentary” category,
Some apps (and the iWatch) have programs that remind you to stand up every hour. Or a simple pedometer can be our daily reminder that our steps can add up.
Poor quality sleep, sleep debt, and sleep disorders are all linked to shorter telomeres.
cognitive changes and mindfulness can help you get more restorative sleep.
A quick gauge, one used by sleep researchers, is to ask yourself whether you’re sleepy during the day. If you are, you need more sleep,
45 percent of Americans say that poor or insufficient sleep affected their daily activities at least once in the last week.
Chronic insomnia is associated with shorter telomeres,
You need that rejuvenating time to set your internal biological clock, regulate your appetite, consolidate and heal your memories, and refresh your mood.
slight dysregulation in a brain structure known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN.
It’s your body’s central internal clock. It tells you when to feel tired,
When your SCN is working well, you’ll have more energy when you need it, deeper rest at night, and cells that are functioning more efficiently.
If you keep to regular eating and sleeping times, you also give your SCN the information it needs to inhibit the sleep drive during the day and unleash that drive throughout the night.
Control Your Appetite
During REM sleep, cortisol is suppressed, and your metabolic rate increases.
this means that a bad night of sleep can throw you into a temporary prediabetic state. Studies have shown that even one night of partial sleep, or one night without enough REM sleep, can lead to elevated cortisol the next afternoon or evening, along with changes in the hormones and peptides that regulate appetite and lead to greater feelings of hunger.
“We sleep to remember, and we sleep to forget,”
When you are well slept, you are better at learning and remembering. Tired people just aren’t as successful at focusing their attention, so they don’t take in new information as well.
Sometimes, though, memories are painful. Sleep works its healing powers on these memories, reducing their emotional charge. Walker has found that most of this work is accomplished during REM sleep, which shuts off some of the stimulating chemicals in your brain and allows you to split off your emotions from the content of the memory. With time, this action allows you to remember a painful experience but without an intense jolt to your mind and body.6
we need sleep to refresh emotionally. If you don’t already know that sleep loss makes you more irritable,
Sleep deprivation makes all emotions more intense. This is, perhaps, a reason Maria felt so hyperaroused and jumpy.
As scientists have realized that sleep is crucial to your mind, your metabolism, and your mood, they have increasingly included measurements of telomeres in their sleep studies.
