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The result of weakened telomeres is that the immune defenses of the body are more likely to lose the fight against a cancer (or a pathogen).
Too much telomerase, spurred by the actions of even normal variants of telomerase genes, can increase risks of developing several forms of cancer. And overactive telomerase fuels most cancers once they turn malignant. But even this “dark side” of telomerase may not always be dark. Researchers have learned that telomerase is hyperactive in roughly 80 to 90 percent of malignant human cancers, with levels that are turned up ten to hundreds of times as high as in normal cells. This discovery may one day turn out to be a potent weapon in our fight against the disease. If telomerase is necessary for
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The key is to well regulate the action of telomerase on telomeres—in the right cells and at the right times,
the more stress you are under, the shorter
your telomeres and the lower your telomerase levels.
It also meant that our life experiences, and the way we respond to those events, can change the lengths of our telomeres. In other words, we can change the way that we age, at the most elemental, cellular level.
YOUR CELLS ARE LISTENING TO YOUR THOUGHTS
When you think about dealing with this situation, how much do you feel hope and confidence vs. feelings of fear and anxiety?
2
same amount
somewhat
1
1
3
1
2
Total score of 11 or under: Your stress style tends to be healthy. Instead of feeling threatened by stress, you tend to feel challenged by it, and you limit the degree to which the situation spills over into the rest of your life. You recover quickly after an event. This stress resilience is positive news for your telomeres.
Threat stress involves a set of mental and physiological responses that can, over time, endanger your telomeres.
Rumination is a loop of repetitive, unproductive thoughts about something that’s bothering you. If you’re not sure how often you ruminate, now you can start to notice. Most stress triggers are short-lived, but we humans have the remarkable ability to give them a vivid and extended life in the mind, letting them fill our headspace long after the event has passed. Rumination, also known as brooding, can slip into a more serious state known as depressive rumination, which includes negative thoughts about oneself and one’s future. Those thoughts can be toxic.
most of us can learn to change our responses to our responses—and that’s the secret sauce of stress resilience.
People who respond to stress by feeling overly threatened have shorter telomeres than people who face stress with a rousing sense of challenge.
When the stress-response system is on high alert, the body produces more of the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine. The heart beats faster and blood pressure increases. The vagus nerve, which helps modulate the physiological reaction to stress, withdraws its activity.
Now there are animal studies showing that inducing stress can actually cause telomere shortening.
short telomeres may precede depression, and depression may speed up telomere shortening.
As you “dose” yourself with more and more alcohol, the poisonous effects of alcohol take over, damaging your liver, heart, and digestive system and putting you at risk for cancer and other serious health problems. The more you drink, the more damage you do.
As you may imagine, more serious traumas, both recent and in childhood, have also been linked to damaged telomeres. These traumas include rape, abuse, domestic violence, and prolonged bullying.
Of course, it’s not the situations themselves that produce the short telomeres; it’s the stress responses that many people feel when they’re in these situations.
when stress is an enduring, defining feature of your life, it can act as a slow drip of poison.
Our studies have shown that being under chronic stress does not inevitably lead to telomere damage.
you do not necessarily have to escape difficult situations to protect your telomeres. Incredible as it sounds, you can learn to use stress as a source of positive fuel—and as a shield that can help protect your telomeres.
People with a strong habitual threat response tend to suffer from anticipatory worry; they imagine a bad outcome to an event that hasn’t happened yet.
Here was some vital information about how stress gets into our cells. It’s not just from experiencing a stressful event, it’s also from feeling threatened by it, even if the stressful event hasn’t happened yet.
Feeling threatened is not the only way to respond to stress. It’s also possible to feel a sense of challenge.
The challenge response is associated with making more accurate decisions and doing better on tasks, and is even associated with better brain aging and a reduced risk of developing dementia.8 Athletes who have a challenge response win more often, and a study of Olympic athletes has shown that these highly successful folks have a history of seeing their life problems as challenges to be surmounted.9
The challenge response creates the psychological and physiological conditions for you to engage fully, perform at your best, and win. The threat response is characterized by withdrawal and defeat, as you slump in your seat or freeze, your body preparing for wounding and shame as you anticipate a bad outcome.
Our emotions are not pure reactions to the world; they are our own fabricated constructions of the world.
Knowing how emotions are created is powerful. Once you know this, you can have more choice over what you experience.
You can choose to feel challenged.
The worst thing athletes can do, he says, is try to get rid of their stress. “They need to think of stress as helping them get ready to perform. They need to say, ‘Yes! I need this!’ Instead of trying to make the butterflies in their stomach go away, athletes need to make those butterflies line up and fly in formation.” In other words, they need to make the stress work for them.
A challenge response doesn’t make you less stressed. Your sympathetic nervous system is still highly aroused, but it is a positive arousal, putting you in a more powerful, more focused state.
Chronic stress suppresses aspects of the immune system, leaving us more vulnerable to infections, causing us to produce fewer antibodies in response to vaccinations, and making our wounds heal more slowly.
Certain immune cells are like SWAT teams that fight viral infections. These cells are known as T-cells, because they are stored in the thymus gland, which sits under the sternum bone in the chest. Once T-cells mature, they leave the thymus and circulate continuously throughout the body.
particular interest to aging is the type of T-cell called a
CD8 cell.
When the telomeres of aging CD8 cells wear down, the aging cells send out proinflammatory cytokines, those protein molecules that create systemic inflammation.
(Normally CD8 T-cells gradually die by a natural type of cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis rids the body of old or damanged immune cells so they do not overwhelm the body or develop into the types of blood cancers called leukemias.)
We cannot rid ourselves of stress, but approaching stressful events with a challenge mentality can help promote protective stress resilience in body and mind.
If you feel that an important aspect of your identity is on the line, you are probably going to feel a strong threat response. This is why a final exam can be so stressful if your main identity is as a “good student,” or why a sports competition can feel terrifying if you strongly identify as an athlete.
The next time a threat looms, pause and list what’s most important to you.
When you see just how broad your values run, you validate your sense of self-worth, so there’s less of your identity riding on the outcome of a single event.
