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Next time you are in the grip of a stressful event, ask yourself, In ten years, will this event still have an impact on me?
We are largely unaware of the mental chatter in our minds and how it affects us.
Cynical hostility, which is characterized in part by the kind of suspicious, angry thoughts that gripped Williams when he saw a less than perfectly tidy kitchen, is linked to shorter telomeres. So is pessimism.
In the 1970s, the best-selling book Type A Behavior and Your Heart made type A personality a household term. The book claimed that type A behavior—characterized by hard-charging impatience, an emphasis on personal achievement, and hostility toward others—was a risk factor for heart disease.
It’s the hostility component of type A that is so damaging.
Cynical hostility is defined by an emotional style of high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted.
People who score high on measures of cynical hostility often cope passively by eating, drinking, and smoking more. They tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease,2 and often die at younger ages.3 They also have shorter telomeres.
“Something bad is going to happen here.” These folks are the first to prepare for a worst-case scenario, the first to expect a bad outcome. In other words, they’re pessimists.
When our research team conducted a study on pessimism and telomere length, we found that people who scored high on a pessimism inventory had shorter telomeres.
pessimism is a risk factor for poor health. When pessimists develop one of the diseases of aging, like cancer or heart disease, the disease tends to progress faster. And, like cynically hostile people—and people with short telomeres generally—they tend to die earlier.
As the data came in, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that we spend half of the day thinking about something other than what we’re doing.
The iPhone mind-wandering study showed that when people are not thinking about what they’re doing, they’re just not as happy as when they’re engaged.
(To gauge how often your own mind wanders, you can download the app at https://www.trackyourhappiness.org.)
Splitting your attention by multitasking is a low-grade source of noxious stress, even if you are not aware of it.
Rumination is the act of rehashing your problems over and over. It’s seductive. Rumination’s siren call sounds something like this: If you keep mulling things over, if you think some more about an unresolved
issue or why a bad thing happened to you, you’ll have some kind of cognitive breakthrough. You’ll solve problems, you’ll find relief! But rumination only looks like the act of problem solving. Being caught in rumination is more like getting sucked into a whirlpool that hurtles you through increasingly negative, self-critical thoughts. When you ruminate, you are actually less effective at solving problems, and you feel much, much worse.
When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over, in the form of prolonged high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and higher levels of cortisol.
People who ruminate experience more depression and anxiety,13 which are in turn associated with shorter telomeres.
ironic error, meaning that the more forcefully you push thoughts away, the louder they will call out for your attention.
Ironic error is one reason smokers who are trying to quit will constantly think of cigarettes and why dieters, trying desperately not to think of food, are tortured by images of sweet Frappuccinos.
Thought suppression is a royal road to chronic stress arousal and depression, both of which shorten your telomeres.
Yelling at yourself doesn’t work.
You don’t necessarily stop the thoughts, but you have more clarity. Activities that directly promote better thought awareness include most types of meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, along with most forms of mind-body exercises.
Thought awareness promotes stress resilience.
We apparently have around sixty-five thousand thoughts a day.
when you practice thought awareness, you notice that about 90 percent of your thoughts are repeats of thoughts that came before.
Stronger feelings of life purpose are also related to reduced risk of stroke and improved functioning of immune cells.21 Life purpose is even linked to less belly fat and lower insulin sensitivity.
Meditation, if it is of interest to you, is obviously one important way to enhance your own purpose in life.
The volunteers had some physiological transformations as well: While the control group had declines in brain volume (cortex and hippocampus), the volunteers had increases, especially the men.
Conscientious people are organized, persistent, and task oriented; they work hard toward long-term goals—and their telomeres tend to be longer.
conscientiousness is the personality trait that is the most consistent predictor of longevity.
Part of conscientiousness is having good impulse control, being able to delay the lure of immediately rewarding (and often dangerous) things like overspending money, driving too fast, excess eating, or alcohol use. Having high levels of impulsivity is associated with shorter telomeres as
Are you judgmental about your flaws? Do you feel isolated and alone, separate from other people? If you’ve answered yes to these, it’s a sign that you struggle to feel compassionate toward yourself.
self-criticism is a particularly painful form of self-pity, not self-improvement.
When we need other people to think well of us, the thought of their disapproval is so painful that we try to beat them to it—and that’s when we jump to criticize ourselves. We cannot overrely on others for comfort.
We have found that women who wake up with feelings of joy have more telomerase in their CD8 immune cells, and their waking cortisol peak is less exaggerated than women who wake up without joy or with dread.
people practicing Zen meditation,37 or loving-kindness meditation,38 have longer telomeres than nonmeditators.
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If you scored between 0 and 3, you are low in pessimism.
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If you scored 9 and above, you are high in optimism.
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