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Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you scored between 8 and 17, you are average in hostility.
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3
1
3
3
1
0
1
If you scored between 0 and 24, you are low in rumination.
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2
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2
Now calculate your total score by adding up the numbers you circled (be extra careful when adding your scores for questions 2, 4, 5, and 9—the numbers are reversed).
The numbers should be switched but they are not?
If you scored between 0 and 28, you are low in conscientiousness.
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3
0
4
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3
If you scored between 17 and 20, you are average in life purpose.
As Aristotle reportedly said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
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Medium
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High
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Medium
with stress-related health outcomes, negative traits are often stronger predictors than positive traits, and they are more directly tied to stress physiology.
rumination is the act of spending a significant amount of time thinking about and perseverating on past negative events in one’s life and one’s role.
Conscientiousness is the measure of the degree to which a person is organized, how careful a person is in certain situations, and how disciplined he or she tends to be.
An individual who scores high on the Purpose in Life scale is characterized as having a strong sense of meaning in life, having aims and engaging in activites he or she strongly values, or having an outlook that gives life meaning.
Then why is question 5 not reversed? Makes no sense.
Clinical depression and anxiety are linked to shorter telomeres—and the more severe these disorders are, the shorter your telomeres. These extreme emotional states have an effect on your cells’ aging machinery: telomeres, mitochondria, and inflammatory processes.
Mental disorders and substance abuse are the top causes of disability (defined as “productive days of life lost”) worldwide, and the biggest player in this mix of disorders is depression, the “common cold” of psychiatry.1 Heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes all develop earlier and faster in people with depression and anxiety.
People who are in the throes of clinical anxiety tend to have significantly shorter telomeres. The longer the anxiety persists, the shorter the telomeres. But when the anxiety is resolved and the person feels better, telomeres eventually return to a normal length.
An impressive large-scale study of almost twelve thousand Chinese women by Na Cai and colleagues (at Oxford University and Chang Gung University in Taiwan) found that women who are depressed have shorter telomeres.
Cell aging in the brain may be one pathway to depression.
Depression, however, appears to have a stronger imprint than stressful events or anxiety, as often people with past depression still have shorter telomeres.
The good news is that even though telomeres can carry scars of past severe trauma plus depression, they can also be stabilized, and possibly lengthened, through activities that help boost telomerase. Telomeres can recover, thanks to telomerase.
Mitochondria are the energy plants of the cell.
When you’re in certain states of physical stress—if you have diabetes or heart disease—mitochondria can malfunction and cells won’t receive enough energy. This can affect brain function, because the neurons don’t have enough energy to fire. Your muscles may be weaker. The liver, heart, and kidneys—all organs that consume mass quantities of energy—suffer. One way to tell if cells are under major stress is to examine their mitochondrial DNA copy numbers, which tell us how hard the body is working to produce additional mitochondria to supplement the ones that are weary and damaged.
you want to protect your telomeres, you need to protect yourself from the effects of depression and anxiety.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, helps people out of that gap. It combines traditional strategies of cognitive therapy with mindfulness practices. Cognitive therapy helps you change distorted thoughts; mindfulness, as we’ve mentioned, helps you change how you relate to your thoughts in the first place. MBCT is potent against that great threat to your telomeres, major depression. It’s been shown to be as effective as an antidepressant.
