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October 13 - October 22, 2017
Telomeres, which shorten with each cell division, help determine how fast your cells age and when they die, depending on how quickly they wear down.
To an extent that has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community, telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres, it turns out, are listening to you. They absorb the instructions you give them. The way you live can, in effect, tell your telomeres to speed up the process of cellular aging.
Senescent cells can leak proinflammatory substances that make you vulnerable to more pain, more chronic illness. Eventually, many senescent cells will undergo a preprogrammed death.
One study has found that people who tend to focus their minds more on what they are currently doing have longer telomeres than people whose minds tend to wander more.
Having a good supply of stem cells that are able to renew themselves is key to staying healthy and to recovering from sickness and injury.
Graying happens least in African Americans and Asians, and most in blonds.11
Immune-cell senescence creates a proinflammatory environment that further taxes the lungs, so they function more and more poorly.
Mixed emotions are easier to manage than purely positive or purely negative emotions. Thus, emotionally speaking, life just feels better. Better control over emotions and enhanced complexity means more enriched daily experiences. People with more emotional complexity also have a longer healthspan.
If you think of aging in a positive way, odds are that you’ll live seven and a half years longer than someone who doesn’t, at least according to one study!31
The DNA of telomeres is different. First of all, it doesn’t live inside any gene. It sits outside of all the genes, at the very edges of the chromosome that contains genes.
Many large studies have shown that people with shorter telomeres are more likely to have a chronic disease, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, lung diseases, impaired immune function, and certain types of cancers, or to develop one of these diseases over time.
Telomeres could add DNA by attracting this previously undiscovered enzyme, which our lab named telomerase. Telomerase creates new telomeres patterned on its own biochemical sequence.
Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for restoring the DNA lost during cell divisions. Telomerase makes and replenishes telomeres.
What if we could increase our supply of telomerase? Could we be like Tetrahymena, with cells that renew forever? (This may have been the first recorded instance of humans fervently wishing to be more like pond scum.)
This natural genetic way of making telomeres longer lowers risks for most diseases of aging, including heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease, but the high telomerase also means that cells that are prone to become cancerous can keep dividing unchecked, causing a greater risk for certain types of cancer (brain cancers, melanoma, and lung cancers). Bigger isn’t always better!
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. Figure 13: Telomere Length and Chronic Stress.
Remember, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Don’t be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” PART II YOUR CELLS ARE LISTENING TO YOUR THOUGHTS
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.
positive reappraisal, which is the ability to rethink stressful situations in a positive light. Positive reappraisal lets you take a less than ideal situation and turn it to your benefit or at least take the sting out of it.
Caregiving is one of the most profound stresses a person can experience. Its tasks are emotionally and physically demanding, and one reason caregivers get so worn out is that they don’t get to go home from their caregiving “jobs” and recover. At
In the United States alone, family caregivers perform an estimated $375 billion in unpaid services each year.
The longer a mother had been looking after her sick child, the shorter her telomeres.
The more stressed out the mothers felt, the shorter their telomeres. This was true not just for the caregivers of sick children, but also for everyone in the study, including the control group of mothers who had healthy children at home. The
In our caregivers, several aspects of the physiological stress response, including lower vagus activity during stress, and higher stress hormones while sleeping, were linked to shorter telomeres or to less telomerase.2 These responses to stress appeared to be accelerating the biological aging process.
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 challenge response may feel anxious and nervous during a lab stressor test, but they also feel excited and energized. They have a “bring it on!” mentality.
We apparently have around sixty-five thousand thoughts a day. We’re
The writer Leo Rosten said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”
(Elissa) was struck by hearing how the fourteenth Dalai Lama wakes up: “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.”
The point is to know yourself and be aware of your tendencies, not to change your personality.
Both genetics and life experiences have shaped our temperament.
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.
The more that telomerase goes up, the more likely it is that their depression will lift.7 It
Negative thoughts are like microtoxins—relatively harmless when your exposure is low, but in high quantities they are poisonous to your mind. Negative thoughts are not signs that you are truly unworthy or a failure. They are the substance of depression itself.
People afflicted with inherited short telomere syndromes are much more likely to develop diabetes than the rest of the population.
Plus, when people are given a smile, they are more likely to help someone else in their next moments.55
Our telomeres are responsive, listening, calibrating to the current circumstances in the world.
For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence.
As John F. Kennedy reminded us, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”
