You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer. Michael Roizen F.
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In the old days, we typically knew one kind of stress: life-or-death stress. It may have come in the form of a stalking tiger or a thirty-day famine, but that’s the way life was. You hunted, you cooked, you danced by the fire, you told stories, you whittled wood, you procreated. With all due respect to Ms. Hilton and Ms. Richie, that was the simple life.
These days, your energy and your attention are pulled in more directions than a piece of gum on the bottom of a shoe. Your boss wants you, your kids want you, you’ve got telecommunications gadgets that beep and buzz in symphony, you’ve got deadlines, you’ve got bills, you’ve got meetings, you’ve got twenty-minute traffic hold-ups, you’ve got six appointments in four hours, and you’ve got about wee much patience to juggle it all. And, oh yeah, how about a little lovin’ for your neglected honey-poo?
Most of us are so beaten and bruised and burdened by stress that we’ve actually got used to it. But here’s the thing: we like to write off stress as an element of life that we just live with. It is what it is, and we deal with it. Because it’s intangible, it can’t be bad for us, right? Nope. Stress is as concrete a condition as any of the others we cover in this book. While we all know that stress is unpleasant, many of us don’t realize how unhealthy it is for our bodies – and how it makes us age.
In this chapter, we want you to understand the biology of stress: how it works, why it’s important to combat it, and how your stem cells are weakened by it. But we also want you to learn how to manage stress not just in the temporary take-a-bath kind of way but for the long term. We’ll teach you how to handle and redirect your stress, not necessarily eliminate it. As you’ll learn in a moment, stress isn’t all bad. After all, the only time you’re free of stress is when you’re dead.
Worry Words: What Is Stress?
We tend to think that stress is like a pair of slippers – one size fits all. Either we’re stressed or we’re not. But the fact is that stress comes in different shapes, sizes and levels of intensity. Some of us certainly worry more than others, and some of us are much better equipped to cope with exploding dishwashers than others. But the danger is that stress – which often increases as we age – is a major driver of health problems. Stress wears on our immune system. Stress alters the variability of our heart rates, which leads to arrhythmias and even fatal heart problems.
In general, life’s stressors can be grouped into three categories, which all have different implications for your life and for your health.
Ongoing Low-level Stress. You work, you have a family, you interact with people who sometimes sneeze without covering their mouths. Life generates a constant hum of stress, no matter who you are or what you do. To expect that you can eliminate all stress is not only unreasonable but unhealthy because, as you’ll see in a moment, your ability to respond to stress can make you stronger.
Nagging Unfinished Tasks. One of the most influential forms of stress comes in the form of a chisel that chips and chips and chips and chips and chips and chips away at your brain cells a little bit at a time. Until. You. Can’t. Take. It. Any-freaking-more! Whether it’s a cluttered wardrobe, or cracked bathroom tiles that have been staring at you for years, or weekly paperwork that gnaws at you every Friday, these nagging unfinished tasks (we call them NUTs) are much more destructive than the low levels of stress we expect from life.
Major Life Events. You don’t need us to tell you the kinds of things that fit this category; things like a divorce, a move, a job change, a death in the family, a sudden illness and bankruptcy aren’t exactly on the same level as a mobile-phone battery dying. The stats show that three major life events in a one-year period will make your body feel and act as though it were thirty-two years older in the following year – meaning that it’s especially important to develop coping strategies and support systems to sustain you in times of crisis.
How do these types of stress affect us? Typically, the first kind of stress does its part to wear us down and fatigue us but really won’t be all that harmful healthwise. The last two kinds of stress are the ones that do the most damage. Understanding how they do – which we’ll now explain – is the first step in understanding how to stop it.
Frazzle Dazzle: The Biology of Stress
Stress is good. There, we said it. Instead of calling us crazier than a four-headed firefly, hear us out. Stress heightens all of our biological systems so that we can deal with an impending threat, be it an enemy, a natural disaster or the fact that some idiot built the fire too close to the cave. Changes occur inside our body that give us the strength or the sense to fight a predator or hightail it out of there. What happens to your body during high-intensity stress? Your concentration becomes more focused than a microscope, your reaction time becomes faster, and your strength increases exponentially. Historically, stress was good – as long as you could survive it.
Yo-ga! Yo-ga! Yo-ga!
Yoga could very well be the ultimate de-stress technique. It lowers blood pressure and heart rate, decreases stress hormones and increases relaxation hormones like serotonin, dopamine and endorphins. You can get the benefits of yoga in a single pose or in a full-fledged class.
The big difference between stress today and stress yesterday isn’t the fact that cavemen didn’t have e-mail; it’s that their stress was fleeting. They had periods of high-intensity stress followed by low (or no) levels of it. Today we’re drowning in a sea of stress, with wave after wave after wave knocking us over. Those heightened biological reactions work in our favour for short periods, but when stress continues unabated, those biological reactions turn wacky.
Too much stress can lead to a host of ultimate stress-enders, like heart attacks, cancer and disabling accidents. Plus, stress destroys your sleep patterns, which can lead to unhealthy addictions to food and alcohol. How? Through a series of chemicals that are produced in your brain, travel through your blood and affect just about every system in your body.
That’s your stress circuit.
Specifically, your stress circuit is the interaction between your nervous system and your stress hormones – the hormonal system that sounds like a Star Wars galaxy: the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. The stress hormones cycle among these three glands in a feedback loop. When you’re faced with a major stressor like a mugger, a looming deadline or a chocolate shortage, the cone-shaped hypothalamus at the base of your brain releases CRH (corticotrophin-releasing hormone), which then does a hula dance on your pituitary gland, stimulating it to release another hormone called ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) into your bloodstream.
ACTH signals your adrenal glands to release cortisol and facilitates production and then release of norepinephrine (also known as adrenaline, the fight-or-flight chemical). As you see in Figure 3.1, these four chemicals serve as your body’s SWAT team – they respond to emergencies. Adrenaline increases your blood pressure and heart rate, while cortisol releases sugar in the form of glucose to fuel your muscles and your mind. Then, to close the loop, cortisol travels back to the hypothalamus to stop the production of CRH. Stress over, hormones released, body returns to normal. But only if the stress stops as well.
The True Life Force?
When it comes to the human body, we can talk about energy in terms of calories, and we can talk about energy in terms of the cellular energy that’s generated by mitochondria, called ATP. But there’s a different level of energy that we should all think about: energy fields. It’s a part of medicine that we don’t fully understand, this relationship between the energy inside the cell and the energy outside the cell. It’s the energy that allows us to see force fields in electromagnetic photographs of an amputee’s “phantom limbs” in the place where the limbs once were. It’s the energy that allows one part of the body to have an effect on another, even though there seems to be no clear chemical connection – for instance, through acupuncture or reflexology. And if you