Life Extension: Stress Management Exercises

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Stress causes a normal unavoidable internal reaction that affects our mind and body when we are faced with anything that we perceive to be dangerous or threatening to our well being and comes from many sectors of ones life. Everyone handles stress differently. Stress can be positive or negative. Recognizing the difference and understanding how you handle both is important. Stress can manifest itself with poor nutrition and a bad attitude. Stress typically comes from:

• Home environment
• Work environment
• Social environment
• Self induced (mental attitude)

An individual Life Extension Stress Management Program is crucial to your health and longevity.

Some stressful events seem to turn a person's hair grey overnight. Now a team of researchers has found that severe emotional distress - like that caused by divorce, the loss of a job, or caring for an ill child - may speed up the aging of the body's cells at the genetic level.

The findings are the first to link psychological stress so directly to biological age. The researchers found that blood cells from women who had spent many years caring for a disabled child were, genetically, about a decade older than those from peers who had much less care-taking experience.

The study, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggests that the perception of being stressed can add years to a person's biological age. Stress management is crucial.

Though doctors have linked chronic psychological stress to weakened immune function and an increased risk of illness, they are still trying to understand how tension damages or weakens tissue.

The new research suggests a new way the damage occurs and opens the possibility that the process can be reversed.

"This is a new and significant finding," said Bruce McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York.

Dr. McEwen said the research provided some of the clearest evidence yet "of the price in wear and tear on the tissues that everybody pays during a stressful life."

"And we know as we get older," he continued, "we have a greater tendency to put on fat, to develop heart disease and diabetes."

In the experiment, Elissa Epel and Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco led a team of researchers who analysed blood samples from 58 young and middle-aged mothers, 39 of them caring for a child with a chronic disorder such as autism or cerebral palsy.

Using genetic techniques, the doctors examined the DNA of white blood cells, which are central to the body's immune response to infection.

The scientists focused on a piece of DNA, called the telomere, at the very tip of each cell's chromosomes.

Each time a cell divides and duplicates itself, the telomere shrinks. A chemical called telomerase helps restore a portion of the telomere with each division. But after 10 to 50 divisions or so, the telomere gets so short that the cell is effectively retired and no longer able to replicate.

Change in telomere length over time is thought to be a rough measure of a cell's age and vitality.

When the researchers compared the DNA of mothers caring for disabled children, they found a striking trend.

After correcting for the effects of age, they calculated that the longer the women had taken care of their child, the shorter their telomere length, and the lower their telomerase activity.

Some of the more experienced mothers were years older than their chronological age, as measured by their white blood cells.

"When people are under stress, they look haggard, it's like they age before your eyes, and here's something going on at a molecular level" that reflects that impression, said Dr. Blackburn, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, who helped lead the research.

The researchers also gave the women a questionnaire, asking them to rate on a three-point scale how overwhelmed they felt by daily life, and how often they were unable to control the important things in their lives.

The women who perceived that they were under heavy stress also had significantly shortened telomeres, compared with those who felt more relaxed - whether they were raising a disabled child or not.

"Some of the women who had a lot of objective, real stress also had a low perceived amount, and the next step is trying to understand what it is that promotes this kind of resilience," Dr. Epel said.

She said the group planned to test the effect of meditation, mindfulness training and yoga on both perceived stress and telomere length. Experts caution that the telomere study needs to be replicated and that no one has yet shown convincingly that psychological stress significantly shortens people's lives.

By Benedict Carey - New York Times

Links: Stress Level Test, Stress Management

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