Living Longer with Stress
How we experience our lives is based on the mindset that we create for ourselves. When we view a cookie as bad for our health, it makes the experience worse, making us feel guilty if we eat that cookie. However, if you view that cookie as a pleasure and a reward for the hard work you did in the past hour, it feels much more fulfilling. It’s the same for stress.
If you view stress as a negative experience, that’s how your body will interpret it. Decreased longevity, bad health, no fun.
However, if you perceive stress to be a difficult scene to be in but an experience you will grow from, that’s when the benefits start to roll in. In particular, the longevity.
Longevity x Stress
In study of transparent roundworms (C. elegans), researchers saw that being a little stressed out in the early stages of life prevented the failure of proteostasis in the cytoplasm — this is the process of keeping the cell healthy, by adjusting and regulating the proteins in a cell. This ensures that diseases like Alzheimer's doesn’t happen, because it stops the accumulation of damaged proteins.
The reason why we tend to use roundworms is that they have a pretty similar biochemical environment and and cell properties as us humans, and it makes for some convenient experimentation.
It has been shown that a lot of stress on the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) isn’t a good thing, but when you can stress it out a teensy bit, the stress signal is interpreted by the cell as a survival strategy.
“It makes the animals completely stress-resistant and doubles their lifespan. It’s like magic.” — Richard I. Morimoto
The researchers involved in this study identified a set of genes (22,000 of them) called ETC, the mitochondrial electron transport chain. They noticed that these were the central regulators of diseases and decline in health related to aging.
By giving these roundworms small doses of xenobiotics (substances that are foreign to the animal — like fertilizer) and exposure to pathogens, the animals were healthier.
The mitochondria thinks of this as an opportunity to reset, and when the mitochondria is good, the rest of the cell is doing amazing.
Conclusion
If you’ve read any of my past articles, you might be a weeeeee bit confused. I said in my article about telomeres that decreasing stress would be a huge bonus in decreasing the rate at which your telomeres shorten. Now that I’m writing this article, it shows that there have been improvements to what I’ve learned, and how much I’ve grown. Thanks for sticking along with me until now :).
If you liked this article, you can follow me on Medium to receive any other updates about articles I post. You can also subscribe to my newsletter for monthly updates of what I’m working on, and connect with me here.
