CHAPTER 6
Sandra looked older than her years. She was in her late thirties and came in regularly for ongoing counselling as part of her drug rehabilitation program. She’d had a difficult upbringing with a mother who drank too much and a father who disappeared from her life when she was three. Sandra’s mother had a number of de-facto relationships and two of her partners had sexually and physically abused Sandra throughout much of her teen years. Since leaving home at sixteen, Sandra had spent much of her time living on the streets until her early twenties. She had been on and off hard drugs—she has been off them for the past six months—and had three children whom she greatly loved, to two different fathers. Sandra still smoked and took prescribed medications from her GP. Because of the drug issues, her children had spent much of their lives in foster care but were back with Sandra.
Sandra was living on welfare because of difficulties holding down a regular job but was doing her best to make ends meet. Sandra was the kind of person, however, who always managed to get up no matter how many times she was knocked down and she had been very courageous and determined to get her life back on track. As a part of her therapy she was making sincere efforts to learn to be more mindful and to live more consciously without being such a prisoner of her unhappy past.
In this chapter we will expand a little on what we mentioned in Chapter 4 relating to stress—a term we will broadly take to be unhealthy states of mind and emotion—and how it affects our ageing. This will help us understand how mindfulness not only helps with stress, but also how it seems to slow the ageing process. Although it’s still early days as far as the research is concerned, and although we haven’t arrived at the end of the journey yet—as far as completely proving the effects of mindfulness meditation on slowing ageing—we will say that the signpost is pointing in a very interesting direction.
In Chapter 4 we looked at the short-term activation of our stress response and the long-term overactivation of it, the latter of which leads to high ‘allostatic load’.[1] We described this as a physiological wear and tear on the body and learned that it is seen in chronic depression, stress and anxiety. Your car mechanic would probably tell you that if you flog your car it will cope pretty well for a time, but it won’t last you as long as it would if you looked after it, and its parts will wear out a lot faster. Well, it’s no different with our body. If we wanted to accelerate our ageing process, then mindlessly flogging our body is the best way to do it. Ageing is unavoidable but how we age is largely up to us.
We thought that some fancy words might impress you, perhaps even make you think that we know something that you don’t! Although we hope you’re impressed, we suspect that the principles these words relate to will probably be quite intuitive to you, although you may not be familiar with the details. So let’s spend a little time exploring genes, epigenetics and telomeres.
There are a lot of things taught in our universities and medical schools for generations that ‘ain’t necessarily so’. One of them is that the way our genes (our DNA) express themselves is pretty much predetermined. ‘If it’s in your genes then that’s the end of the story. It will come to pass.’ That belief potentially leads to a kind of scientific fatalism or learned helplessness. If we get genetically tested for one condition or another and find that we ‘have the gene’ then we might feel like we’re perched precariously on a genetic time bomb, just waiting to go off.
We now know, however, that what we used to think about genes and how they work simply isn’t true. Why, for example, do some people get an illness like bowel cancer when others with the same family history and diet don’t? Why do some people get the chronic illnesses associated with ageing at an earlier age than others do? Why do some people look as though they are ageing faster than others?
Epigenetics is an emerging field of science that tells us that our genes and the way they express themselves are anything but set in concrete. Our environment, lifestyle and state of mind have profound effects on how our genes express themselves, for better or worse. We can increase our likelihood of getting an illness we’re genetically disposed to—whether it’s heart disease, cancer, MS, addictions or depression—depending on the things we do (lifestyle), the things we think (state of mind), and the things we’re exposed to (environment).
What we also know now is that we can age faster or slower depending on the things we do, the things we think and the things we’re exposed to. We won’t go into diet and exercise too much here, as important as they are, but will focus on the mind because that will help us understand the potential importance of mindfulness for improving genetic repair and slowing the genetic ageing process.
Australia’s Nobel Prize-winning researcher Elizabeth Blackburn discovered telomeres and telomerase and demonstrated their importance in the ageing process. What are telomeres? They are located on the ends of the long strands of interwoven DNA, which are the molecules at the centre of our cells that contain all the information they need to function and produce whatever they need to produce. Telomeres function something like the little plastic bit on the end of our shoelaces—to stop the DNA from unravelling. As we age the telomeres get whittled away and an enzyme by the name of telomerase works away trying to repair the telomeres. The shorter the telomeres get the older we are genetically and the more chronic illnesses associated with ageing we are prone to, from heart disease to cancer to arthritis. When the telomeres get worn short enough the DNA unravels and the cell dies. Like the ends of our shoelaces, when they get shorter and shorter in response to what we’re doing to them, eventually they don’t do their job very effectively anymore.
We know that a good diet and regular physical exercise help slow the ageing process and keep our telomeres intact. That’s just another reason why eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly is good for us. We also know that our state of mind has a profound effect on the rate at which our telomeres age. Ageing, however, isn’t just about our telomeres, but let’s look at them closely because they illustrate the relationship between the state of our mind and the state of our body so well.
Work by Elizabeth Blackburn and her team has found some interesting relationships between our state of mind and our rate of ageing. For example, a study on healthy post-menopausal women found that the combination of lower optimism and higher pessimism was associated with shorter telomeres, greater inflammation and increases in the risk for disease, and early mortality.[2] In other words, by middle age the women with a tendency to pessimism were approximately ten years older genetically than optimistic women. One could save on a lot of anti-wrinkle cream at that rate!
That women exposed to domestic violence experience chronic stress and report worse health than women who aren’t is well known, but we now also know that a big part of the explanation for this is the resulting wear and tear on the telomeres.[3] Another study on healthy pre-menopausal women showed that psychological stress associated with higher oxidative stress (oxidation is a part of ageing, like when an apple is going brown), lower telomerase activity and shorter telomere length added the equivalent to between nine and seventeen years of accelerated ageing. The effect of ageing wasn’t due to the events going on in the woman’s life but how well she coped with them.[4] This raises the question, of course, of whether learning to cope better with our life events will slow our ageing process. It seems that the answer is yes.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with childhood trauma has also been associated with increased risk for age-related diseases, rapid loss of telomere length and early mortality.[5] Children with greater exposure to institutional care have significantly shorter relative telomere length in middle childhood—the longer the institutionalisation, the shorter the telomeres.[6] Early adversity and how we learn to cope with it has potentially profound effects on a molecular level for the rest of our life. Although most of the studies in this field have been done on women, there’s no reason to believe that it’s any different for men.
The more positive side of what might look like a very gloomy ageing coin is that we can do a lot to turn this process around. So, for example, physical exercise has been found to protect our bodies and telomeres from the damaging effects of stress. Sedentary women were fifteen times more likely to have short telomeres in relation to significant life stress compared to women who exercised regularly.[7]
What we find even more interesting is that when we change our state of mind we change what’s happening to us on a molecular level, right down to the very core of our cells. As we said previously, we can’t always control the things that happen to us, but we can have more control over our responses to life events and our attitude to them—mindfulness helps us to do that. It has been found that mindfulness may slow genetic ageing and enhance genetic repair by increasing the effectiveness of our telomerase.[8] It’s fascinating to consider that we can help our bodies do their own genetic engineering by sitting on a cushion and paying attention. There’s still a long way to go as far as this research is concerned, but although we may not have arrived yet at the end of that journey we are passing some very promising signposts.
We discussed this in Chapter 4 to some extent, but it’s worth expanding on a few points here. The bad news is that we know that increased inattention, stress and poor mental health accelerates the ageing of our brain cells (neurons)—but can the process be reversed? Well, the good news is that yes, it can.
Brain scans measuring the thickness of the ‘grey matter’ in long-term mindfulness meditators indicates that it is thicker, particularly in the areas associated with sensory input (we connect better with the world around us), memory (we remember more in both the long and short term because we are paying attention), emotional regulation, the attention centres (we attend better) and the executive functioning region (we think, plan and choose better).[9] This indicates that mindfulness meditation slows down the ageing of the brain by reversing the negative effects of the high allostatic load that we discussed in Chapter 4. Leisure activities that engage our attention literally help keep us young—it’s natural to be creative and to explore our environments. It’s not so natural to spend our life ‘veging out’, which isn’t to say that the occasional veg-out can’t be very useful and enjoyable.
Mindfulness can help us make all of the other healthy lifestyle changes that may help slow our ageing process and reduce our chances of developing the illnesses associated with it. All of the above points also have important implications for preventing or slowing the progression of dementia.
Over the last six months Sandra has made great progress in moving on from her troubled past. Although her mind habitually wanted to dive back into the past she found that the mindfulness practice helped her to come back to what she was doing now. Sandra had gone around those loops in her thinking many times and she was sick of always arriving at the same place—it was time to move on. She had also made a number of changes to her diet and exercise levels and had found the mindfulness practices very helpful in getting off the cigarettes. She enjoyed nothing more than the early morning walks with her children along the waterfront. This was when she felt most present and alive—the healthy benefits were a nice side effect but were a secondary concern. Some part-time work had come her way, which helped to make ends meet. Who knows what was happening in the core of Sandra’s cells? All she knew was that she was feeling a whole lot better physically and emotionally, and people were telling her that she was looking younger all the time.
• Recognise that what we think affects what we do and that what we think and do affects our body.
• Recognise that stress comes from our reaction to what happens, not from what happens.
• Take an active interest in health by developing interests and activities that will stimulate our brain and body.
• Be aware of, accept and enjoy life as it really wonderfully is—at any age.