If you don’t believe that living in a state of perpetual stress ages a person expeditiously, just compare photos of any president on the day they took office with the day they left office. After four or more years of carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, they invariably look older, grayer, more stooped, and more lined. The constant demands, the sleepless nights, the unending responsibilities—it all adds up to a perfect storm of rapidly accumulating stress and a rapidly aging body.
The effects of stress may be accelerated for the president, but they are just as real in our own lives. We see accumulated stress on our faces in real time, from the bags under our eyes from lack of sleep to the worry lines on our foreheads from a constantly furrowed brow. We feel it accumulating in our bodies over the gradual, creeping consequences of weeks of sleepless nights and through years of unresolved anger or sadness or both. Whatever the demands etching themselves across your face, they can lead to unrelenting pressure that intensifies with age—and our bodies pay the price. Our prematurely graying hair, our sallow skin, our aching joints, our general weariness—they all bear witness to the stress we have allowed to live rent-free in our brains and bodies. Who has ever caught a glimpse of themselves in the mirror at the end of an exhausting, emotionally draining day and thought, I look positively radiant! I should go take my driver’s license picture and new headshots right now! Stress is not a good look on anyone.
How, exactly, does stress wreak such havoc on the body? One major factor is the same culprit we have come back to several times already: increased acid. If we revisit our tiger-attack scenario, when your brain kicks into fight-or-flight mode, it begins pumping out high doses of cortisol and adrenaline; these chemicals are (say it with me now) acidic in nature. And remember that whole thing about acid seeping into your skin so you’d taste bad if a predator tried to bite you? Yup. That contributes to an acceleration of body age, and decreases skin elasticity, too. When we live our day-to-day lives in a state of perpetual stress, we are flooding our bodies with acid. To put it rather inelegantly, we are, in essence, pickling ourselves.
It’s no secret that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. It seems that nearly every commercial for personal care products—cosmetics, lotion, grooming supplies, and so on—uses the promise of looking younger as a selling point. The cover of every women’s magazine teases secrets for decreasing wrinkles or “getting that youthful glow.” Every men’s magazine boasts about how to “regain the strength and performance you had in your twenties!” They’re all selling the dream that you can hide your age and be young again.
Our society has an unabashedly negative view on growing old, but far too often we fail to recognize the beauty of age: the wisdom that comes with time and experience; the dignity that results from loving and being at peace with your own body because of what it has borne you through; the attractiveness of maturity and confidence; the self-assuredness that comes from reaching a point where you’ll no longer tolerate anyone’s bullshit. These are qualities to be celebrated, vaunted, honored. These are not the aspects of aging anyone should want to combat. Too often, we’re chasing youth when we should be chasing health.
There’s nothing wrong with growing older. Let me repeat that: There’s nothing in the world wrong with growing older. It is natural and beautiful. Instead of chasing a carrot we can never capture (youth), what if we shifted our focus to chasing the things we are actually coveting: the glow of healthy skin, the vibrancy that accompanies a healthy diet, and the confidence and peace that are earned through daily meditation? What you’ll find happens with a regular practice like the Z Technique is that you start to become the best version of your age right now. Your body will have a chance to undo physical damage, and your mind will come to a place of acceptance and celebration of what your life has been up to this point.
Our bodies are a collection of every experience, every joy, every sorrow, every meal we have eaten, every rest we have (or haven’t) taken, every injury, every illness, every good decision and every bad one. Our bodies and our minds are the sum of everything we’ve ever been and done. This is what makes us who we are. Would you rather be someone trying to hide their age because they’re ashamed of how prematurely haggard they look, or someone who can brag about their age because of how fabulous they look?
I know the difference firsthand. When you’re an actress, there’s a constant awareness of the age ceiling looming over your career, putting undue pressure on the rate of your success. Most actresses hide or lie about their age to make people think they’re younger than they are. Now, as a meditation teacher, one of the main benefits of the thing I am selling is a reversal in body age, and I am proud of my age and how I wear it!
As the expression goes, age is only a number; it’s simply an external signifier that designates the number of times our body has circled the sun—a marker of maturity and physical wear. The problem is that many of us have a flawed perspective on where that marker should be at each stage. We’ve all seen that person at our class reunion who looks like they’ve discovered the fountain of youth—or has, at the very least, made a deal with a fairy-tale witch for some magic beans guaranteed to eliminate wrinkles. We’ve also seen that person who looks like time somehow sped up in their world, aging them at a much faster rate than everyone else. Personally, I know which one I’d rather be, and I imagine you feel the same way.
Meditation helps your body repair injuries and illnesses that have stuck around due to stress’s long-term effects on the body, in the form of lost or disrupted sleep, systemic inflammation, a state of chronic acidity, a decrease in mental alacrity, and pain. These are the disruptions to your body’s natural aging process that accelerate and heighten the rate at which you look and feel older.
The Western notion of aging is often summed up as “You live half a dozen decades or so, then you get sick and die.” That’s the casual, general reality we’ve all seemed to accept as unavoidable . . . except it doesn’t have to be. There are Ayurvedic practitioners—monks and long-term meditators—who live and thrive and age well, and then literally name the upcoming date of their death before going to the Ganges and simply dropping into the water at the moment they pass away. In other words, they die, but they don’t necessarily accept the “get sick” part of the equation. As one guru described, “The yogi always wants to know the time and date of death ahead of time. He fixes it. Many years ahead he says, ‘On this date, at this time I will leave, and he leaves . . . [l]eaving this body consciously without damaging this body, like you take off your clothes and walk away, you take off your body and walk away.”1 I’m not saying this needs to be your reality, but my point is that a rapid deterioration of the body and prolonged suffering before death may not be as inevitable as we tend to think.
Doctors have long known that prolonged exposure to cortisol, our old stress-induced nemesis, can lead to an accumulation of visceral fat in the abdomen. Stress can literally make you gain weight in some of the most unflattering places, the effects of which are only magnified with age.2 But the physical ripple effect of meditation goes far beyond your appearance.
In 2000, Massachusetts General Hospital partnered with Harvard Medical School to use MRIs to investigate brain mass—specifically, the specialized cortical areas of the brain that control things like cognition, which tend to thin with age, beginning around thirty. The study found that the average thickness for meditators between the ages of forty and fifty was comparable to the thickness of the average brain of people between the ages of twenty and thirty. In other words, a regular meditation practice showed evidence of keeping the brain up to twenty years younger than brains without one.3
Four years later, Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, released a study in which her team discovered that mental stress has a direct correlation on the rate at which telomeres shorten.4 Telomeres, which are basically the caps that protect the ends of DNA strands (almost like the plastic ends that keep a shoelace from unraveling), shorten with age. Epel’s study looked specifically at the telomeres on leukocytes, part of the body’s immune system. Shorter leukocyte telomeres are linked to a host of age-related health concerns, including osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease. The shorter a person’s telomeres, the more vulnerable his or her cells are to degeneration and disease.
Epel’s study found that among women of comparable age and physical health, telomeres were markedly shorter in women living in an environment of higher stress—the test group consisted of mothers of chronically ill children. The subjects exposed to chronic high-demand situations had notably shorter telomeres—displaying up to an additional decade’s worth of decay—than the control group. In other words, researchers were able to confirm with hard science what we all already knew from experience: Stress can cause premature aging.
Epel and her team then set out to see if the effects of stress could be mitigated through natural means—namely, meditation. In a study released in 2009, they announced that meditation did, indeed, have a measurable effect on slowing the rate of deterioration of telomeres.5
A 2013 study by Elizabeth Hoge, M.D., a professor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, explored something similar, examining the differences in telomere lengths between meditators and nonmeditators.6 Dr. Hoge’s team discovered that not only did meditators have substantially longer telomeres than nonmeditators, there was also a correlation between telomere length and the length of time a person has been practicing meditation. Simply put, the longer a person had been meditating, the longer their telomeres were compared to those of nonmeditators.
A 2014 study by UCLA neurologist Eileen Luders found that white matter volume, which is responsible for transmitting electrical signals throughout the brain, was substantially higher for meditators than nonmeditators in seventeen of twenty different neural pathways. That means meditation had a direct correlation to the health of 85 percent of the neural pathways examined!7
What these studies and the science that continues to emerge on an almost-daily basis seem to indicate is that meditation has a verifiably and undeniably positive effect on cellular aging.
Take a moment and consider what this means for your mental acuteness, both now and in the future. Meditation not only sets you up for present success by allowing you to bulk up your right brain, which brings the rewards of heightened intuition and awareness of the moment, but also increases your neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change itself. This allows you to retain the benefits you’ve been working to develop. Meditation is an investment that will pay dividends in your performance capabilities for the rest of your life.
Stress does age the body expeditiously, but meditation isn’t magic; it’s a means of purging the body of its backlog of stress. This allows the body to reset its baseline for how it physically responds to demands. Therefore, it stands to reason (and hard science backs this up, as we have just seen) that meditation is a highly effective means of helping to slow down—or even reverse—the aging process.
Within thirty seconds of the fight-or-flight response being triggered, adrenaline and cortisol are detectable in the blood; within ten minutes, those same acidic stress chemicals are present in the bone marrow. Fascinatingly, the opposite occurs with meditation: Within thirty seconds of simply sitting down with the intention to meditate, dopamine and serotonin are present in the bloodstream; after ten minutes of meditation using a technique designed for you, those same alkaline bliss chemicals are present in the bone marrow. Those chemicals have a real and lasting impact not only on your emotional state but also on the physical makeup of your body on a cellular level. What are you creating with your actions every day: a body of fear or a body of bliss?
It’s okay if your road to meditation is marked by a little bit of vanity—mine certainly was. Maybe you want to combat those crow’s feet or even a bit of a paunch. But I would urge you to consider focusing on how to be the best version of your age right now, even as you seek to lengthen those telomeres. As your body begins to heal itself from stress, you’ll likely begin to feel more energetic and less achy. Take advantage of that! I encourage you to get active—start jogging or doing yoga; be more conscious and deliberate about what you eat. Let meditation be just one in a series of positive choices and changes you make in your life to enable you to age gracefully. This is a second chance to treat yourself better; don’t waste it.
Even if you’re the type of person who has a hard time committing to healthy habits, even if you’ve never made a regular practice of going to the gym or cutting out gluten or going to bed early—I urge you to be open to the possibility that this may all change once you adopt this one foundational habit. I hear from my students all the time how meditation was actually the first healthy habit they were able to adopt, and how it opened the door for myriad other positive lifestyle changes. It might be as simple as a smoothie every day instead of a coffee, or a weekly yoga class, or reading in bed instead of scrolling through social media. But keep an eye out for what habits fall away innocently and spontaneously after you commit to your daily Z Technique time.
A key aspect of who you are as a high achiever is your mental acuity. As you grow older, don’t you want to be able to maintain the neural pathways you’ve already created and continue to create more as a means of leveraging your experience into new innovations in your field? Just imagine what the cumulative results of a healthier, stronger body and mind can have on the path of a career or a life over five, ten, twenty, or even fifty years. How much more could you accomplish over the next few decades if you choose today to begin a practice that will increase your productivity and improve your performance?
As the old saying goes, “You will never be younger than you are today.” The means to combat age-related deterioration is within your grasp; it’s just up to you to use it.
Ziva Case Study 5
Aging Backward
A few years ago, my husband and I spent a year and a half trying to get pregnant with our second child. We were in the midst of packing our life up to move from New York City to Los Angeles when I learned that one of my tubes was blocked and the other was partially blocked. Heartbreak washed over us. After relocating to L.A., we decided to connect with a fertility doctor. I took tests to assess my hormone levels, egg quality, egg production, follicle count, and so on. Across the board, my results were poor and discouraging. Because of the blocked tube, IVF became our only option. But because of the inadequate levels indicated by my blood test and my age (at the time I was thirty-eight), the doctor explained that even a successful IVF procedure would be unlikely to lead to pregnancy. We took his advice, decided not to pursue IVF, and tried to move on with our lives.
Six months later, in January 2014, I took the Ziva Meditation course, and I’ve been practicing meditation every day since. Early in 2015, I realized that I still wanted to have another child. I planned to revisit the fertility doctor, fully prepared for the possibility that he would deliver the same bad news (or worse, now that I was two years older) about my stats. Best case, we would be able to conceive. Worst case, I hoped that this would help close the chapter on my desire to be a mother again and enable me to move on.
I took another blood test, and my husband and I went in for another consultation. The doctor looked at my new results. Then he compared them to the results from almost two years ago. He was dumbfounded—everything had turned around for the better. He asked, “What have you changed in your life? Whatever it is, we need to bottle it! I have only seen this dramatic change once in eighteen years.” I told him, “I’ve been meditating every day for the past two years.”
Here are the results from each blood test, to show you the dramatic differences:
|
Test |
2013 |
2015 |
|
Estradiol (under 80 is ideal) |
313.3 |
39.0 |
|
Inhibin B (egg quality) |
59 (avg) |
94 (very good) |
|
Anti-Mullerian hormone |
.49 |
1.08 (above 1 is needed for IVF) |
|
Follicle count |
6 open |
11 open (10 needed for IVF) |
Meditation changed my body and my life. I was able to build my family a new life that is even more beautiful than I could have imagined and far surpasses the life I had in New York, which I’d felt would be impossible to rebuild. I’ve made good friends and found a job that surpasses my “ideal” job in New York. I now love Los Angeles and love our neighborhood. I’ve run three half marathons since 2013 and have been playing my music more than ever. All these things have come to fruition because of meditating.
Two years ago, I had tremendous stress in my body (from years and years of a high-demand life, as well as moving). While I did not conceive again, meditation has helped release this stress and helped me to accept things as they are—I feel that every day. I now have scientific proof that my body changed, too, as a result, and for that I am eternally grateful.