![]() Pessimism is the second thought pattern that has been shown to have negative effects on telomeres. When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over. Women tend to have lower hostility - and it’s less related to heart disease for them - but there are other psychological culprits affecting women’s health, such as depression. In terms of their physical and psychosocial health, they were highly vulnerable to an early disease-span, the years in a person’s life marked by the diseases of aging, which include cardiovascular disease, arthritis, a weakened immune system and more. The hostile men also had fewer social connections and less optimism. ![]() Their systolic blood pressure increased, but instead of returning to normal levels, it stayed elevated for a long time afterward. Instead, when these men were exposed to stress, their diastolic blood pressure and cortisol levels were blunted, a sign their stress response was, basically, broken from overuse. Ideally, your body responds to stress with a spike in cortisol and blood pressure, followed by a quick return to normal levels. These men had the opposite of a healthy response to stress. The most hostile men were 30 percent more likely to have a combination of short telomeres and high telomerase (an enzyme in cells that helps keep telomeres in good shape) - a profile that seems to reflect the unsuccessful attempts of telomerase to protect telomeres when they are too short. In a study of British civil servants, men who scored high on measures of cynical hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages. Someone with hostility doesn’t just think, “I hate to stand in long lines at the grocery store” they think, “That other shopper deliberately sped up and beat me to my rightful position in the line!” - and then they seethe. Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. Scientists have learned that several thought patterns appear to be unhealthy for telomeres, and one of them is cynical hostility. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility have shorter telomeres. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. ![]() What this means: Aging is a dynamic process that could possibly be accelerated or slowed - and, in some aspects, even reversed. We’ve devoted most of our careers to studying telomeres, and one extraordinary discovery from our labs (and seen at other labs) is that telomeres can actually lengthen. This isn’t the only reason a cell can become senescent - there are other stresses on cells we don’t yet understand very well - but short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old. When they become too short, the cell stops dividing altogether. Shortening with each cell division, they help determine how fast a cell ages. They form caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material from unraveling. Some lifestyle factors may even turn genes on or shut them off.ĭeep within the genetic heart of all our cells are telomeres, or repeating segments of noncoding DNA that live at the ends of the chromosomes. Even though you are born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves. How can one person bask in the sunshine of good health, while another person looks old before her time? Humans have been asking this question for millennia, and recently, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to scientists that the differences between people’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions among genes, social relationships, environments and lifestyles. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Elizabeth Blackburn and health psychologist Elissa Epel explain. Jenn Liv Researchers are finding that your mental patterns could be harming your telomeres - essential parts of the cell’s DNA - and affecting your life and health.
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