How to remain youthful and resilient despite stress (E103)

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Join Marie and Pete this week as they discuss a recent scientific article on how to remain youthful and resilient despite stress.

Show notes

Telomeres and telemerase

Telomeres, the specific DNA–protein structures found at both ends of each chromosome, protect genome from nucleolytic degradation, unnecessary recombination, repair, and interchromosomal fusion. Telomeres therefore play a vital role in preserving the information in our genome.

Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for maintenance of the length of telomeres by addition of guanine-rich repetitive sequences.

Good stress

During the podcast Marie and Pete discuss a great ted talk on good stress (eustress) by  Kelly McGonigal: How to Turn Stress Into an Advantage

Hayflick Limit

The Hayflick Limit is a concept that helps to explain the mechanisms behind cellular aging. The concept states that a normal human cell can only replicate and divide forty to sixty times before it cannot divide anymore, and will break down by programmed cell death or apoptosis.

Transcript

[Happy intro music -background] 

M: Welcome to happiness for cynics and thanks for joining us as we explore all the things I wish I’d known earlier in life but didn’t. 

P: This podcast is about how to live the good life. Whether we’re talking about a new study or the latest news or eastern philosophy, our show is all about discovering what makes people happy. 

M: So, if you’re like me and you want more out of life, listen in and more importantly, buy in because I guarantee if you do, the science of happiness can change your life. 

P: Plus, sometimes I think we’re kind of funny. 

[Intro music fadeout] 

M: Three! Two! One! Go!

P: A hoy, hoy.

M: A hoy, hoy.

P: And here we are.

M: Yeah.

P: We’re back and here for another week of happiness.

M: Yay! I need happiness tonight I’m feeling a bit flat.

P: Are you? Aww.

M: My day was so full of happiness, but I’m just over happy.

P: Laugh, this is the natural ebb to your flow. Laugh!

M: It is. I woke in a good mood, slept well, I played with the cats a little bit, made my coffee. Got straight to work which is unusual for me, I normally do some writing and stuff like that. I was just like, ready to tackle the day.

P: Here I go!

M: And then we popped out for a bit of sun in the pool.

P: We did, we had a little happiness date today. That was lovely.

M: We did.

P: Yeah.

M: And then I was just in the zone all afternoon and feeling really productive. And yeah, it was a good day, good day. And I think also summer does this to me because I get out more with friends, which is that social side of things. But also, I do more physically. I’m just out and about and moving more.

P: See I’m the opposite, I do more in winter. I know I’m weird. I’m much more motivated to do physical activity and the sporty. Laugh, don’t pull a face at me like that!

M & P: Laugh!

P: I just got, like, the most judgmental face you’ve ever seen from Marie Skelton folks, laugh.

M: It was confusion.

P: Yeah, no. I get really motivated for that in winter, which is odd as well. Like summer is like, ‘Oh, I just want to sit down.’

M: Nah, nah. I’m the opposite.

P: Really.

M: Anyway. So, I am at the moment just in a really positive mood, which is excellent.

P: But an exhausted positive.

M: Now I’m tired.

P: Laugh.

M: It’s like the kid who was on a sugar rush and is now like, “now I’m cranky.”

P: Laugh! And now is like, “I wanted it to last forever!”

M & P: Laugh.

M: So, what are we talking about today?

P: Well, good segway. We’re talking about being youthful today and remaining youthful. We’re talking about beauty, people. Hair, nails, lips. What’s the next one? I can’t remember the next one.

M: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

P: It’s in a song somewhere. There’s always a song. [Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels by Todrick Hall]

But now we’re looking at an article written by a Jolanta Burke and Padraic Dunne in the conversation, ‘How to remain youthful and resilient.’

M: And they’re both from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences.

P: Mmm, scientists.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: We’re going to get sciency, laugh.

M: That’s why we’re here.

P & M: Laugh.

P: So, what? What’s people’s impressions of youthfulness?

M: Not dying!

P: Laugh!

Okay, but if someone was youthful, what characteristics would they have? What would they be doing?

M: Well, they wouldn’t have done what I did earlier today, which was wander around my house thinking, where did I put my glasses?

P: Laugh.

M: Where on earth did put glasses. And I told you before we got on this podcast that was just feeling particularly old, wandering around the house, squinting at things, looking for my glasses, to the point where I looked across the room was like, oh, is that my glasses? And as I got closer, I realised it was a spoon.

P: Laugh!

M: Not my glasses…

P: Laugh!

M: And that made me feel even more old because I think during covid a lot of people that I work with in particular, who have spent hours sitting at computers and a lot less time getting up to go to the bathroom or interacting with colleagues, et cetera. We really are spending a lot more uninterrupted time in front of screens, since covid.

P: Yeah, yeah.

M: A lot of people that I work with have noticed a decline in their eyesight.

P: Laugh.

M: So that’s making me feel a bit old.

P: Laugh.

M: The grey hairs.

P: Oh yeah.

M: The random hairs.

P: Laugh, in different places.

M: That starts in your thirties, I will say for any women out there, you know, the hair that springs up in a place that shouldn’t. You’re like, how did that get there?

P: Laugh.

M: Why is that there? So, you pluck it. And then, the wrinkles.

P: Okay, so these are all things that young people don’t have?

M: That’s the bucket for me. Yep.

Also, the aches in the muscles.

P: Laugh.

M: They have flexibility, young people.

P: Laugh.

M: There’s a lot that young people have that I’m missing.

P & M: Laugh.

P: Ok.

M: Stamina.

P: Laugh.

Ok, well let’s turn that frown upside down.

M: Healthy liver.

P: Laugh.

There is a way –

M: You asked!

P: Yeah, well I did. I opened Pandora’s box. I’ll give you that.

M: Laugh.

P: So, there is a way to… I guess what the authors are talking about here is there is a way to retain that youthfulness or that… it’s not all about the doldrums of feeling arthritic and grey hairs and wrinkles and so forth, but in our mental health, maintaining a youthful exuberance for life or a youthful perspective on buoyancy and resilience.

M: So definitely perspective and how you view yourself plays a factor. But what the article that we’re talking about today is about is about stress.

P: Mmm.

M: It’s about how stress can impact your DNA all the way down to your core. So, there’s good stress, which is:

P: Eustress.

M: And bad stress, which is:

P: Distress.

M: Yes.

P: As in dis – ease.

M: Yes. So, eustress and distress. And if you’re in a heightened state of distress for too long. So, if you work in a job like our healthcare workers right now have spent two years in a heightened state of stress.

P: Mmm, yep.

M: A lot of people have. People who are dealing with financial insecurity are just in a constant state of stress. So, we’re talking about prolonged amounts of distress, and that impacts you all way down to your DNA and can make you… die!

P & M: Laugh!

M: It can impact your longevity.

P: Absolutely.

M: Let’s not be so dramatic.

P: Laugh, well it is reasonably dramatic, and I guess this is what the science is behind, and this is what the movement of positive psychology is doing for us now. Is that we’re paying more heed to our mental health and so forth.

M: Mmm hmm.

P: And this just proves that, those sort of situations where you are under emotional distress are just as bad as being under physical distress.

M: Yes.

P: And they have the same impact going down to our DNA at a cellular level that ages us or makes us less buoyant or less resilient.

M: Absolutely. So, studies, because we like studies, –

P: Laugh.

M: – have shown that people who aren’t good at managing their stress can increase their risk of dying prematurely by 43%.

P: Mmm hmm, yep.

M: So, you’re 43% more likely to die prematurely.

P: And this is partly –

M: 43%!

P: Laugh.

M: That’s huge.

P: It is, [almost] half. Yeah.

M: And so, these wonderful researchers have done a lot of research into the effects of stress on our DNA and we’re going to talk about a little bit of more scientific stuff Pete. So, I’m going to hand to you.

P: We’re gonna try. We’re going, we’re going to give this a go. It’s going to be really basic.

M: Laugh.

P: So basically, when we’re talking about DNA, there are these little things called telomeres, and they’re like little barriers that stop the DNA from replicating too much basically. Whenever we have cell damage it reorganises itself, we can do that around 60 times.

M: If you think of your DNA as the bracelet, the telomere as the bead on the end.

P: Okay, Yeah, we can go with that.

M: So, it’s a sequence of beads, right?

P: Yeah, we’ve got about 60 of them let’s say.

M: Yep.

P: And we can reproduce, and we could lose them. We lose a bead every time we [the cell] reproduce.

M: 60 reproductions?

P: Yeah, around there.

M: Before a cell dies.

P: That is called the Hayflick Limit.

M: Yes.

P: Of telomere reproduction.

M: Yes.

P: And if we have short telomeres, if we’ve only got a few beads left on the bracelet, these are the sorts of things that make us less resilient, less buoyant, getting grey hairs, getting wrinkles, showing the signs of ageing.

M: In the cell.

P: Yes.

So, there is a molecule in our DNA, which has telomerase, which can put beads back on the bracelet. So, we had this and these are things like our immune cells and if we didn’t have that our immune cells would die, and we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves against bacteria or pathogens. So, these telomerases [stop, extend and may] reverse the ageing process. And there are things that we can do that increase that telomerase being active in our body. And these are a lot of things that we talk about with positive psychology.

M: So why don’t we all just drink telomerase every day?

P: Laugh, good question. I don’t think we’ve been able to bottle it, to be honest.

M & P: Laugh.

M: This is the elixir of life.

P: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. The fountain of eternal youth. I guess that would, that would work if you can do that.

M: Sure. And look, it does sound like the solution to ageing. But telomerase does stop working properly when people reach about their eighties. So even immune cells, which produce a lot of telomerase, the molecule telomerase stop producing that and begin to age.

P: Yep.

M: So, my lovely grandma, shout out. She just turned 97.

P: Oh, wow.

M: She had shingles last year, and they said not to worry about getting the vaccine for shingles. She’s 97, it’s not going to make any difference.

P: No.

M: So, as you get older things still do… We still have a shelf life, unfortunately, laugh.

P: Yeah, we do. There’s a used by date on all of us, laugh.

M: So unfortunately, there are things that we can do in our environment and as habits and behaviours that have the opposite effect from telomerase, which are things like smoking, drinking too much alcohol, being overweight and stress.

P: Yep.

M: And all of those things impact or are associated with telomere loss.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And telomerase not working as effectively.

P: Yep. If you’re losing beads at a high rate, no matter how many beads you put back on, you’re still losing beads.

M: Yeah, so the solution here is to manage your stress.

P: It is. And how do we do that, Marie?

M: Well, I’m glad you ask.

P: Laugh.

M: So, obviously adopting a healthy lifestyle. So, not only [are you] going to have a better quality of life, you’re going to have a longer life as well by doing a lot of things we talk about.

P: Yeah.

M: In particular, it’s worth noting that in today’s day and age, we are experiencing more low-level stress in our life and more high impact stress more often. We are more likely to divorce. We are more likely to move interstate or overseas. We are more likely to lose our jobs nowadays as well.

P: Yep.

M: And the list goes on and on. And then there’s that low level stuff like climate change, something that’s completely out of a lot of our control.

P: But ever present.

M: Always there… Political unrest right now. This whole debate about the media and who can say what and whether we can lie and how much lying is happening.

P: Access to information.

M: And how dumb our relatives are.

P: Laugh.

M: Anti-vaxxer’s and QAnon and all of that’s going on in the background and is just creating this high level of stress. And that’s what I think we’ve talked about before, I refer to it as the change storm. We’re just in the middle of this storm of stuff and what we can do and what we’re learning now and is critical in this new world is for us to be far more diligent about controlling what we allow to impact us. So, as we’ve discussed before, turning off your notifications on your social media, not being on every single social media channel and feeling that you have to participate on them all.

P: Gosh yes. I’ve been off social media for a long while, I feel so good. Laugh.

M: Really time blocking your use of things and being deliberate about it.

P: A client did that recently, shout out to Dimitry. We had a conversation about social media use, and he actually put a timer on his usage, and now he’s gone from six hours down to an hour and he’s loving it.

M: Yep.

P: He said, it’s just that constant information coming at me that I don’t need and processing of that information, that’s low-level stress.

M: Mmm hmm. Yep, absolutely. Particularly because a lot of it is talking about negative things in our environment that we have no control or influence over.

P: Mmm. And sensationalism.

M: Yep. You know, if you remember the watermelon and the orange and the M&M.

P & M: Laugh.

M: It’s the big stuff that you just no matter what you do, you can recycle, and you can do a whole lot of things. But really, it’s not going to change what happens in the news every day.

P: Mmm.

M: So, all of that is in our environment right now. So, listening to the news less.

P: Yep.

M: Controlling your social media, controlling how your technology that you use during the day, a lot of us spend a lot of time in meetings and on email and being contactable by people at work, really saying no and being okay to say no to a lot of these things in our lives as well as the other side that we talk about so controlling stress. It’s going to happen.

P: Mmm.

M: You could go live under a rock and stress would still find you nowadays.

P: Laugh.

M: Yeah, so it’s about then managing things when they do go bad as well.

P: It is, and in that way, and along those lines, let’s talk about eustress a little bit here. Let’s talk about the positive stress.

M: Yes.

P: Sometimes stress is good for us. We can take it and we can use it to actually benefit ourselves. And the authors talk about this in terms of the psychology of embracing stressful events, leading to matters that make us more resilient and resourceful, such as seeking out friends when we need help or creating resources within ourselves so that when stress comes at us, we have the tools to be able to deal with it a little bit more.

M: Yep. So, mindfulness is a great one.

P: Mmm.

M: So, when you can feel your heart racing or you’re not sleeping well at night, or there’s too much going on, and it’s just out of your control to fix it because you’ve got a deadline coming up or something like that, or, you know something is going wrong or bad in your life at that point. Deep breathing. I’m saying it, there you go.

P: Laugh.

M: Meditation has been proven. Yoga, Pilates, a lot of these lighter exercises or going for a walk, getting out in nature and getting some sun. Those kinds of things are really good for balancing out the negative stress.

P: Yeah.

M: And then, as you just said, then the good stress. So, we had spoken way back early on in our podcast episodes about Kelly McGonigal, who has a great Ted talk talking about good stress. So, if you google Kelly McGonigal and Good Stress and Ted X, you’ll find her.

P: It’s really worth a listen.

M: Yes, and she looks at how, studies actually that point to how we perceive stress. And if we see stress as good. Like if you’re gearing up for your grand final on sports day and you’re a bit nervous and a bit stressed, but you’re excited by that your body responds differently, and it’s exactly the same physiological response to that deadline at work.

P: Mmm.

M: But how we frame it in our minds and how we see it, is how our bodies react to it.

P: Yep definitely, and that actually has a link to telomerase in actually getting those beads back on the bracelet we can actually influence that response. And we can do that via intense exercise as well.

M: Yes.

P: So, it can be a good or it can be bad. It depends on how you frame it and how you use it.

M: Yep. So, Kelly McGonigal talks about a study where they tracked 30,000 adults in the US for eight years, and they started by asking people how much stress have you experienced in the last year?

And I don’t know anyone in the world today who hasn’t experienced higher than usual levels of stress over the last two years, right?

P: Mmm.

M: So, how much stress have you experienced in the last year? And they also asked, do you believe that stress is harmful for your health? And then they used public death records to find out who died.

P: Laugh. What a lovely thing to do a study about.

M: I love how blunt she is as well, right?

P: Laugh!

M: I think we’d be friends.

P & M: Laugh!

M: And so, people who experienced a lot of stress had that 43% increased risk of dying that the study that we’re looking at today mentions.

P: Yep.

M: But it was only truth people who also believe that stress is harmful for your health. So, really important thing to note there. If you’ve got high levels of stress, you don’t want to die. You want to live forever.

P: Laugh.

M: At least into your eighties, there’s two things you can do:

• Reframe how you see that stress in your life.
• And secondly, learn some of those techniques that are going to help you control the bad stress.

P: Yep.

M: And bad stress will happen. And there’s some things that you can’t refrain. Grief is probably one of… divorce again is one of the most stressful times, and they suck and they’re bad.

P: Yep. And getting through those and recognising the down in the negative. Getting through those is what we’re talking about.

M: Yep.

P: Read a book, play a computer game, go for a walk.

M: Play your favourite music in the morning.

P: Get through it.

M: Yep, put some put some habits in place that bring some joy into your life as well.

P: Use your tools, and then come to the other side and then you can… Then you can do the reinterpretation and reframing.

M: Well, if it’s appropriate. There’s some stuff that I acknowledge, you can’t refrain. It’s crap.

P: Laugh.

M: To use a PG word.

P: Laugh. So, there we go. If you want to be youthful and do well with your telomere length and have good ageing qualities. Be a model for long term, get into some distressing stuff.

• Reframe,
• meditate,
• mindfulness.

And dance a little bit in your underwear.

M: Laugh. The cynic in me is like, I can’t believe we’re spouting this shit.

P: Laugh!

M: But it is science.

P: It is science, yep. Look it up.

M: That’s why we’re here.

P: Laugh!

M: It is all convincing me that one day I will need to do some meditation.

P & M: Laugh!

P: It’s alright, just run around in your underwear, and that’s just as good.

M: I can do that, laugh!

P: And on that note, laugh!

M: Have a happy week.

P: And stay cynical.

[Happy exit music – background] 

M: Thanks for joining us today if you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe and like this podcast and remember you can find us at www.marieskelton.com, where you can also send in questions or propose a topic. 

P: And if you like our little show, we would absolutely love for you to leave a comment or rating to help us out. 

M: Until next time. 

M & P: Choose happiness. 

[Exit music fadeout] 

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