The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Stress ages us, and in the least healthy manner of aging

  • We can reduce the impact of stress on our health, with an array of tools—including making use of eustress, the kind of stress that is an inspiring challenge rather than a potentially existential threat.

    • See today’s main feature for how!

• Chronic fatigue is becoming increasingly common. Treating the cause can be difficult, but we can give our bodies a boost.

  • Today’s sponsor, Native Path, have launched a new product, Native Greens, packed with superfoods including vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants, to help support our bodies naturally.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The top foods alarmingly high in pesticides | Prof. Tim Spector (7:22)

Options include skipping certain foods, buying organic, or pressure-cooking:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Pesticidal menu:

• 0:01 | oats

• 1:02 | rice

• 1:44 | some fruits, especially strawberries

Further reading: 33 Countries Have Banned the Use of Glyphosate (Map & Article)

📝 MAIN FEATURE

The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)

This is Dr. Elissa Epel, whose work has for the past 20 years specialized in the effect of stress on aging. She’s led groundbreaking research on cortisol, telomeres, and telomerase, all in the context of aging, especially in women, as well as the relationship between stress and weight gain. She was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine for her work on stress pathways, and has been recognized as a key “Influencer in Aging” by the Alliance for Aging Research.

Indeed, she’s also been named in the top 0.1% of researchers globally, in terms of publication impact.

What’s that about stress and aging?

In her words,

Source: Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress

We say “in her words”, as she is the top-listed author on this paper—an honour reserved for the lead researcher of any given study/paper.

However, we’d be remiss not to note that the second-listed author is Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. What a team! Maybe we’ll do a spotlight feature on Dr. Blackburn’s work one of these days, but for now, back to Dr. Epel…

What does she want us to do about it?

She has the following advice for us:

Let go of what we can’t control

This one is simple enough, and can be as simple as learning how to set anxiety aside, and taking up the practice of radical acceptance of what we cannot control.

Be challenged, not afraid

This is about eustress, and being the lion, not the gazelle. Dr. Epel uses the example of how when lions are hunting gazelles, both are stressed, but both are feeling the physiological effects of that stress in terms of the augmentation to their immediate abilities, but only one of them is suffering by it.

We’ll let her explain how to leverage this:

TED ideas | Here’s how you can handle stress like a lion, not a gazelle | Dr. Elissa Epel

Build resilience through controlled discomfort

Don’t worry, you don’t have to get chased by lions. A cold shower will do it! This is about making use of hormesis, the body’s ability to build resilience to stressors by small doses of controlled cortisol release—as for example when one undergoes thermal shock, which sounds drastic, but for most people, a cold shower (or even an ice bath) is safe enough.

You can read more about this here:

A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

Connect with nature

You don’t have to hug a tree, but you do have get to a natural (or at least, natural-seeming) environment once in a while. Simply put, we did not evolve to be in the urban or even suburban settings where most of us spend most of our time. Getting to be around greenery with at least some kind of regularity is hugely beneficial. It doesn’t have to be a national park; a nice garden or local park can suffice, and potted plants at home are better than nothing. Even spending time in virtual reality “nature” is an option:

Effect of Virtual Reality on Stress Reduction and Change of Physiological Parameters Including Heart Rate Variability in People With High Stress: An Open Randomized Crossover Trial

(you can see an example there, of the kind of scenery this study used)

Breathe deeply, and rest deeply

Mindful breathing, and good quality sleep, are very strongly evidence-based approaches to reduce stress, for example:

• No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

• The 6 Dimensions of Sleep (And Why They Matter)

Practice gratitude to build optimism

Optimism has a huge positive impact on health outcomes, even when other factors (including socioeconomic factors, pre-existing conditions, and general reasons for one person to be more optimistic than another) are controlled for.

Read: Optimism and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study

There are various ways to increase optimism, and practising gratitude is one of them—but that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning realism, either:

How To Practise (Non-Toxic) Positivity

There are other ways too, though, and Dr. Epel discusses some with her friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, here:

TED ideas | Could your thoughts make you age faster? And can we reverse that? | Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn & Dr. Elissa Epel

Want to learn more from Dr. Epel?

We reviewed one of her books, The Telomere Effect, previously. It’s about what we can do to lengthen our telomeres (a key factor in health aging; effectively, being biologically younger). You also might enjoy her newer book, The Stress Prescription, as well as her blog.

Enjoy!

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🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• What are the pharmacological properties of black goji berries?

• Prostate cancer can be made less deadly by modifying key risks, new study finds

• Texas medical schools increasingly use unclaimed bodies for medical research and training

• Study identifies new pathway to suppressing autoimmunity without loss of general immune function

• Swap red meat for meat substitute to improve heart health and reduce waist circumference, study finds

• Stanford researchers uncover the science behind the tight skin feeling

• “I'm a microbiologist and here's what (and where) I never eat”

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Immunity – by Dr. William Paul

This book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it's not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.

We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn't), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.

Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we've also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!

If the book has a downside, it's that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It's engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.

Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!

Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.

Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!

Wishing you a healthy and happy day full of small, satisfyingly surmountable challenges,

The 10almonds Team