Growing Young

by Marta Zaraska

  If you are a parent, and you’d like to set your kids on a centenarian path of not being Mr. or Ms. Grumpy, there are things you can do to help them. For one, don’t do what made some parents in Hayward, California, and Darien, Connecticut, end up in the headlines. Elementary schools in Hayward and Darien reported trouble with overzealous moms and dads who swarm school cafeterias at lunchtime to help their offspring deal with the many challenges surrounding the ingestion of soups and burgers—and we are talking kids even as old as ten. The parents bring extra snacks. They solve social troubles. They spoon-feed. These are the masters of helicopter parenting.

  Some emerging research is beginning to indicate that helicopter parenting may lead to neuroticism once the kids become young adults. On the other hand, simply being a warm and loving parent without the hovering seems to translate into having children who grow up to be more conscientious and emotionally stable—set on the path to becoming centenarians.

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  If you were truly happy with your life you would probably want that life to last as long as possible—and in a lucky biological twist, that’s precisely the way nature has arranged it. Those full of joy and those who have found meaning in their existence are the very same people who are the most likely to escape the Grim Reaper. On the flip side, in excess, worrying, rumination, or negative emotions kill us slowly yet steadily.

  From the perspective of longevity, personality traits are not created equal—some are simply more conducive to reaching the centenarian years. Extraversion is like that. Conscientiousness is like that. Emotional stability is like that. You could dismiss these effects by saying that a large part of them comes from the way personality influences pro-health behaviours like smoking, diet, and exercise. And it’s true—it does.

  Yet we shouldn’t dismiss personality-changing interventions if we are looking for healthier, longer lives. You could, of course, just focus on each health behaviour individually. Try to eat more whole grains. Try to take more steps each day. Try to cut down on sugar, alcohol, and junk food. But targeting your personality traits is a bit like getting the master key—a key that can be used to regulate all health behaviours in one go. If you become more conscientious, getting diet and exercise right will be less of an uphill battle. Tone down neuroticism, and you will be less likely to calm your nerves with tobacco. Increase your extraversion, and health-boosting social relationships will come more easily to you. And on top of all that, the biological mechanisms that link personality with health may slow down your aging even further.

  However, there is a caveat to consider: although personality and emotions do affect average lifespans, we shouldn’t blame each and every illness on personality defects. If Mr. A has a heart condition, it doesn’t mean he is a miserable neurotic with no purpose in life. There are many reasons for why we get sick, starting with genes and followed by the environment in which we live, and although working on certain personality traits can help boost our immune systems or stave off cognitive decline, it won’t make us disease-proof. Nothing can. What personality changes can do for you is simply lower your risks of dying prematurely and suffering ill health.

  If you were to pick just one personality trait to work on in order to increase your chances of becoming a centenarian, go for conscientiousness. Fake it until you make it—set yourself small challenges of conscientious things to try and do. Keep your office desk neat. Organize your sock drawer. Set out your clothes the night before.

  The next on the list would be tackling neuroticism: worrying less and sharing your problems with others. Therapy is the best way to go if you really want to change. Mindfulness and meditation are also good for neurotic people and their telomeres (more on that in the next chapter). The plus here is that this particular personality trait is quite malleable and the easiest to change.

  Last but not least, if you care about your health and longevity don’t simply go on chasing hedonistic pleasures. Don’t fixate on getting more and more money. Instead, try to find a deeper purpose, a “why” that could help you bear almost any “how.” Difficult? If you sit in a quiet spot in a yoga position, breathing mindfully, you may find all these challenges a bit less overwhelming. After all, even rats get more laid-back when they practise yogic breathing.

  A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY

  If you are neurotic and not very conscientious, try working on these personality traits—it can be done and your health will profit. You can see changes even after a few weeks of simple exercises. Avoid excessive worry and rumination, and if you find yourself being often angry and cynical, talk to a therapist. Although optimism and joy prolong life, don’t chase happiness as an ultimate goal. Instead, try to find purpose. Your life will not only be more meaningful for that, but may last longer, too.

  10

  HOW MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS BOOST HEALTH

  Slow Breathing, Yoga Rats, and Horror-Stricken Leukocytes

  MAHARISHI MAHESH YOGI, a Hindu monk, looked like an encyclopedia illustration for an entry titled “meditation guru.” He had Jesus-like hair, a long, greying beard, and flowing white robes. It’s possible, though, that we might imagine meditation gurus in a certain way precisely because that’s how Maharishi Mahesh Yogi looked: after all, it was his lecture at the Hilton Hotel in London on August 24, 1967, that gave a great push to the popularity of transcendental meditation in the West. That day, in the front row of an auditorium full of people, sat three special guests: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison (Ringo stayed home with his newborn son).

  The Beatles were transfixed by Maharishi’s words and decided to pick up meditation right there and then. Six months later, the Fab Four followed Maharishi to his ashram in India to take a deep plunge into transcendental meditation. “The meditation buzz is incredible,” Harrison claimed in one interview. “I get higher than I ever did with drugs.” In John Lennon’s words, meanwhile, “Buddha was groovy.”

  Although today, few people would call meditation “groovy,” mind-body practices certainly haven’t lost their popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact. Modern-day celebrities from Katy Perry and Ellen DeGeneres to Hugh Jackman and Oprah Winfrey preach the wonders of mindfulness, while airports all over the planet open dedicated “yoga rooms” for tired travellers. Almost one in five Americans report that they have used at least one mind-body therapy in the past year, and 1.5 million Canadians practise yoga. In England, meanwhile, several hundred schools have recently introduced a new subject to the curriculum: mindfulness.

  The benefits of mind-body practices are supposed to be many, from the “classics” such as better sleep and dampening of stress to more unconventional ones like cellulite reduction and increased hair growth. And although to my knowledge no research exists on how meditation could remedy cellulite or make anyone’s locks more swishy, a substantial collection of studies does support the notion that mind-body therapies may improve some aspects of health and may even prolong lives. Yes, the studies are still new, and not all findings are conclusive, but some trends are already emerging.

  There are many different research-tested mind-body practices, from yoga and meditation to the lesser-known qigong. Among various meditation styles, scientists tend to distinguish three main types: focused attention, open monitoring, and kindness-oriented. Focused attention is the mantra-chanting kind of practice: you stay still and fixate your mind on something, say a word or a candle. If your mind wanders, you bring it back to the point of focus. In open monitoring, on the other hand, you just observe the present moment with everything it brings—your thoughts (need to do laundry), your bodily sensations (that itch in the left toe), accepting everything as it happens.

  The last type of meditation, kindness-based, centres on others to develop compassion. It may involve, for instance, directing positive thoughts toward your mail carrier or check-out clerk, or even someone you don’t like very much. Within these broad categories lie myriad diff
erent meditation styles, from the trendy mindfulness meditation to om meditation, Zen, vipassana, and so on. Some internet sources also suggest dishwashing meditation, labyrinth meditation, and crystal meditation (involving holding various crystals in your hands), but science remains poignantly silent on these ones.

  No matter the style, research suggests that mainstream meditation practices make the body’s stress axes, the sympathomedullary axis and the HPA, less active—with all its downstream physiological consequences, including those directly implicated in aging.

  The fact that the Beatles’ yogi, Maharishi, lived to be ninety-one may have had something to do with his ashram-based lifestyle. It appears that even a short stay at a meditation retreat may affect your DNA in a pro-longevity way. In one 2018 experiment, just one month spent at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, was enough to stretch out the participants’ telomeres by about 104 base pairs, which could be roughly compared to four years of life. Admittedly, the program was intense. Participants were required to engage in various meditation practices for about ten hours per day—all in total silence.

  Although it still remains to be seen whether the results of such telomere-extending retreats persist long-term, other studies point in a similar direction. Expert Zen meditators who have practised daily for over ten years have far longer telomeres than do people of the same age who have never meditated. Mind-body therapies may also slow down the ticking of your epigenetic clock: DNA from the blood cells of long-term meditators show changes suggesting that the more you practise, the more slowly you age. And even though staying at hippie California retreats may not necessarily rebalance your chakras, it may change your FOXO genes—the same type of genes that are behind the immortality of hydras.

  Chanting “om” and practising mindfulness may not only hold back aging, it may also rewire the brain. If you put someone who meditates a lot into a neuroimaging machine, you may see quite pronounced changes in six to eight different brain regions; these could happen through formation of new synapses between neurons in some of the regions and loss of neurons in others. A mere few weeks of mindfulness meditation can decrease grey matter density in the amygdala, for instance, which could make an expert meditator less easily frightened (by a lion surprising them on a savanna, say, or their boss demanding, “I want to see you in my office, now!”).

  Another brain region commonly affected by meditation is the insula—the reward-related brain area that makes us enjoy helping others. And then there is the hippocampus, which has nothing to do with camps for hippo-lovers and everything to do with emotions and memory. Atrophy of this horseshoe-shaped area (hence the “hippo,” which comes from Greek hippos, meaning “horse”) has also been linked with Alzheimer’s disease. A typical meditation expert, meanwhile, will have a particularly large hippocampus compared to an average Joe, suggesting possible protection against dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Such an increased volume of the hippocampus resulting from meditation has been explained by hikes in the levels of a protein called BDNF—brain-derived neurotrophic factor—which helps the development and survival of nerve cells in the brain.

  Spikes in BDNF are one of the reasons why physical exercise is good for your brain. On the other hand, stress makes the levels of blood BDNF wane. That’s bad news. A person whose body runs low on BDNF is at a higher risk for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and even suicide. Post-mortem tests on the brains of suicide victims reveal that they tend to have decreased levels of this protein. Suicide apart, BDNF seems to predict mortality all on its own, at least in women. Eighty-five-year-old Danes who have the lowest levels of BDNF in their blood plasma have over twice the risk of death as do women with the highest levels. Now, if you want to raise your blood levels of BDNF, go for a downward-facing dog pose and start meditating. Volunteers participating in a three-month yoga and meditation retreat saw their plasma levels of BDNF triple, while a shorter twelve-week intervention caused a two-fold increase in BDNF.

  Another thing you may find changed in the blood of people who meditate are their leukocytes—the white blood cells involved in the functioning of the immune system. To see if I could nudge my own leukocytes with a bit of mindfulness, I visited the London offices of a biotech company called Oxford MediStress, a spinoff of the University of Oxford.

  The interior of the building I entered, just off Tottenham Court Road, looked somewhere in between sleek and start-up-y. David Sarphie, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Oxford and who co-founded Oxford MediStress, led me into a white corporate kitchen, where he had already prepared the tools he would use to evaluate the responsiveness of my immune system. As we settled around a long, glossy table, he explained to me the workings of the measure they’d developed, called leukocyte coping capacity (LCC). When you get stressed, Sarphie told me, your leukocytes start producing reactive oxygen species, the very same molecules that are implicated in cellular damage and aging. To evaluate their levels, you take a drop of blood and mix it with a chemical called phorbol myristate acetate. “It kind of pokes the white blood cells and says, ‘respond, respond,’ ” Sarphie explained. This way you can see the levels of reactive oxygen species your leukocytes are spewing out. The more reactive oxygen species, the lower your LCC score will be (which is generally bad).

  This reactivity of leukocytes had already been used in several studies to measure stress in creatures as diverse as wild badgers and young humans. When a group of students watched the 1974 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, their leukocytes fired out tons of reactive oxygen species, and their LCC scores plummeted, suggesting that their immune systems got temporarily messed up by the stress. So if you ever find yourself affected by a bacterial infection, don’t indulge in a horror-movie marathon at that very moment—instead of helping you feel better, it could make your immune system less efficient.

  As we chatted about sore throats and chainsaw murderers, Sarphie started preparing a test kit for the day’s experiment. It would involve just one subject: me. First was the unpleasant part. With a tool that resembles an icing syringe, Sarphie poked the tip of my index finger to get a few drops of my blood. Then he plopped the sample into an “incubator,” which to me looked like an old-school answering machine. And then, we waited. After ten minutes, Sarphie showed me my initial results, which, I have to admit, I found slightly disappointing. My LCC scores were okay, but not as high as I’d imagined (I had secretly hoped that my leukocytes were these black-belt infection-fighting masters—they were not).

  The second part of our little “experiment” involved me sitting in the lotus position for about half an hour and practising mindfulness meditation. That part was fun. I found a secluded terrace overlooking the back gardens of London, positioned myself in a sunny spot far from prying eyes, and off I went. I moved my attention inward. I observed my body, my mind. I noticed my breath flowing in and out, in and out. And then I started thinking about the flea collars I should buy for my dogs. Argh. I moved my attention back to my breath. In, out, in, out. I started thinking about rearranging shelves in my daughter’s bedroom. I inhaled and brought my attention once again back to the present moment. The flea collars popped up. Inhale, exhale. And so it continued.

  After my mindfulness session, I went back to see Sarphie. He tortured my index finger some more and placed the new blood sample in the incubator. Ten minutes later we had the results, and my LCC scores had gone up! Okay, maybe they didn’t exactly skyrocket, more like inched up, but we could definitely see some improvement. A single session of mindfulness shifted my leukocytes toward a more healthy behaviour of firing out less reactive oxygen species.

  Although I didn’t manage to get a large response from my own immune system, it’s hardly surprising—I’m a Sunday meditator at best (hence the thoughts of flea collars and shelves). Studies done on people who have far more experience in meditation and practise more regularly show better results.
Take the one done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that involved sixty-eight volunteers. About half of them were meditation pros, each with an average of nine thousand lifetime hours of chanting and attention-focusing under the belt. The other half of the group was made up of people of similar age who were not into mind-body practices. After some initial medical tests and psychological evaluations, the researchers applied a rather nasty concoction to the volunteers’ forearms—a cream containing capsaicin, the same compound that makes chili peppers burn your mouth. Right afterward, it was stress time. The volunteers had to do a five-minute impromptu speech and some mental arithmetic in front of two stern-looking judges and a video camera—something that most people find quite anxiety-inducing. Then it was back to prodding and poking, as well as measuring the extent of the inflammatory reaction to the capsaicin on their forearms.

  Later on, when the researchers analyzed the results, they discovered that the experienced meditators had less cortisol in their saliva after the upsetting speech experience, and that the red, inflamed areas on their arms was on average much smaller, too, suggesting that their immune systems were less “jumpy.” Which makes me wonder: if a mindfulness expert fell into a patch of poison ivy, would they break out in a less severe rash than I would in such a scenario? And no, I’m not willing to check.

  Poison ivy and various unpleasant creatures were certainly a risk to those of our ancestors who were ostracized from their tribes and left to wander in nature all alone. Remember how they developed increased inflammation (to protect them from bacteria in wounds) and lowered antiviral protection (not much needed since they were away from their snotty peers)? This so-called conserved transcriptional response to adversity is no longer beneficial to us in the modern world, yet it is quite widespread due to chronic stress. It also tends to lead to diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and strokes.