HOW TO SLOW AGEING

4-page pullout based on a Nobel Prize-winning discovery

STReSS, we’re told, is toxic. We’re warned it damages our health, thwarts our happiness and ages us before our time. We should, say some lifestyle gurus, do our best to avoid any kind of stress at all.

The truth? Some stress can actually be good for your health, making you more youthful, not less.

It may seem utterly contrary to the prevailing wisdom, but there is science behind this. We are a nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a health psychologist who have devoted decades of our professional lives to understanding how you can slow down ageing.

After years of research, we’ve pinpointed how you can glow with health and youth when your contemporaries are succumbing to wrinkles, exhaustion and illness. even better, it’s never too late to start.

How has this been discovered? By examining the end of your chromosomes — the string-like structures where your dnA lives.

Chromosomes can be found in every single cell in your body — from the surface of your skin to the core of your liver.

At the end of each dnA string are littleknown things called telomeres. Think of them as the plastic bits at the end of your shoelaces. The longer your telomeres, the more they protect your dnA from ‘fraying’ and succumbing to disease.

And the longer your telomeres, the more youthful you will be.

After years of research, we’ve isolated the precise causes of shortened telomeres. The culprits include everything from too many sugary drinks to suffering from chronic depression.

We’ve found your telomeres are a unique guide to your insides and what is ageing you.

But even if your telomeres are short, you can help them stabilise or maybe even grow — no matter how old you are.

Just follow the simple suggestions in our series about slowing life’s clock, which concludes tomorrow in the Mail. We’ve put together solid, scientifically supported tips — from what to eat to how to sleep — that should slow cell ageing.

Today, we’re going to focus on stress and its impact on your telomeres — as well as giving you a truly revitalising stress-busting exercise plan. (Happily, because we’ve discovered that too much exercise can be bad for your telomeres, it’s not too demanding.)

Stress can be a vital weapon in the fight against ageing. If it’s allowed to run rampant through our lives, it can damage telomeres and accelerate ageing.

But with a little help, you can turn stress into an invigorating emotion, rather than one that grinds you down.

How? Well, we’ve discovered it’s not necessarily just the amount of stress you’re exposed to that’s bad for you — it’s how you respond. So it’s not work pressure that might cause health problems or stressful family arguments.

Rather it’s your state of mind when in stressful situations that is damaging: allowing yourself to feel under siege or endlessly ruminating on your problems.

So, how do you know if you have an unhealthy response to stress? And how can you manage stress so it makes you more youthful?

First, we’re going to ask you to take our quiz on the next page, which will help you understand how you react to stress.

Then we’ll guide you through some simple lifestyle changes to make sure stress doesn’t wear you down. From relaxing meditations to stress-busting exercises and simple, but rejuvenating, yoga routines, it’s your one-stop shop.

MAKE STRESS YOUR FRIEND

To undeRSTAnd how to do this, first we have to explain how stress can also damage your health and shorten your telomeres — if you let it.

When we embarked on this research, we chose to study one of the most stressed groups of all: mothers who take care of chronically-ill children.

Such caring brings extreme stress. Carers get worn out because their job is constant. even at night, when we need to biologically ‘check out’ and refresh body and mind, carers are on call. They may be repeatedly woken by a child in need.

They often feel unappreciated and isolated. The ideal guinea pigs, then, to see how serious stress affects your telomeres.

our findings were nothing short of fascinating. For they revealed that you can think yourself old. First, let’s deal with the negative side of stress. We found that years of caring had a profound effect on these mums’ health, grinding down their telomeres.

The longer a mother had been looking after her sick child, the shorter her telomeres.

And this was true for all mothers we tested, including a control group of mums who had healthy children at home.

Why? When you feel continually stressed, your body is on high alert. You produce more of the stress hormones cortisol and

adrenaline. Your heart beats faster and your blood pressure increases. it’s harder to breathe, harder to stay in control, harder to believe the world is a safe place.

And when you suffer from chronic stress, these responses are on a low, but constant alert, keeping you in a state of physiological vigilance.

Such chronic stress also suppresses parts of the immune system, leaving us more vulnerable to infection and making wounds heal more slowly.

indeed, the cells in our immune system that actively fight infection and illness — known as the CD8 T-cells — are especially vulnerable to stress.

All in all, these responses to stress accelerate the biological ageing process.

ever wondered why stressed-out people look haggard and get sick? Now you know: heavy cares are wearing down their telomeres.

No doubt by now you’re wondering how on earth we can claim that some stress can be good for you if it can erode your telomeres, thus speeding up how quickly you’re ageing.

Well, these weren’t our only findings. We also discovered that being under chronic stress does not inevitably lead to telomere damage and a speedier old age.

Some of the carers we studied managed to weather enormous burdens without suffering damage to their telomeres. And they had just as many demanding duties as the other mums we examined.

These mums are proof you can become stress-resistant. incredible as it sounds, you can learn to use stress as a positive force in your life — and even as a shield that can help protect you from ageing.

Your telomeres are listening to your thoughts. master your thoughts and you can slow down the ageing clock. There are two ways in which you can respond to a stressful event: you can see it as a challenge or a threat.

We found those mums of sick and disabled children who had surprisingly long telomeres, despite the strain they were under, faced stress with a ‘bring it on!’ mentality.

And they were healthier for it. They managed to convert a challenging experience into a robust, beneficial kind of stress, similar to the kind you have when you exercise. There are other positives to the ‘bring it on’ style of thinking. Those who rise to a stressful challenge often have a more youthful brain and a reduced risk of developing dementia.

Athletes who have this sort of mentality win more often.

What a contrast to those who felt threatened by stress. Not only do they freeze and flounder at the moment of challenge, but they suffer from anticipatory worry: they imagine bad outcomes to events that haven’t even happened yet.

Astonishingly, we found this habit also damages our telomeres. it’s not just experiencing a stressful event that can hasten ageing, but also feeling threatened by an event that has yet to occur.

if you get a high score for questions one and two of our quiz below, you are likely to feel threatened by stress. But don’t feel bad. We’re all wired differently. And there’s hope for you to change.

We certainly don’t mean to trivialise or underestimate any stress you’re experiencing.

But while you can’t always control difficult events in your life, you can still slow ageing and protect your telomeres by changing the way you respond to them.

Women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men