My second rule was "Keep positive beliefs and free yourself from stress." So, what do positive thoughts and eliminating stress have to do with staying young? Well, the answer to that makes this a very scientific blog about telomeres, DNA, and main stream medical research.  It’s pretty dry stuff, I guess, so I’ll keep this one as short as I can.

It seems that every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, ticking down to the end of cell division.  The telomere shortens each time the cell divides, and short telomeres are linked to whole list of diseases -- and aging. Cells do, however, have an enzyme, called telomerase, which keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing.  But according to UCLA scientists, the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells' ability to activate their telomerase, which helps us understand why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres and at least one part of the mind body connection.

The question is do positive thoughts affect stress enough to prevent the stress hormone cortisol from stopping our telomerase from activating to protect our telomeres?   It seems that the answer is yes.  A seven year study on the level of positive thinking in relationship to the level of frailty in older adults was recently conducted through the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.  The final report concluded that people who scored high on positive affect (or positive thinking) were significantly less likely to become frail.  Researchers speculated that positive thinking may directly affect health via chemical and neural responses that help maintain an overall health balance and that positive thinking can have a beneficial effect on people’s health by increasing a person’s intellectual, physical, psychological and social resources.

Some Institute of HeartMath researchers conducted tests to determine if human emotion actually physically alters human DNA at a cellular level. Those researchers concluded that emotion causes the DNA molecule to either “wind” or “unwind.” This altering either does aging type damage to the body or healing of the body: “Oh, he was so young to have a heart attack!”  “Isn’t she looking younger and healthier these days?” The change can be negative or positive to the body, depending on the thought that creates the emotion combined with the power of the emotion.

Many studies have shown the effects of stress on people’s health. Being stressed or extremely negative can bring on high blood pressure, ulcers, and many other problems that can lead to life threatening conditions. One of the primary ways to handle or eliminate stress is positive thinking. How do we think positive when stressful situations come along? Here’s an example: I get laid-off and immediately start thinking about all the negative things that could happen as a result, so I start feeling high levels of stress. STOP. I immediately change those thoughts to how to solve immediate problems and search for a job where I’ll be much happier with my work and maybe make more money and feeling of stress decrease. I envision a positive outcome.  Usually, I have to do that STOP step over and over.

Other than the medically proven physical benefits of positive thinking and stress elimination, here’s a final thought.  Positive thinking keeps us on focus to do the other things needed for staying young, such as eating right, drinking plenty of water each day, moving our bodies, getting enough sleep, etc. I know without those positive thoughts, I start to wobble on my commitment to healthy living. So, we all have a choice: think about the negative or think about the positive. If we just give positive thinking a try, we may find that it really does help us stay healthier and younger in physical age even as our chronological age keeps getting higher.

Thanks for all the comments on Staying Young: Part I, and even though few commented on the brain, I received some questions in my email on keeping the brain healthy! When I think of aging, I mostly think that I would like to be able to be old and still remember where I live and what my children’s names are, because if I can’t do that, would it really matter that I didn’t have wrinkles? If keeping your brain sharp and active is important to you, as it is to me, here’s some information that may give you, as it did me, a little motivation. 

Even in old age, the brain can grow new neurons. If we put severe mental decline caused by disease aside, most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. Research also shows that the brain grows stronger and sharper as long as you continue to use it. For example, avid reading into your golden years (whoever thought up that term?) continues to increase the rate of speed that you read and the amount of information that you are able to comprehend and retain. All of our abilities get better with time if we continue to use them, including problem solving skills.

If we continue to challenge and engage our brains with activities such as continued learning,  activities that require us to think on our feet and assess information quickly and accurately, and continue to stretch our brain muscles, our brains will definitely reward us with increasing good memory and cognitive skills. According to Ronald Kotulak, author of Inside the Brain: Revolutionary Discoveries of How the Mind Works, “The brain is like a block of marble, and we have to use outside experiences to shape it into a working organ. Experience sculpts neural networks for language, vision, thinking and other capacities.” Simple things, like more formal education, can contribute to intellectual stimulation of the brain and may even strengthen the brain cell networks to help in preventing mental function damage.  So, the message is take care of your brain so it can take care of you.

So, now you may be wondering how I’m doing with brain exercises, and how they may be helping in my quest for youth. The brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, 900 billion glial cells, 100 trillion branches and 1,000 trillion receptors and reacts to stimuli in a series of electrical bursts, spanning a complex map of connections. However, if you have a severe concussion you lose a lot of those neurons and that complex map of connections.  That’s what happened to me, but the right nutrition and mental exercises brought most of that back and learning new material is moving faster than ever.  So, I’d have to say it’s working!

Many sites with free mental exercises, usually in the form of games, can be found, just google something like “Brain Games.” Not just any game, such as crossword puzzles, will do. Joe Hardy, PhD, a cognition neuroscientist who develops brain plasticity training programs, says, “The key thing in terms of exercise for the brain: You need to do new things, thus forming new paths.”  Hardy has been developing brain games for the San Francisco-based company Posit Science. The games — the Brain Fitness Program and Insight — have been tested in several randomized clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. The results indicate that the brain age clock can roll back 10 years.

So let’s keep exercising our brains until we’ve rolled back the clock 10 years or more.