The New Science of Stress and Stress Resilience

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only good evening everyone welcome back my name is Margaret Chesney and I'm the director of the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine anyway we're here we are to talk about life in balance and we're moving now to talking more about some of the challenges to a life imbalance this is one of the the greatest challenges I think to trying to keep your life in balances not only the things we've talked about about diet and Ellen Hughes's wonderful array of things that we can do to make a difference and I hope some of you did something last week I mean if you did something some flossing small plates we thought a finger went through how many of you since you've been in class thought about doing something that's called intention we like that that's good then after you intend like you walked by the running shoe store and you just look at the shoes that's step number one then you worked for it a little closer like saving up some money so you can get some shoes to do walking so that's intention but all of that is to help you learn what you can do and here's one of the reasons why and that is that we have a great deal of stress in our lives and a lot of this stress comes from competing demands how many of you know about the Sandwich Generation and they're finding yourself in it I see some hands that's an example of competing demands people in their 50 early 60s sometimes late 40s are stuck in what's called the Sandwich Generation it means these are people who are caring for children who maybe finishing high school looking at colleges in college you know you're still really thinking about those little people in your lives that have become a little bit bigger and their problems can be bigger like car crashes things like that and on the same time you'll get a phone call and you don't know is it going to be something about your youngster or is it going to be something about a parent and that's a competing demand and both of those demands are actually competing within the family two demands coming from within your own family you can have competing demands with you within yourself like you had this class tonight and some of you decided you know gee we've got this other thing we really have to do so I think we'll miss that one and maybe we can watch it on the web or something or you thought I've got that class but I've got this I've got that near all good things so stress can come from having two good things you have to choose between those are competing demands within yourself competing demands can also be between what we might call life your family yourself your friends and work and this is a major source of stress for many of us it's called actually even given a name and their offices now of the office of work-life balance because it's how do you balance this and what's amazing even if you become a retired person quote unquote retired many people get involved in volunteer work and other activities and before they know it they're busier than they were when they were quote working so this is a major source of stress and we will be talking tonight and have a wonderful speaker who's going to be focusing on the impact of stress on our bodies on our resilience that's tonight I'll introduce our speaker in just a minute our next talk will be on bringing wisdom and science to our diet so we'll return back to diet because what we will hear is that stress can impact some things like how we behave some of the ways we cope with stress are not always so good last week and must admit I didn't get any dinner I ran to that food place and they were long accepted everything except the French place or the because it's Italian I bought a piece of pound cake and I hid it here and in the second row amid nibbles on it a little bit that is what some of us do when we're running and under stress we just grab a Snickers and we say well it's got peanuts in it so it's good for us not so much anyway so what we need to do is think about you know what we do when we respond to stress and you'll also be hearing tonight about what happens to our bodies under stress so I want to introduce our next speaker in the series dr. Elissa EPEL let me tell you a little bit about Elissa she's in health psychology and she's also a behavioral medicine researcher she focuses on the pathways by which those competing demands can get somehow into our bodies and what it does she studied psychology and psycho biology at Stanford University where she got her bachelor's degree and then she went all the way across the country to Yale where she got a PhD and one of the best universities to learn about health psychology she then completed an n IMH postdoctoral fellowship here at UCSF and then she was so fabulous we kept her on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry I remember seeing her application for postdoc and we had these stacks and stacks there were five of us in the room and we all sort of said we looked and said well who's on your shortlist and everyone just said well Alice Apple so and she has just been spectacular over the past 15 years she's focused on stunning stress in the lab and there she uses what they're called standardized stressors and she'll tell you about those she's also gone into the field and studied more naturalistic stressors or people who say I'm really feeling stressed she's focused on understanding how stress can affect eating and then we'll talk about eating next week our behaviors it can affect where we put fat on in our bodies and most important it can affect immune cell aging she has shown that people's propensity to be a stress reactor psychologically or in terms of some physical sign is a predictor of overeating and also most currently in her work accelerated cell aging with her colleagues Elizabeth Blackburn and Anjou then I think I've saying that right and you might remember Elizabeth Blackburn just won the Nobel Prize for medicine last year well she Alyssa works very closely with Elizabeth and they were the first to show and actually this was Alyssa's work they were the first to show that stress perceptions as well as stress arousal are related to telomere shortness and dampens our telomerase activity she will tell us how important that is there UCSF group has now collaborated with many many research teams because everyone now wants to measure telomeres in their studies and when you've finished hearing this lecture tonight you're gonna be wanting to protect those telomeres yourself she is with the Osher Center integrative medicine helping us study stress reduction interventions and how those might enhance the functioning of our telomere telomerase maintenance system and protect or even maybe lengthen our telomeres which is a good thing so today she's going to be talking about the new science of stress and stress resilience please join me in welcoming Elissa EPEL thank you for coming out tonight to hear about the new science of stress and stress resilience and I guess another title of way to thing about this talk is can stress really make us depressed and and gray-haired and what can we do about it so there's definitely a little positive some strategies at the end so are we really going to sit here and talk about stress for an hour why and why should we as stress really that important in health and it you know how isn't it all about our genes and our DNA those are so so important so I'm just gonna tell you really briefly about two recent findings in the literature that look at perceived stress this is the easiest measure in the world to get it's questions like how stressed are you on this you know one through four scale and so people who perceive themselves with higher stress in this large study of over 12,000 adults actually died earlier this was a study where they they looked at a large sample across an age range the the people at most risk of stress predicting earlier mortality were actually young men in the study they had a 2.6 times greater risk of earlier mortality if they simply reported greater stress in their life and then there's some classic studies with caregivers spouses people caring for spouse with dementia or chronic condition this is a really difficult life stressor that goes on and on for years and so we research or study caregivers a lot because they help us understand how people cope with stress and as well as how stress makes people vulnerable to disease so in these studies they measured perceived stress what they call emotional strain and some caregivers don't feel stress at all some caregivers report a lot of burden and high stress and so it's really amazing given the same situation people have such different perceptions so stress is really partly the study of individual differences and how some people see the same situation and live in it in such a different way where their brain responds to it differently they feel really high highly tax so in caregiver studies caregivers who feel more stress have a 23% greater risk of stroke that finding just came out and a dramatic study showing that among elderly caregivers those feeling strained had a 63% greater risk of early mortality in just a four year span so you probably feel that stress affects you and I'm not going to spend the hour proving the point that stress matters so the old question was really does stress matter and trying to you know scientists trying to convince the field that stress is real and it's just not just in the head there are journals and journals in our field filled with documenting ways that stress affects different disease's progression onset treatment so we're not really going to talk about can stress does but really how so we're going to delve deep into the mechanism and look at how stress gets under the skin to affect our cells and even our DNA so even the zebra knows that stress can affect his stripes actually this is like DNA unraveling I'm going to talk about DNA unraveling you know in in a bit so the new question that we're gonna focus on is how does stress affect our health what are the pathways what are the mechanisms I'm gonna focus on three examples that use DNA how stress either interacts with DNA to predict depression or how stress is actually causing a certain pattern of gene expression and lastly how stress is shortening our telomeres the tips of our that the DNA that protects our chromosomes cellular aging and then at the end we'll talk about what is stress resilience and how can we promote it and after hearing about all of these ways that stress can damage our health and affect us believe me you are going to want to be Stressless you you may want to push away feelings of stress get rid of stressful situations and that's natural brains are just hardwired to avoid pain and suffering but actually stress happens and is embedded and inherent in life and so really the task is rather than becoming stress less which is impossible is really how can we live well with stress so I like the title of the series life and balance and one of the ways I'm just going to summarize by calling these ways of livings being stress resilient so how do we measure stress as scientists we we break it into three parts and stress is really this multi-dimensional construct so there are things that happen situations that are outside of herself like having too much work and too much responsibility so these are situations and then whether they're stressful or not depends on our mental filter how we're seeing the situation so we call that appraisal cognitive appraisal and this is this measure of perceived stress and then how to stress get under the skin the physiological stress response responds to these perceptions of stress and this triggers changes hundreds of changes in the body but the primary stress response systems just to simplify things cortisol insulin and inflammation so cortisol is a primary stress hormone it goes up acutely when we're acutely stress and then it goes down but it can become just regulated it can be stuck and elevated in states of chronic stress or it can actually be too low and not be doing its job there and then inflammation rushes in and stays elevated so there's a real complex signature to the stress response and we all have different ways of responding to stress just to give you an example of some of the situations that are we know that are really affecting health these chronic stressors low social economic status it's one of the most robust and consistent predictors of earlier onset of disease and early mortality job strain and overload interpersonal stress relationships train especially divorce and social isolation having a chronic illness is a chronic stressor or taking care of a loved one with a chronic illness caregiving bereavement and of course natural disasters and traumatic events and then there's daily stressors that we all deal with I think one of the most common stressors that you probably all face every day is time stress just not having enough time to get everything done that you'd like to do and rushing around and being late and that's just to become part of our daily stress that we tend to accept if we're one of those late people so stress is really embedded and it's part of our life and I'm gonna ask you to just take a minute and reflect on your own perceived stress so if you don't have a pencil maybe you can ask a neighbor to borrow one and what I'd like you to do is just to read yourself these three questions in the past month how often have you felt you were unable to control important things in your life and give yourself a rating from zero to four never almost never sometimes fairly often or very often so when you've answered these how often you feel stressed intense how often you felt like difficulties are just piling up too high then I'd like you to just do a little bit of arithmetic so add those three numbers and divide by three so you're gonna get an average item score of what number you tend to rest at the reason I'm asking this is you'll see later you're going to see some data using these numbers and then you can actually apply it to yourself so let me just first talk about depression now why should choose depression depression is extremely common it's the second most common disorder it's characterized by either sad mood or just feeling a loss of interest and things you're usually interested in and then a bunch of other symptoms fit like physical symptoms loss of appetite disrupted sleep it really affects people's life and and their you know their life trajectory and what they want to do in life dramatically so it's a leading cause of disability and it has a tremendous societal burden 20% cost for all mental disease so what do we know about what causes depression there's been a long history of stress research showing that experiencing stressful life events sometimes triggers a major an episode of major depression and so for example you can see in one one of these classic studies that if you add up the number of stressful life events people with three or four events have a dramatically increased likelihood of having a depressive episode so stress is affecting depression but not for everyone there's still a lot of individual variability a lot of variants and whether you personally are going to become depressed or not so I'm going to talk about three factors that that help us understand when and where stress can cause depression so one is the type of events turns out the interpersonal loss and rejection events are very potent very linked to depression the timing events early events even in utero but mainly early childhood events we now know have a very big effect on later adult health including mental health and genes so in this study researchers examined what are the kinds of events that preceded episodes of depression and so you can see that a minor loss predicted a a almost four-fold increase for risk of onset of depression other losses as well death predicted a tenfold increase in risk for major depression and then you can look at breakups or divorces and something very interesting pops out so here you see that if you initiate a breakup or a divorce there is a tenfold increase in risk of depression but if someone breaks up with you it jumps to over 20 fold so there's something extremely powerful about rejection stress and there's a literature by George slavich and colleagues that really examined the type of events and rejection events being targeted at work or in interpersonal relationships being broken up with something that hurts your ego and is very personal these are the types of events that bring on depression much sooner than other events so targeted rejection brought on depression within one month compared to other types of stress what about the timing of events so the child brain is extremely sensitive it's being hardwired to to be resilient to stressors and if stress happens very early on it actually affects the brain for the long run so these are the types of events that we measure and we no matter during childhood they are common they're about parental separation parental substance use disorder fighting as well as the child being abused or neglected so we add these up and we we see how this predicts adult health and indeed having more of these events predicts earlier onset of disease in large studies as well as some of the mechanisms for disease increased reactivity cortisol reactive stress smaller hippocampus important part of our brain that controls the stress response greater vulnerability to depression and this is a study looking at women with an app without depression and with and without early life trauma and what's so interesting about this data is that whether they're depressed or not you can see that these women have exaggerated stress responses there are stress hormones ACTH and cords are jumping much higher in adult life even this group is non depressed but experienced some early events so we know there's it affects the wiring of the stress response system so in rats studies they found the same thing they can actually look at the early nurturance of rats they they measure licking and grooming of the mom to the baby pup and the rats who don't get licking and grooming actually look like these these adults who had early trauma they have this exaggerated stress response and we now know that that there's a very specific mechanism for that that the actual the brain develops so that certain genes are turned on or off so that the stress response system is is particularly on when there's no licking and grooming or nurturing early on that you could think of it as like the organisms really prepared to be in a stressful environment so what about genes it's not often that you get a gene that's really predictive of a lot of bad outcomes but we do have this case in the case of depression what we call the depression gene this is the serotonin transporter allele and this is a gene that we all have either it comes in a short and a long version if you get the long version then you're getting more this transporter is bringing more serotonin into the synapse here between your neurons you're getting more serotonin dose so people either have two short alleles a short and a long or a long and along if you're lucky the minority people have these Long's and it turns out that if you have two shorts you're more vulnerable to stress induced depression so let me show you some data that looked at that this applies to both life stress as adults as well as early trauma so in this study they looked at early trauma or early maltreatment now if you if you don't have maltreatment it doesn't matter what your gene is you have the same risk for depression but you can see here the group with severe maltreatment if you have a long long you're not more likely to become depressed with maltreatment but if you have two short versions you have less serotonin that SCIM naps you are much at much greater risk for depression so we're all walking around with different vulnerabilities to depression that's genetically based biologically based it's you know it's really a very medical disorder that we need to view and treat that way I'm going to tell you about I'm some new research on gene expression because it's so fascinating and it really explains a lot of I think of human health and how the environment shapes human health so how do our genes translate into proteins and health and and build our tissues so basically just to go over a really simple model you can see that so genes trans there are transcription factors so these factors like glucocorticoid throw hormone is it can go into the cell and service two transcription factor and their signals or hormones that tell the genes whether to turn on or off so transcription factors bind to a DNA promoter region so they find the gene that has the little site or receptor for it it binds there and it turns the gene on so some genes are turned on by cortisol some genes are turned on by an inflammatory factor called NF kappa-b and there are lots of other transcription factors so our genes are controlled by some of the hormones and other transcription factors so then what happens the DNA reads off transcribed into an RNA exits the nucleus now it's in the cell and it can actually enter this little machine called a ribosome and turn into a protein that's what matters we're built of proteins so what proteins are your body making it's not just a function of your genome it's also a function of these little messengers these transcription factors and guess what our state of mind is controlling levels of these transcription factors so let me show you some very clever work by my colleagues Steve : great Miller they ask to stress create different patterns of gene expression and we know that chronic stress can up regulate inflammation and it can either up regulate cortisol or make cells glucocorticoid resistance so they cannot actually see and hear the cortisol the cortisol does not actually enter the cell the cell is resistant to cortisol probably because it got too much cortisol so it becomes resistant so the prediction was that in stress groups we're going to see lots of genes that were responsive to NF kappa-b the inflammatory factor but a really muted response from the genes that were turned on by cortisol because courted the cortisol signals not getting in in chronic stress so that was the hypothesis inflammatory signals will be over expressed and cortisol signals will be silenced so now in a classic stress study they've gathered a group of caregivers and lower stress controls and they looked at the types of genes that were turned on by glucocorticoids you can see the controls have a normal amount the caregivers have a significantly lower amount of these genes that are expressed by cortisol and then if you look at NF kappa-b the inflammatory factor you see that caregivers have a tremendous number of genes that are being turned on by inflammation so the whole pattern of proteins that are being made is being regulated by more by this inflammatory factor so this finding has been now replicated in a lot of different samples it's not just stress but other states of disadvantage so for example chronic care give besides chronic caregiving an elderly sample who is lonely I'll sample who had low social economic status low education or low income in children this this has also been shown and then we've recently looked at our dementia caregivers sample and we find the exact same pattern so states of stress create tell the DNA to create different proteins in our body so our whole biochemistry is different so this next topic is I have to admit one of my favorite this is what I study we're gonna talk about stress and cellular aging and rate of aging and before I jump into this I have a disclosure to make we have as Margaret said there's been a great demand for measurement of telomeres and interest in using it Clint now that it's been shown to matter in all of this research that tumors are related to health so my cup with my colleagues we've started a company that measures telomeres for research and eventually clinical use so what is it Jim where I'll take a step back telomeres are little non-coding packets of DNA that sit at the ends of chromosomes and they're very important because they protect the chromosomes from all sorts of problems like fusing and breaks and they're this repeat sequence of DNA that's all roundup and capped here but every time the cell divides sorry many of the cells in our body are by taut excels so they're dividing cells and these are the cells that are really important for healthy aging so for example the lining of our cardiovascular system is always turning over our immune cells our hair cells are turning over so all what many of our cells are replenishing throughout life and we need them to if they don't replenish we're going to get old age tissue so in these cells as they divide the childers tend to shorten with time and as they get too short when they get too short the cell becomes senescence so it's like a clock on the cells life now what does senescence mean the cell doesn't necessarily die but it reaches a state of old age a senescence state where it's no longer able to do its job and no longer able to divide so I study immune cells so in immune cells we they reach what we call replicative senescence they can't replicate and the bad news is the inner machinery of the cell has changed its job to create to now spew out pro-inflammatory cytokines so immune aging is now one of the dominant models of how we age and what causes disease and our internal kind of chemistry and milieu has turned more and more pro-inflammatory and part of what's happening is that the immune cells are aging and now they're creating pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as the fat I'm not going to talk about fat tonight but fat cells go through the same process of senescence and inflammation so this was an article around election soon after Obama the election and the article was on you know is he stressed out the stress out tips of its chromosomes his telomeres might be to blame it was all about his break air and people worst thing always going gray so quickly and maybe after Tuesday's election he's even more gray but anyway the question is is it really stress and there's really no proof that stress causes gray hair but there there certainly are studies that offer hints so one recent studies showed that DNA damp taking hair cells the melanocytes stem cells these are the cells that create color and replenish our hair color as the cells divide so when you expose these to radiation they get DNA damage and they become senescent and they stop producing pigment so there is you know physiological stress that definitely can damage those important stem stem cells you still don't know about gray hair and psychological stress but I won't go into it but there are a lot of hints that psychological stress causes oxidative stress free radicals so that's another pathway so what do we know about telomeres telomeres I told you they're a clock on the cells life are they o'clock on our life on the human organism so there have been now many study epidemiological studies showing that when you have short telomeres in your white blood cells you also that this is correlated with a vast array of diseases of Aging and what's interesting about this biomarker compared to others is it's so I'm specific telomeres have been related to almost you know to to I think most chronic diseases that we know of so they're related to the heart disease category diabetes vascular dementia obesity Alzheimer's osteoporosis and and that's because it's you know it's part of I think maybe you might think of it as the the flip coin of old aging tissue if you look inside you see short telomeres so it's a general aging process regardless of tissue and the white blood cells a little bit of a window into what's happening in the rest of the body we wanted to know yes question Yeah right that's a good question so I would have answered this differently last month but new studies have come out the question is is telomere length linked to type 1 diabetes that the type we find more in children or type 2 the type we get with aging and obesity and it's in many studies it's linked to type 2 diabetes in adults but they recently did a mouse I think it was a knockout where the mouse didn't have telomerase I won't be talking much about telomeres but it's a really important enzyme it's the driver of telomere length that replenishes the telomere length if you don't have enough to long race the telomere length shrinks quicker so they made these mount these poor mice have very low telomerase and their beta cells their pancreatic cells that they need to produce insulin died early and atrophied and they've got type 1 diabetes so telomerase is really important for many types of cells especially these kind of progenitor cells that we need to keep dividing so we asked whether telomere length shortening predicts mortality we already know that just children like at one point in time predicted mortality but just the rate of the shortening matter because that would offer us some hope that we might even if we're short that we might control the rate of aging and modify it and so we looked at a little snippet of a two and a half year period in people's life we had a this was an initial study with a small sample I think it was about 235 elderly men and women they were all healthy and in the women we just found that till more like predicting mortality as in other studies but in the men we found it was rate of change so let me show you what that looks like the change the those who had shortening in this short period of two and half years these men had a much lower probability of surviving by 12 years later but the men who had their telomeres were pretty well maintained during this period had much better survival so what we know now from this and other studies actually is that telomeres can be maintained when you look within a person we're not just always shortening they can State be stable for a while I can even lengthen so that's really good news so Margaret mentioned our our our study on stress and Kilmer's so our really our first question when we start studying this was what about chronic stress we looked at moms caring for children with chronic just conditions and we looked at their telomeres and we found that perceived stress mattered a lot so when you look at the women in the highest quartile of perceived stress and compared them to the low stress women they had dramatically different telomeres they were missing about or they're shorter about by about 550 base pairs which is equivalent to what you'd expect to lose given the rate of telomere loss over years in over ten years so they did have shorter telomeres and then we also looked at duration of caregiving and you can see there that the longer these women had been caring for a child with a disorder the shorter their telomeres so that's more of an objective measure so it's not just about genetics or bigger because when when your child gets a diagnosis is kind of a random event so I had mentioned that early childhood events matter there are now several studies showing that early child trauma was also linked in adults to shorter telomeres so in this study these are all healthy of healthy adults no one's depressed and you can see that the healthy adults who did have child maltreatment had significantly shorter telomeres so there's a footprint or a an imprint or a shadow of early childhood adversity on adult health please write it's a it's a good question the question is well what about culture and cross-cultural comparisons and when we think about children in the early experiences has this been looked at in for example non-western cultures we we haven't I know there there's a group at Harvard that that is looking at Romanian orphans so its culture definitely matters and culture can also serve as a buffer to chronic stressors and can make certain stressors more normative so I don't have a great answer for you except for that that's a good point and we don't know yet any other questions so how does all this happen what's in the black box between feeling stressed perceiving stress in the mind and having shorter telomeres in our white blood cells so the short answer to that is we don't know yet but we have some good clues and this is my very simple schematic of what's happening so we perceive stress and then we have we make stress soup and stress soup is you know these for biochemical stressors that we they're all really important and they also influence each other so cortisol and insulin go up this kind of source of metabolic stress that creates inflammation and oxidative stress but there's another important pathway that I don't want to leave out which is adiposity so cortisol and insulin during stress also pack in fat into the visceral or abdominal fat cells and that these cells serve as another source for cytokines and oxidative stress so these cells act almost like an endocrine gland and they can secrete factors like cortisol and inflammatory factors into our blood as well so fat cells are really important in shaping our health and what I'm going to call our biochemical stress soup whatever we are creating with our mind and we're walking around and living in so this these levels of biochemical stressors are most of these have been linked to shorter telomeres and some of these studies have kind of shown this in a mechanistic way like taking white blood cells and or other cells fibroblasts and exposing them to free radicals hydrogen peroxide and finding that it shortens the telomeres and that's also been done by done with cortisol colleague at UCLA Rita efforts have shown that applying the stress hormone cortisol to white blood cells dampens down the telomerase dramatically so we have a clue that you know this some factors in the soup bar affecting the longevity of our immune cells but there is good news so now we're going to get closer and closer to the good news so it looks like from these cross-sectional studies there are many things that we can do to protect our telomeres it's probably is very similar set of factors that that protect our heart health or cardiovascular health if this list doesn't look too different so obesity and insulin resistance are related to shorter telomeres but exercise is related to longer telomeres take having greater levels of omegas in the blood is not only related language humors this was an amazing study done by colleagues here at UCSF Mary who Lee and Roman Farzana far and they found that over five years one of the only predictors of telomere lengthening was omegas in the blood so that was really compelling and I definitely take try to get high doses into everyone in my family because they do lots of other things besides helping telomeres mood inflammation omegas seem to be all good with low risk and then vitamins from supplements and food have also been linked to longer telomeres vitamin C has been linked and then certain foods have been like two shorter telomeres processed meat sausages hamburgers so they're you know kind of emerging clues from this population health about things that we can control that might be shaping our telomeres yes mmm-hmm right well how do you collect telomeres and how much variability is there so when you so what we're doing now to the typical ways through a blood draw and so it's very easy I we just need a little bit of blood and and in that blood there are the cells and in the cells there are the DNA so it's the DNA that we're measuring the variability question we can't quite answer the only studies that have measured telomeres repeatedly over time have been our own studies most of them unpublished and what we find is that rather than thinking telomere has changed slowly over years and years we see chained meaningful changes over one year so for example stress word when Percy stress goes down over here telomere length tends to go up since to increase over just one year and in our intervention studies we're starting to measure it in a shorter timeframe because we think we can you know maybe change in four months six months but we just don't know yet so if you so the variability in the assay is it depends on the type of assay but you know somewhere between two and six percent yes white blood cells right right how much variability is there in the tumors in these different cells so within the white what well the red blood cells don't have the nucleus in the DA in the white blood cells there's all sorts of different cells with different functions it's really a mixed group and and immunologist just hate it when we take whole blood and we and we talked about teal rolling because we have no idea what is driving that result but the bottom line is that's where all this data is from that I've showed you it's all about whole blood and the meaningful marker the gold standard measure is telomere length across all those cells it drives immunologist crazy because we haven't it we don't know which cells are responsible for the tumor shortening I can tell you that that the if we were to look within cell types which we sometimes do and other researchers do it's the cd8 cells that are spinning down and aging more quickly and becoming senescent and and they get a you know certain profile and cell markers we identify them with flow cytometry and we see that they are part of the culprit and immune aging so we haven't looked at natural killer T cells but those are a type of cd8 cells your other question was what about fat cells what about other types of cells so there have been studies that looked at two month across the different cell types and they are correlated not you know it's not huge correlations maybe point four so so it it does look like there is some you're getting a hint of whole body aging when you look at immune cell tea-length but I personally think that the immune cell telomere length is so predictive because it's it's so directly tied to inflammation and immune senescence stress and lifestyle so let me just show you well you know what happens when you're feeling stressed what happens to your daily behavior do you take better care of yourself because you know you're under stress usually most of us all of our self-care behaviors just fall to the wayside and the diet we were on forget it it anything we actually eat more of the high fat high sweet food that's very much hardwired we feel more sedentary and we have trouble sleeping so stress is kind of this big framework or organizing thing that shapes our daily life and even when we don't want it to so what's happening in our brain why do we do things that you know why is it that our intention you all made intentions last week to start to meet certain nutrition goals so why didn't you do that I think there wasn't one hand in the room actually am ethical I might be wrong but the the we're really when we're stressed it's really really hard to control some of the drives that we have that are tied to survival so let me explain what I mean there are these two two systems I'm going to talk about so we have the prefrontal cortex this is the home of planning and control this is the part of the brain that we want lit up with activation all the time this helps us think clearly foot problems so solve problems and control behavior that we don't want to be doing so when we want to ignore the donuts that are sitting there we need to inhibit that behavior and that takes a tremendous amount of prefrontal cortex inhibitory activity so this is where we're at when we're feeling really relaxed and clear-headed and after running an exercise we have a lot of activity there and then there's the lower systems the limbic system home of emotions and the pleasure center the reward center and these drive a lot of our behavior and we can't help it these are extremely hardwired strong drives so when we're emotional we live in our more limbic brain and our reward area and then here's the the clincher or the killer it inhibits the prefrontal cortex so we are doubly handicapped we're feeling emotional and we also are we've damped down our our control center our home of controlling impulses so what does that mean for behavior well I'm you can see my bias I study cookies and eating and fat so what this means is when we're really stressed our brain actually craves high fat that's for partly biochemical reasons but also the reward Center area once you eat fat it dampens down the reward center and that actually calms the HPA axis so that's been shown in rat studies by married almond here at UCSF and that's basically he studies basically show the power of comfort food that when rats are really stressed give them lard or sugar and they look calmer and their cortisol is lower and so there's this kind of you know feedback of stress driving greater consumption of the high-fat food and then in turn that's making the rats feel better and this probably happens in in humans too I would say a lot of people think it does so we're going to talk a little bit about mindfulness soon and I wanted to just show you how this prefrontal cortex is you know an essential part of becoming really aware of our body and our feelings and our behavior and controlling behavior so we really want to be promoting pre focal cortex activity so we can be meeting our goals that we want to in life and not so much driven by the stress reactive brain so I call this the limbic PFC balance and when we're stressed were in this limbic PFC imbalance and all bets are off it's very hard to stick to a diet or to exercise etc but it's when we need exercise most so when you are under stress you tend to eat less the same or more the majority of you are probably in the more category that's a more common category and we and other people have shown that just identifying as a stress eater actually puts you at greater risk of gaining weight during stressful times and also greater abdominal fat so it's definitely a you know something to be aware of being aware of your emotions and what you're eating for kind of emotional comfort versus hunger true hunger let me show you my favorite rat study that shows what stress eating really does to us so here this is the little belly of rats so they kind of axial slice here and you can see the yellow lit up is the visceral fat this is the fat that spews out all that inflammation in cortisol and in this study they had rats in under all conditions rats who got Oreos and chips so they had a junk food diet and then they had a stress junk condition where the rats also had different types of stress in their life and they got to eat junk food and then you can see what's happened to their fat you can see that junk food alone didn't do much and actually the stress alone didn't do much either but when you combine stress and junk food you have a ballooning of that visceral fat pad and this was such a fascinating study they went in to see what was happening anatomically at those in those fat cells and what was happening in the stress condition is that the fat was remodeling the cells were becoming huge and innervated and there was angiogenesis so blood vessels were enveloping the fat cells and they were getting this great source of of triglycerides so the fat that the rats were eating was were going right to the belly fat and the fat cells were maturing these early pre adipocytes kind of these immature cells were developing to these beautiful full-blown fully stuffed fat cells so basically the fat cells were being modeled and the chemical that was doing that was called neuropeptide Y and they actually blocked neuropeptide Y and they didn't get this ballooning stress fat so that was an interesting study you can imagine drug companies and others are how do we get the neuropeptide Y right into those cells so we can block the stress fat it's probably never gonna happen so stress plus drunk food caused this whole full-blown metabolic syndrome high cortisol high insulin high neuropeptide Y greater abdominal fat and it kind of I won't go into this but a little cortisol machinery it was turned on into the fat cell so we're spewing out cortisol they were not given a choice of food but there are studies by Mary Domino colleagues where the rats are given a choice of they're born lab Chow or sucrose or lard and when they're stressed they ignore the low-fat Chow and they really eat the sucrose and lard and they may even lose weight because of the stress but their belly fat still gets relatively much bigger so to summarize this point you can see that this metabolic suit the stress soup that we make when we're stressed the cortisol and insulin plus this comfort food tendency that really does work in the short term actually has a you know it's as double-edged sword that when we eat the comfort food that makes us feel better immediately it's going to be creating this abdominal obesity so so far I've shown you that stress really is not just in our head it's in our bodies it's in ourselves it does get under the skin it can affect gene expression it affects the proteins that we make it decides are they the stress pattern are they the are they the genes that are turned on by inflammation stress can affect the rate of our immune cell aging or at least the the data hints at that and one important pathway that we do know is through changes in our in our metabolic health and the chemicals that are in our blood cortisol insulin inflammation so now finally some relief we're going to get to stress resilience so what is stress resilience I've listed here four ways that we that we can build stress resilience and you might want to choose one of them for your goal for this week and Margaret can check in with you next week and see if anyone increased behavior in any of these areas I'm going to talk about exercise we already talked a little bit about social connection early nurturing and I won't have time to talk about that but social support is one of the most important stress buffers having a confidante call and using their support I'm going to talk a little bit about mindfulness and some of our new interventions and then Margaret and the last lecture is going to talk about positive states and then lastly we're just going to end with a very there are no real quick fixes but there is an a breathing exercise that if you do over the long run it really will become a longer term way of regulating stress arousal so let me just start with exercise how many minutes each week do you do vigorous exercise vigorous so you may do a lot of walking and that might be enough but I'm just I'm just focusing on vigorous here so what does the CDC tell us that we should be doing the CDC recommends 75 minutes per week so it comes out to about 10 minutes a day it's not that much 10 or 11 minutes a day of vigorous exercise so this is really getting your heart rate up etc so one of our wonderful postdocs at UCSF Eli Putterman wanted to know whether exercise could reduce stress reduce stress induced e-m-f Ordnung and so she's sedentary and she's the exerciser and we they're both experiencing a lot of like stress we wanted to go in and look at what their telomere length was so in this cross-sectional study we divided up people into the active and inactive based on that criteria I just showed you are you doing at least 10 minutes a day of that vigorous exercise and what you can see is for active group the highest stress people barely had shorter telomeres this is not a significant difference but then you look at our sedentary women and you can see that if they're sedentary and they're high stress they had dramatically shorter telomeres so it does suggest that exercise is particularly important when you're under a lot of stress this is probably a not an exercise to take too seriously exercise so to speak but you can see here where's your score so did you score a three if and are you active if you're active it doesn't really matter I mean your stress level might not matter so much but if you are sedentary and you score too high you can see you're very likely to fall into this short telomer category you're maybe so if you scored it to a three or maybe it you know 80% now that's a model applied to a big sample and it's hard to apply the models like that to individuals so don't take it too seriously but the point is that if you are if you are sedentary and high-stress than you you and you need to start becoming active here are many of the reasons and the ways that we know that that exercise might be buffering stress so one is it's it's actually improving that stress soup the levels of cortisol and catecholamines in our blood it's reducing inflammation free radicals and it's also changing the way we think so this is kind of the the bottom-up feedback rather than just changing your thoughts and saying it's going to help my body you're actually changing your physiology and that's actually feeding back on your brain increasing your prefrontal cortex reducing rumination which is one of the ways we really carry stress with us so Ken lifestyle interventions increase telomerase or telomere length so we haven't we've yet to do a great double-blind study but we do have some under the way at the Osher Center so we're we're looking forward to those results but so far we have some very interesting hints mostly about mindfulness and mindfulness based interventions now mindfulness is a multi-dimensional construct but I'm just gonna as an example I'm going to show you an item from a mindfulness scale that gets at the attentional part so paying attention in the moment is a part of the attentional focus of mindfulness being engaged in the moment not thinking about the past not not worrying about the future there's also an attitude that goes along with mindful some kind of kindness and compassion so I'm gonna tell you about a colleague study cliff Sharon at UC Davis this is a study that came out today actually was in the news today and it's been you know long under way and basically these colleagues that UC Davis brought a group of meditators to a retreat center in Colorado for three months and they had a perfectly matched weightless control purposes very controlled study they all went there and the waitlist group was measured on the same biological factors before and after this very intensive meditation in retreat you can see there was definitely an effect of context here this is not a general necessarily generalizable study and here are the participants in the Dharma talk the class with Alan Wallace and they did a very thorough biomarker battery so you can see they measured a lot of different factors in our blood to see is meditation improving any of these and with the telomerase we didn't get involved in the study to a little bit too late so we didn't get a pre baseline measure Plummers but we we were able to get to long race after the intervention in both the control group and the meditation group so it's an imperfect design but one of the most interesting parts of the story I'm going to tell you is you can guess the story is going to be about two long race not just because I study it but because it was the only biomarker that was related to well-being I mean even cortisol failed us and DHEA so so it does appear to be you know a promising biomarker that might be related to well-being so let me show you the model here the montt the idea here was that that doing a lot of meditative practices would increase the states of mindfulness and maybe even meaningfulness and purpose in life and that would rid increase positive cognitions positive effect perceived control and decrease some of the stress vulnerability factors feeling lack of control feeling neuroticism which is kind of just a negative effect measurement and these in turn would increase up regulate the telomerase activity in ourselves so the measure of mindfulness is kind of it's kind of complex you can see there's different sub-skills noticing experience acting with attentional awareness not reacting to thoughts and emotions but just seeing them accepting them describing them labeling emotions turns out that labeling emotions increases your prefrontal cortex activity so there's something very powerful about the awareness of what we're feeling so we tested this model Tania Jake Jacobs a postdoc and as so the first question is well did three months on this mountain really improve wellness or was it stressful being with one's inner and not having their normal life and you can see here that it's not surprising but three months away from the usual stressors of life improved all of these scales of well-being improved mindfulness purpose in life so the red dots are the the meditators and the blue dots or the control group increased feelings of control and autonomy and decreased neuroticism so then the next question is did it increase too long race so what did the control group do the control group flew to the mountain in Colorado about all the same measure they all acclimated for several days with the altitude they got all the same measures and then they flew home and then when it was time for the post measurements they flew back got all those measurements done but then they got their turn and then he got to stay for three months and and meditate so what did we find we just compared the treatment group to the waitlist group the control group and what you see here is that telomerase at the end of the tree was significantly higher in the meditation group so there's a big hint maybe it was the meditation but maybe was something else so the real clue would come if we could see that the people who really did well and improved in well-being were the ones who had the highest telomerase that would give us more confidence that it was about well-being so here you can see that the control group didn't have that as much change in purpose in life and it wasn't certainly not related to their telomeres that flat line means there's no correlation but here you see a strong correlation the higher the increase in purpose in life and most people did increase the higher their telomerase was so these people really changed a lot improved a lot and also had the highest alum race and we see the same pattern with most of these psychological measures I just won't show the same graph over and over and so then the you know is it really the retreat that that led to the high telomerase is it exposure to meditation or did it work through control decreases in eroticism it increases in purpose in life so these are statistical models you can throw all three variables in and you can kind of figure out well what's really driving this relationship is just the group or is it because it's mediated or was or due to the change in purpose in life and you can see that in all cases it was really mediated through these increases in well-being so the short story is it's not just go meditate and you're going to have these increases its increases in your in well-being are related to higher telomerase there are other ways to get those increases in well-being you don't have to go to a mountain for three months this was I'm just gonna briefly show you this was a study by Dean Ornish and colleagues where they looked at telomerase pre and post his very intensive lifestyle program so people a low-fat diet they did yoga they had some group support and these are all men with prostate cancer and after the intervention they did have significant higher telomerase there wasn't a control group here so this was again an imperfect study but another hint that telomerase might be responsive to lifestyle and the men who had the biggest decreases in stress in this case it was intrusive thoughts about having prostate cancer because they just learned they had prostate cancer so those improvements were related to the biggest increases in telomerase yes so there are many different measures we used to assess well-being and in the the purpose and life scale and that I just showed you was a scale by it someone in Carroll riff ry FF and I'm using well-being in those general way about increases in feel in both you know emotional state and thoughts about the self and feeling control over life you know you know kind of globally so lastly I'll tell you about an intervention where they're doing it oh sure so Jennifer Taub and mirror started this with me and we wanted to look at mindfulness and mindful eating at the same time and see if this helped reduce that abdominal fat because now we know that abdominal fat is so sensitive to stress and forget about weight loss let's just see if we can reduce some of that visceral fat that's really the culprit in the health problem it's not Oviatt general obesity in fact the fat at your hips is actually really healthy the more of that the lower the glucose you have in your blood and insulin resistance so we looked mindfulness to both improve stress cognitions and emotions and improve hunger and satiety cues we usually just ignore those but we actually do have a lot of cues from our body about whether we really need to eat at the moment or not so we wanted to use mindful eating to teach people those and we base this on a program by jean chris teller at university of indiana so our goal was to reduce emotional eating and reduce the physiological arousal from life stressors and we hope to reduce abdominal fat and cell aging so this was a small initial study and the results were were interesting enough that we got some funding from end cam to do this in a big way so we now have a big ongoing trial at the Osher Center it's called shine and we are really really happy to have anyone who wants to lose weight join it but you have to be overweight in the first place of course and you can look at the Osher website so in this small initial pilot study we wanted to reduce cortisol and do stress arousal so here you can see in our sample of women that those who well I should first tell you that when we wake up our cortisol tends to be high in the morning to mobilize energy but then about 20 you know 30 minutes later it spikes and that spike is actually a little nice little index of stress perceived stress the more perceived stress you have the more you spike up and it might also be kind of preparing for the day or ruminating about what's ahead of you so we don't know exactly what's responsible for that spike but we do know it's it's a pretty good index of stress if there are any I mean believe me course all's messy index so here you see that the the people who decrease the most in that cortisol waking response after they did our mindfulness mindful eating intervention had bigger decreases in abdominal fat so they lost more grams of abdominal fat so this suggests that that mechanism probably is at work here that that reduction in cortisol might be reducing the abdominal fat now we're get to get to look at that in several hundreds of people so it's so easy for us especially you know living and breathing this research and knowing a lot about stress and how bad it is for health to want to push it all away and to avoid it and to damp down arousal and you know I've said many times tonight you know reduce stress arousal that's gonna be good for your health but our minds are wired such that when we want to push emotion away it doesn't actually work and in fact it can backfire and we actually find ourselves more stressed at least physiologically or ruminating about things even more and then there's something else that happens this whole another layer of negative emotions because we don't we're upset that we're stressed and that's actually part of what depression is is being is not accepting negative emotion and really having a whole nother reaction to that and feeling guilty and mad at yourself etc so there's this new way to think about stress that might be helpful for some people and let me just tell you about some of the kind of assumptions behind it so we really can never be stressed less and that suffering is embedded in our life and inherent and if you think of anything you've tried to do that's been hard any achievement even there's stress in that and stress as part of engaging in life but we want to avoid you know negative emotions and pain and so we do try you know our automatic tendency is to try to be happy and try to push that away but that actually doesn't usually work and so there's an you know part of the mindfulness intervention is to help people it's just notice negative emotions and let them be and accept them and that has actually been shown to really help there's much more to it but that tends to help with depression so it's more cognitive perspective of mindfulness and looking at thoughts and emotions and seeing that's not reality that's not myself I am NOT my thoughts and I can I can live with these negative thoughts and still go on so I did recommend a book that has this perspective called act acceptance commitment therapy and by Richard blonde that's in your references and so I you'll notice I'm talking about leading the life we want so some people stress or stressful thoughts are obstacles to living the life they want they're getting in their way and mindful awareness can help both noticing the thoughts so checking in with yourself and just noticing thoughts and then letting them float away rather than stay in your mind and be causing a lot of stress arousal and mindful awareness can also help us do less time travel with our thoughts so much of our time is spent thinking about the past of thinking about what has already happened or ruminating about it or projecting to the future planning or worrying about the future and so all of that cognitive activity leaves very very little time for us to be right here and right now and that's the time that we can be relaxed our body be connecting with other people a lot of good things happen when we're in the present moment so mindfulness training can help with less time travel and it's also a piece of living our values this act therapy so let me just tell you a little bit more about that then act therapy it's a new new therapy that's been helpful for PTSD and depression and they use it at the VA now and it may also be helpful for stress there haven't been Studies on that yet one of the things that it has a lot of clever exercises so I'll just tell you about one that tends to be helpful for people more in the I would say the second half of their life and so the question is given how many days you have left to live how do you want to spend the rest of your life and so you could divide your list into three parts so what do you want to continue doing or do more of what do you want to start doing and what are things that you've had enough of and you want to stop doing and then think about why not what are the obstacles to living that life that I want to lead and sometimes it is about thoughts and emotions and fears and so scripts that we tell ourselves and so the so part of the acts therapy is living our values even with stress and negative affect and not thinking that emotions should be getting in the way and stopping us from doing things that we want to be doing another exercise they do it's very morbid I didn't like it at all when I first heard it is to think about your eulogy and what do you want to have done at that time in your life at the end of your life what do you want people to hear about so that's another exercise that that can help people get in touch with their values so act therapy is very much kind of value based and living a purposeful life yeah the question is is Act therapy really helping people with PTSD veterans who have been traumatized yes so I so let me expand on my statement act therapy is a it's a is a larger framework and I've shown I've only shown you just a few pieces about trying not to avoid negative effects but it's a lot it's a really full therapy and yes it has been very successful treating traumatized veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and they've rolled it out across the VA s so it's it's exciting because there's been very little treatments that have been able to help PTSD okay so I wanted to end with a with talking about breathing and breathing is really at the root of all relaxation activities and it's very very powerful and simple and it's something that is free and cheap people who have very few degrees of the freedom in their life and don't have time to exercise and go to a intense three-month meditation retreat and other things still can do this exercise and no one can take this away from you even if you're very busy and overloaded you can sit at your computer and do this exercise when we do deep breathing we are shifting our sympathetic and parasympathetic activity in a very favorable way and we're turning on our our vagal tone or vagus nerve which is which suppresses the stress response in a sense and turns on more restorative activities so the one of the keys to relaxed breathing is to breathe in slowly and fully but not to fully but to breathe out more than you're breathing in so you might think of 40% 60% and so the exhalation should be long and full and I'm just going to be quiet for a minute and let you all do that so you want to breathe in and have your belly extend and then let yourself breathe out fully and slowly and when you're starting that you can do it over and over until you get slow enough that you're doing six breaths per minute or less and that will change the stress soup inside of us not that anyways study that specifically exactly but but breathing is very powerful so I'm gonna just end here and I'll be here for questions that stress is not just in your head but it's in our body our brain and our cells it is a serious risk factor for both mental health and physical health problems and we stress is here to stay especially in this day and era but we can live well with stress if we're aware of it and we build up these these resilience factors and we can try to live that balance yes yes that's a great question so the question is can people individuals find out if they have that gene for depression that makes you vulnerable to stress and if so what can you do about it so there are now several companies that you can send in a little swab cheek swab to and they will tell you you're full you know genetic readout at least of this of the variants that we know about like this gene and it's an educational exercise and there's a lot of controversy about it you know the FDA is trying to regulate that type of information one of the companies that I know better is called 23andme but there are several others on the web you can look up and it's all by mail it's not regulated by a doctor and is definitely some important helpful information in that genome besides knowing whether you are vulnerable to stress induced depression there are things like drug responsive ''tis certain genes make you more or less responsive to certain drugs so it is an interesting set of in from you know information to have about your personal health can we change our genes there's absolutely nothing we can do to - to change that that risk profile but the good news is that our genes interact with our environment I mean probably almost all the genes there are a few rare disorders that are determined by one gene that are strong but in general the genes are not determinant they're just more give us a sense of your probability of risk and then there's a lot that we can control in our lifestyle so a really unhealthy lifestyle is probably going to increase the expression of genes that cause risk for depression and heart disease and diabetes it's a great research question do do the interventions psychological inventions like mindfulness help people who are vulnerable to depression like who have this short gene more than people who aren't genetically vulnerable I don't know the new ones looked at that but it's a very nursing question I think that's where personalized medicine is going - exactly those types of questions we can tailor therapies more know who's going to be more helped and who shouldn't bother yes it's positive assets you stress those that are motivating to us - okay so it's a it's a good point that stress is you know I haven't talked much about positive stress at all and we we like to think of stress in terms of good and bad stress and the good stress is challenge stress and that our that is when we're engaged in activities that are hard but that energize us and cause us to have adrenalin and we feel motivated by them and so they're definitely a lot of achievement challenges and positive stressors like that embedded in life and those we you know feel some of us who have more risk you know risk-taking personalities really pursue those challenges and we get a lot of benefit from them so the other one one way of thinking about threat and challenge stress is ask yourself questions to figure out if something is this really a very bad threat and bad for me psychologically or is this actually something really good to approach so do you feel like you have control over the stressor so when we feel like we have control we can turn stressors into challenges that we can try to achieve and and succeed that are good did you want to add anything to that one okay so the question is does mindfulness really have a home in the prefrontal cortex is that you know can really localize it like that and is that the type of meditation that the shaman sub-project was doing with Alan Wallace and I definitely oversimplified that solo so let me let me elaborate on that now the type of meditation well first of all the converging research does suggest that that mindfulness and states of awareness do increase prefrontal cortex and reduce that the stress reactive part of the brain the limbic system and that the connectivity of the two are very negatively correlated you can increase that negative correlation with mindfulness training so there's research that's starting to show that it's not fully accepted but the this is a really active area of research and mindfulness is doing these brain imaging studies the type of research that our sorry the type of meditation Alan Wallace was teaching was actually not mindfulness per se and it was much more complex elaborated type of meditation including something called the four immeasurables and really important part of what he was teaching was an attitude of compassion and this type of meditation I think that the Strama topic will be really will be showing this data you know in the future but it the the the compassion meditation is probably one of the most important types of meditation for for kind of for good health and relationships does does multiple sclerosis is it related to shorter telomeres and if you lengthen or Chalmers can it help MS and I don't know I don't know that there's any research in that area yet I do know that in general inflammatory disorders should be related to shorter telomeres in autoimmune disorders I don't think I've been studied that much yes the question was can you go to your doctors and get your telomeres measured and the and how much would it cost and the the comment that cause laughter was you're not going to get insurance to pay for that and you're absolutely right so the short answer is right now there are I'm going to think at least one company on the web that you can get your telomeres measured at and our company doesn't have that set up yet but we will eventually do that for people directly to people by next fall and the reason is the technology is all in place but we want to be if we're going to be giving people information about their own telomeres we want to be very confident about the norms about how to interpret that and so we don't feel like the data is there yet and in terms of measuring your telomeres we did just we're just in the middle of a study that we're just dying to know the results of which is that we had to let's say 250 women come to UCSF this summer and had their tumors measured and so we're still asking them but then they're going to get to learn them and their lengths and that has never been done before and so there's all sorts of questions like does it really help to know your telomere length does it cause a lot of distress you know you don't want to know that you're at risk of a you know a wide range of diseases of Aging or does it motivate you which is engage in more health behaviors and lengthen them so there's it's a really wide open question the question was what about adaptogenic herbs have though can those lengthen telomeres I can tell you with confidence no studies well I shouldn't say with confidence there baby studies underway on that because there are a lot there's a lot of interest in herbs and pharmaceuticals and whether they can affect the cell aging system none that I know of there was a study that came out last month on an herb extract and it showed that it increased telomerase and so that was impressive that was the first study that suggests that a supplement could help you know it's I can't tell you it was I I don't think it was the straight extraction of an herb it sounded like a compound that they may be manufactured yeah thank you so much Alisa I just want to take time to make a few comments first of all there was a question about and this has been talking about meditation and this concept of compassion and we'll talk about some of that in the last lecture but what's wonderful about compassion if you can in your mindfulness or in whatever meditation to begin to sense of compassion what that does is it's an antidote to anger and some of the research that when many of us were doing like a decade ago I did a lot of research on quote type a behavior we identified the component of type a behavior that led to heart disease it was anger it was a tendency to look at others like if you're driving down the freeway and you see the cars are those cars fellow travelers just trying to get to the city with you you know or trying to get where you're getting you know and you can wave at them which I do all the time and you know they're they're people stuck or are they are they in your way like for my dad they were in our way and if we needed to stop at the restroom he counted the cars we'd get back in the cart he goes now I got our past twenty more cars again and we learned to go to the bathroom very fast so that anger is not good it's very related to stress but it's almost where people kind of go into social situations or into environments with this sort of chip on the shoulder who's here how important are they and compassion is way on the other side of that what can I find out about this person there's four every person you see there are things to look for and develop Compassion's you have you actually have a choice and we'll talk more about those choices but that really relates it brings all the research of the 70s and 80s all full circle to whether Luis is talking about tonight there was a question about Paul positive stress and challenge and all that let me just mention that when there is a stressful challenge ahead a key thing is whether or not you have self-efficacy a fancy term ELISA used the word control it's whether or not you feel like you know I can handle this I can do this and when you feel that like you're a hiker you're at Yosemite if you've been there and you want to do a hike that's gonna be a challenge to your system but there's this good so a lot of it has to do with the package do you feel as you look at that this is something I can do it's like getting a new kit and opening the instructions which some of us do some don't and you have this sense of like I can do this some of us have colleagues and friends and spouses who say I can do this and they don't read the instructions and then they get angry not so good but normally it's a sense of self-efficacy and a stressor now this is all complex add to that you're with some other people and the other people have you ever been at something where you knew it was really hard we knew at the end of the weekend we're gonna get this done and you're doing it with others that brings in that's social support piece and you reinforce each other you say I just don't think I can do this hang in there we're gonna get there if any of you heard about the Giants can not I'm not a sports fanatic but watch how they talked about that game they had efficacy they also were a team and burrell who didn't get the hit that would have made him super duper famous that forever and ever watch how they the cameraman were so compassionate they were keeping the camera on him when the last hitter was hitting and when the last person hit that home run that one the whole thing blew everything wide open who ran out first Burrell hugs him who at first it was amazing this team he wasn't sitting there going oh you know I missed you know I'm gonna be traded now and feeling glum because he had this sense it was all about a team of misfits as they called themselves so the context around these are important take-home messages you're starting to hear them from this class ELISA talked about the fat and the diet the junk food what did Ellen talk about the junk food there's another study just like Alyssa's rat study that looked at Somali cos macaques monkeys and they fed they put them in stress and they stress the male monkeys I'll tell you how they stress female monkeys its opposite but with the male monkeys what they do is they get them all in a cage so not they're all in the cage together big cage swinging around and they'll introduce another male and that means all the male monkeys have to figure out who's top of the totem pole and that's very stressful because they got to figure it all out now because they got a new guy in there got to figure out who's the strongest and do this whole thing again and they fed them fat the stress was kind of bad if and they look at their heart disease and if they were under stress that wasn't so good and if they just fed them the fat which by the way they used the fat that they used to cook mcdonald french fries in the past they used to cook mcdonald french fries in animal fat beef laura be full of fat and in fact people cook mcdonald's actually ran into trouble they couldn't find enough fat to cook their french fries now they've had to change that but they were wondering where it was all going was all going there to North Carolina to Kaplan who was feeding it to the monkeys when they put the two together when they put the stress as as Alissa was saying with this fat from the McDonald's wanted to buy but they couldn't the monkeys developed heart attacks and died now for the female monkeys it turned out the social setting was great you bring another female in it's like oh this is great another person to talk to you know and so the monkeys are just having all this fun and that didn't stressing we're like totally disappointed what's wrong with these monkeys and then a female researcher came along a wonderful colleague and they discovered that for females what's really stressful is to be in a cage alone that females kind of like do well in groups and so that I just like to share that take-home messages we got to look at you look at that junk food now I'm two weeks we get together and I'm gonna ask you have you thought about making any changes that intention or have you actually maybe used that smaller plate or maybe said no I love the way to talk about saying no to the donuts one thing good is just don't even look at the donut stand way away from the donut so you can't smell the donuts because the smell goes right into that brain Center that's not so good the other one was the omega-3s you heard about that last week and Alyssa mentioned it to the make sure it's threes we've talked about exercise remember on the last class if you come to the last class you will get your very own pedometer to that you so you can keep track of your exercise and in the last class we'll talk more about positive effect we'll go back over some of the mindfulness and breathing Alyssa and I really are about we are inches away from doing a study teaching people some better things about breathing and looking at telomere length associated with people being randomized to either learning mindful breathing or basically a control group that would later get it so we will be able to do one of those studies together and we have our fingers crossed to get the funding so we this course is giving you up-to-date information so I want us all to thank Alyssa again for getting us data just from today which is incredible so thank you so much

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 34,532

Keywords: stress, science, mental health

Id: nPm2Z2-YVBM

Length: 88min 35sec (5315 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2011