Epigenetics and emotions: 12/1/2023
I was away for the last couple of weeks and I'm back, finally happy to be here. And the reason why I wasn't here was because I recently took a trip to visit my mom in Argentina. And that's what I want to talk about today because although she kept a very active life and her nutrition and her lifestyle was impeccable, was very healthy, I was sad to find out that she's showing signs of cognitive decline. So when I went to visit her, although she was physically active and normal, I hadn't seen her in the last well before COVID. So it was like four years that I hadn't seen her.
And to my surprise, I mean, she was perfectly physically active and doing things in the house and gardening and all types of activities. But I noticed that she would forget easily things that we shared or she would repeat stories that she didn't remember that she already shared with me. So little things like that made me come up with this blog post that I posted already on my webpage. If you are curious, just go to my webpage, Maricelrocha.com, go under blog and you'll find my last post that has to do with epigenetics and emotions and specifically how we cope with stress and why stress is our enemy when we try to rejuvenate and prevent cognitive decline in our golden years. So this is a wake-up call to me and I hope I can inspire you to start taking action today.
Don't wait because the damage is accumulative and we don't want to wait because things when they are already established are really hard to revert. It's not impossible, but it's really difficult. So what can we do today? What are the things that we can start working on? It's the prevention, it's about how we cope with stress, it's about how we develop emotional resilience.
So this is my intention: to share with you that it's not enough to do exercise, that is not enough to have proper nutrition, it's not enough to have a healthy life unless you spend time and you master how to cope with stress because stress in life is inevitable. Stress in life will happen over and over. It's not under our control. But what we can choose, what we can control is actually the way we react when we receive those hard, difficult emotions, when we are going through stressful situations.
So what does epigenetics have to do with all about our mental health, the way we cope with stress, and our biological age? Well, it turns out that as we age, specifically when we talk about DNA methylation, we sort of accumulate these methylations in our DNA in sequences of genes or promoters or specific places in our DNA that regulate the expression of our genes. So over time and as we age, it's getting more difficult to regulate the gene expression, especially in our brain. And that's why it's very important to keep up with mechanisms or techniques to deal with stress.
Now, the good thing is that these epigenetic changes that happen in your DNA as a consequence of stress and difficult emotions are reversible. Science is showing that we can revert the damage. Well, it depends, of course, how bad it is already, right? But we can always be positive and we can always revert some, if not all, of the damage that we accumulated during our life. There have been, over the last years several types of epigenetic clocks that measure your biological age.
And if you see in this chart that I put here on my left, there's a graph that shows how people can go with their biological age accelerated in comparison to their chronological age. In other words, you have two ages. The chronological age is the one that you cannot change, right? It's the amount of years that you have been on this planet. Now, the biological age is the phenotype.
It's what you show in your cells, it's what you're manifesting in your physiology. And that's the one that is super relevant to assess chronic diseases or to assess the risk of developing cognitive decline when you are older. Why? So this biological age is the one that we can test using an epigenetic clock, an epigenetic test. And if you're interested in doing it, let me know.
Wherever you live in this world, I can get access, I can send you a test and we can measure, I can help you measure your biological age. And if you see the black line there, the middle one represents people who age one year per year of living. So let's say I'm 50 years old. My biological age is 50 years old. But when you see the graph in yellow, that shows the acceleration of aging and that could be done for many reasons.
But especially as we are talking about stress, one of the lifestyle factors that we are covering today, then you can see how people can accelerate their aging and manifest a biological age that is older than their chronological age. And I'll share a few examples because I think that in the case of my mom, that was what happened with her. Although she covered all the other pillars of youth perfectly, and she was very proactive in the prevention of illness at the point that she would take all of the preventive measures, she would go to her doctor and do her controls and testing and everything. I figured out that what she missed was a mechanism to cope with stress and anxiety.
Even now, she's still a very anxious person. And I will share with you what are the psychosocial factors that are shown in research that affect the way you age and accelerate your aging, making your biological age older than your chronological age. So these are the people who are in that curve in the orange line. And I'll mention just a few examples. Chronic stress.
When you are stressed out about ongoing things that you cannot change, but you're still affected by that persistent financial hardship or unemployment, long term relationship problems or long processes like divorce or separation, all those stressful factors affect the way you age because they are chronic. And then we have excessive stress. Those are the stresses that you get when acute. Like, suddenly you have work responsibilities that are excessive or pressures that exceed your capability, and then you feel super stressed, and then you don't know how to deal with that. And it starts affecting the way you sleep, the way you eat, the way you enjoy your life.
Then, of course, we have early life stress, uh, like trauma or growing up in poverty or growing up with parents who were were neglecting your needs or parents with mental illness or with substance abuse problems.
Then you have major depression. Those are other conditions that accelerate your aging, of course, like Depression, depression, depressed mood, loss of interest, fatigue, the feeling of not being worth it or self-doubt or lack of self-esteem. And then lastly, we have examples of PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, when, you know, you have, um, Trauma in your past and then for some reason you are still affected and you didn't cope with those stressors that haunt you that come again and again and are affecting your aging process and are making you more, susceptible to develop cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer, all of those mental illness problems as you age.
So, What can we do? What can we do to prevent all of this? So in the case of my mom, for example, I discovered that sensorial experiences like massage, like applying hand cream or lotion. Focusing and, uh, guiding her to focus on the sensorial experience, the way, you know, she's feeling music, all things that stimulate the sensorial experience in the brain are really good tools to cope with stress and reverse aging.
And then, of course, there's a bunch of techniques that we can use, uh, like mindfulness. Relaxation. She loves to do coloring and, uh, she gets these mandalas and, uh, coloring pencils and markers and, you know, art supplies. And she enjoys coloring while listening to her favorite music. And that brings her a sense of peace, a sense of relaxation.
It calms for sure. It calms her mind. And that allows her. To clear her mind, to be more, uh, present. And that's our goal here, to become more present in our life. Now for you and I, for people who are, um, in the prevention part, you know, to me it's a wake up call because I saw that in my mom. I saw that in other relatives. It was really sad for me because it was like, I couldn't talk to her 100 percent of the time, 100 percent to her. It was like sometimes 50, sometimes even a 10%. And I was frustrated because I couldn't get access to her full attention at once. And now it's a wakeup call to me because I don't want to become like her.
I don't want to, my kids, 20, 30 years from now, struggling to find me in my own body. Right? Because it's all, at the end, it's all about function. We don't want to lose or decline in our functions, and especially our brain health. So, what is it I'm going to start doing? I'm going to schedule every single day, in addition to why I already have: ways, techniques, or practice so that I can get more relaxed, so that I can get more present, so that I can invest in mental health, invest in the way we protect our brains.
From aging prematurely, and I hope I inspired you by this talk today. It's really something. It's a silent, not visible, um, aging factor that we need to consider. We need to actually understand the importance and start action and start doing things right now. And with that, I'll leave you with two invitations.
One, if you want to know more. Actually, three. Go to my blog post and find the last post that I'm talking about Epigenetics and Emotions.
Number two, go to my webpage and get my e book, The Epigenetic Youth Guide, where you will find not only a chapter that talks all about stress and how we deal with that, but also all the other six pillars that are super important for us.
to reduce our biological age and rejuvenate. And, uh, number three, if you want to take the test and learn what is your biological age, let me know. I took the test, and I was gladly surprised to find that I was almost two years younger in my biology than my chronological age. And although that was positive and optimistic, I still have room to grow and develop a proactive lifestyle to reduce that biological age even more.
And my goal that I'm sharing with you is to become seven years biologically younger in one year from today. So that, that's my invitation. That's all I'm sharing with you today. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. Write your comments under this post. And, uh, or send me an email at [email protected]
You will find me in my webpage, www. maricelrocha.com
Thank you for listening and I'll see you on my next session live here. Bye for now.
