Category — Living Counterclockwise

Last week I found myself wide-eyed at 3 am, skin clammy, mouth dry, breathing shallow, mind racing, not able to stop thinking about workplace “issues.”  I was stressing out. What does it mean to “stress out”?  And what does this have to do with aging?  Read on.

Our bodies are masterfully designed to deal with threats that require us to react quickly and powerfully.  An emergency presents itself, and the brain immediately alerts the body’s automatic nervous system.  Whoosh… a flood of hormones, cortisol being the biggie. The heart beats faster; blood pressure elevates; blood vessels dilate; the digestive system slows; the liver releases glucose; the skin sweats.  The body stays in this overdrive state until the brain signals the emergency is over.  All this makes sense – perfect, wonderful, species-protecting sense – if there is danger, and a person needs to be hyper-alert and super-energized to deal with it.

If there had been a burglar trying to jimmy open my bedroom window at 3 am, or if I had jolted awake to the sound of a smoke alarm, this response would have been a completely appropriate, perhaps even life-saving.  But there was no such threat.  In fact, only about 10 percent of modern stress can be linked to actual physical threats to life or safety. The other 90 percent comes from our perceptions of worrisome life events, like domestic problems, money concerns, work issues.  But burglar at the window or bureaucratic meltdown at the office, our bodies react with the same flood of cortisol.

If the threat is a real emergency, when it is resolved, the body regulates itself back to normal.  But if the “threat” is ongoing, recurring or chronic (that is, if you continue to perceive the worrisome situation as stressful, or if you move from one worrisome situation to another), then the body never really goes back to its pre-emergency self.  You remain bathed in cortisol.

This is not a good thing.

This is a path to ill health and premature aging.

In fact, researchers in the psychiatry department of UC San Francisco (among many others) report a distinct link between psychological stress and accelerated aging in humans (also mice).  Stress – courtesy of the cortisol bath – can elevate cholesterol and blood pressure, increase bone loss, increase fat storage (especially around the middle), cause sleep problems, cause memory problems and suppress the immune system.  Yikes.

So what’s a person to do?  Avoiding situations that could trigger stress is probably not an option.  Choosing to react to those situations – training yourself to react to those situations – in more positive ways is an option.  The “It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge” way of thinking. You might like to know that people who exercise regularly are less susceptible to chronic stress.  And there’s some evidence that good nutrition and perhaps vitamin C and B vitamin supplements may help.  There’s always stress management techniques: deep breathing, yoga, progressive relaxation, music – or a self-designed strategy.  Whatever you do (I walk myself, mentally, through all the rooms of the house I grew up in…this both comforts and distracts me), the important thing is to stop the stress response before it begins to do real harm, before it fast-forwards the biological clock.

Do we live in a world of preservatives, additives, pesticides, hormones, lead, mercury, PCBs, BPAs and EMFs not to mention artificial colors, artificial flavors, nitrites, nitrates, trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup? We sure do. Are some or all of these harmful to our health and well-being? Absolutely.  If these substances contribute to ill health and our “environmental” aging, isn’t it logical that ridding our bodies of them would help turn back our biological clocks?  Yes.

Happily, our magnificent bodies are designed to do just this. We are self-cleaning machines with protective layers of skin, air-filtering lungs and powerful blood-purifying livers.  But hold on a minute:  What if the detritus of modern life — the poisons we choose and those that are “chosen” for us — are overloading this system, creating a body burden that can make us ill and speed up our biological clocks.  We should actively, purposefully cleanse ourselves, right?

Welcome to the world of detox, an enormously lucrative cottage industry, from fasts, diets, teas and supplements to cleanses, herbal wraps and irrigations, from chelation therapy and IV infusions to Chinese foot pads and harmonic water. There’s hype.  There’s hoax.  And there may be things that work.  Alternative and conventional medicine are at odds about the value of detox.  Most conventional researchers say that, with a few exceptions, detox is unnecessary, virtually ineffective – and may even be harmful.  But alternative health providers – and their satisfied patients – claim significant health benefits for some detox plans.  I am one of the satisfied, in fact.  I did a 2-week progressive elimination detox diet (I wrote about this in Counterclockwise), and I felt better for it.

The controversy rages and is not about to go away any time soon.  Neither are the hucksters who feed on our fears.  I’d like to suggest that at least some of our body toxic obsession is ill-placed.  Don’t get me wrong.  I do believe we humans are managing to toxify our environment (and thus, over time, our bodies).  But I would argue that we are polluting ourselves in other, very important ways we seem to care little about.

The 24/7 news cycle (no news being good news…ergo all news is bad news) is every bit as poisonous to our spirit as pesticides are to our bodies.  It eats away at the soul to hear, every moment of every day, about the ugliness and evil some people perpetrate on each other.  And I would argue that our new way of experiencing the world – hyper-connected, disjointed, detached, machine-driven, lightning fast  — is toxic to our humanity.  Lest you think I inhabit some elevated position here, let me confess that I am right now toggling between working on this little essay, making witty (?) comments on other people’s facebook updates and shopping for shoes at zappos while also checking emails on my phone…all this as I travel by rail between Seattle and Eugene.  It’s a lovely stretch of terrain, but I am hardly glancing out the window, let alone allowing the soft, swaying rhythm of train travel to seep into my bones. I am a poster girl for this other kind of toxification.

So rather than obsessing about amalgam fillings or researching the merits of coffee enemas or debating the optimum temperature of the sweat lodge, perhaps we could refocus at least some of that attention.  How about engaging in an occasional 24-hour detoxifying news fasts or an “Unburden and Unplug for a Day” vacation or a “Sounds of Silence” evening?  We can, and should, take action to mitigate these other toxicities.

Now excuse me while I turn off all devices, take a deep breath and simply stare out the window.

It’s the end of July, the height of summer, but because I have the privilege of living in western Oregon, I awake to a gloriously chilly 54 degree morning.  It’s 6:30 on a Saturday.  I’m awoken not by my clock radio but by the rat-a-tat-tat of a bird pecking at insects in the rain gutter outside my bedroom window.  All the windows are open.  The room is cold enough for me to burrow under the down comforter.  And it there I stay, in that lovely state between dream and waking, for almost an hour.

I think, and then I don’t think.  I breath the crisp air, conscious of it filling my lungs, and then not aware at all.  My mind wanders: what do I have to do today did I overwater the garden last night should I check the amazon ranking of the book did the cat stay out all night.  Then I go blank.  Then I conscious-dream about my mother. I stretch my legs, my arms, wiggle my toes, enjoying, thoughtlessly, how my body feels. And then I do think.  I think how delighted I am to have a strong, healthy and pain-free body.  I think about the energy I feel inside me waiting to be called on.  I think about how clear my mind is at this moment, how sharp my hearing.  I am both treasuring the moment and looking forward to how the day will unfold, both content and deeply curious.

I drift away and come back again. And when I come back, I come back to these thoughts:  Yes!  This is what “anti-aging” is all about.  This, right now, is why I traveled the country talking to experts, why I read books and struggled through scientific journals, why I went to boot camp, detoxed, ate superfoods, why I did (do) yoga and CrossFit and Tabata, why I have the 7-minute workout app on my phone.  It is to feel like this. To think like this.  To be like this.

It’s two weeks until the official publication of Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging, and I have a confession to make:  I am a hypocrite.  I am currently doing a number of things I tell readers not to do in the book, some key things I  learned not to do during my turn-back-the-clock year.  In short:  I am not walking the talk.

Oh readers, hear my sins:

I am sitting on my butt way too many hours.  Yes, I am sweating every day, crunching, lifting, pumping, curling, cycling, Tabata-ing, whatevering, for an hour, maybe an hour and a half…but that’s it.  The rest of the time it is seat of the pants to seat of the chair (or, in my case, the red stability ball).  I put in my gym time – hooray for me! — but, as I learned when I researched the book, one strenuous hour a day doesn’t cut it.  You’ve got to integrate physical activity into your daily life.  You have to create an active lifestyle, not compartmentalize exercise and check it off like a chore every day.  Keeping yourself relatively fit is one thing.  And a good thing.  But working to reverse the biological clock…well, that’s another level of commitment.  That’s a game-changer, not something you pencil into your date book.

I am skipping meals.  I am happy to say that it is not breakfast I’m skipping – so that’s a good thing (it truly is the most important meal of the day) – but skipping any meal is very much less than ideal.  Food stokes the metabolic furnace.  Not eating signals your body to store any food you do eat, and by “store” I mean convert to fat and plant on your hips.  And by “your hips,” I mean my hips.  Not eating makes you cranky.  Not eating makes you starving for the next meal so you overeat.  If I’m so damned smart, why am I skipping lunch?  Good question.

I am deafening myself with negative self-talk… like:  If you’re so damned smart why are you acting so  dumb?  Why aren’t you doing all those things you know are good for you?  All those things you discovered are good for you after a long year of deep research and sweaty guinea-pig involvement.  What’s up with you?  And while we’re at it:  Why haven’t you learned to nix the negative self-talk?  How about that compassion self-test you took (and failed) during research for the book and the lessons you supposedly learned from that?

What happened?  I have allowed a three-week trip to Europe and deadlines for other work and the shoulder injury of one of the Sweat Chicas (my work-out buds) and the challenges of living with a teen and a broken lawn mower and the daily seductions of Mr. Internet – in other words, the push and pull of daily life — to lead me astray.

But do not fear, readers.  I see the righteous path before me. And I’m on it.  Or I will be.  Tune in next week to see how I do.

Is New World capitalism the ultimate ager.

I’ve been thinking about that these past few weeks as I’ve spent time in three great – and very different — European cities: gracious, sparkling clean Vienna; medieval, beatnik Prague and bustling poseur Paris.  In my counterclockwise report last week, I talked about Europeans’ walking habits (versus our vehicular addiction) and how they ate their biggest meal mid-day (versus our enormous dinners followed by hours of screen-staring, junk-snacking couch time).

But the longer I stay here in the Old World, the more I see fascinating and complicating contradictions. Take McDonald’s, for example, the epitome of junk-food-fast-food America.  These three European cities all have multiple McDonalds (rebranded as McCafe in Vienna and Prague), and they are packed.  (I know. I frequented a number of them to use their super-fast internet connection.

But here are two differences that might make a difference: 1. No drive-through…therefore no mindless face-stuffing while operating a highly prized vehicle.  2. No rushing in general.  The food category might be fast food, but the diners appeared to take their time.

As I stood in a corner checking email, facebook and the weather forecast, Skpying with family anddoing business for twenty minutes at a time, I noted how slowly people were eating their burgers, how much time they spent talking and nibbling and sipping rather than gobbling and gulping.  Eating was a lengthy social event not a calorie-consuming contest as it sometimes appears to be in the U.S. – and especially at places like McD’s.

Here’s another bit of weirdness:  Austria, the Czech Republic and France all have higher – much higher – rates of cigarette smoking than we do.  In the U.S., we’re down to 20 percent these days (yay!).  The three countries I’ve been visiting are all in the mid- to high 30 percent range.  It seems even higher.  It seems like everyone smokes here.  So I looked up lung cancer death rates.  We’re #9.  Austria, with 75 percent more smokers, is #45 for lung cancer deaths.  France, with close to double the percentage of smokers, is #23.  (Incidentally, France ranks #7 in life expectancy.  The U.S. is a proud #40.)  What gives?

Probably national health care has something to do with this.  But I think something bigger and harder to define might be going on — attitude toward life.  Which brings me to:  Is rampant consumer capitalism the ultimate quick-ager?

If you want more all the time, if you’re always striving for bigger and better, you put yourself in a state of chronic stress which basically bathes you in cortisol.  Overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones is implicated in heart disease, depression, obesity, sleep and digestive problems and lowered immune response. It is, in other words, chronic stress — the way many of us live in the U.S. — is a major ager and major promoter of disease.

My friend (and sister-in-law) Morgaine Hager, a naturopath, mentioned the stress-cortisol-aging connection in a comment last week.  I think she’s right.

I am writing this post from Prague where, in three days of walking the streets of four different districts, I have yet to see a morbidly obese person.  The closest I came was yesterday, at a sidewalk café on a street leading to Prague Castle, when a rather chunky woman sat down at the table next to us.  She was – I am delighted to tell you – French, thus disproving the French Women Don’t Get Fat thing.  But aside from her, no one.  It was the same thing in Vienna, where I was last week.

I will also say that it is almost impossible to get a skim milk cappuccino anywhere over here.  And the stores – my favorite thing to do in a foreign country is to go grocery shopping – don’t offer shelves of “fat-free” this or “low carb” that.  The folks over here in the Old World appear not to fetishize their food like we New Worlders do.  The eat, and they enjoy it.  They eat and they don’t get fat like we do.

Maybe – the female diner I saw yesterday notwithstanding – you believe in the “French Paradox”:  The French eat rich foods and pastries and don’t get fat because they drink red wine.  Fine. But what about the Czechs who drink beer.  A lot.  Huge steins (liters!) of Pilsner Urquell.  What about the Austrians who wash down fried pork cutlets (aka schnitzel) and potatoes with tall glasses of Gosser.

Here’s my take on their “secret.”

They eat a big lunch, a multi-course, sit-down, enjoy-yourself lunch.  (Dinner is small, almost an after thought.)

They walk.

They watch a lot less TV than we do.

And did I mention they walk?

We (and by we I mean I) are obsessed with eating low fat and low glycemic index and with cutting calories and sweating at the gym.  And we’re getting fatter and fatter.  Over here, they eat all the stuff we shun, and they look fit.  The old folks walk hills and manage cobblestone streets.  Walk being the operative word.

I have a Google Alert in for “anti-aging,” but I would not suggest you do the same.  Just yesterday, for example, I learned via this handy service that Heather Locklear uses sperm as an anti-aging face cream.  I wish I could give you details (names of donors, methods of donation) but I have to admit I didn’t click on the link.  Most days I get links to press releases from nutriceutical and cosmeceutical companies hawking their wares.  Everything from distillations of black garlic to infusions of twig tea, from multi-vitamin miracle serums to well, sperm facials.  

 Is it really so complicated, time-consuming, expensive – or icky (I’m talking sperm facials) to actively work on enhancing our health and vitality?  To do what we can do to turn back the biological clock. I don’t think so.

 After exploring this world – as both a journalist and a guinea pig – for more than a year, I think I can narrow it down to eight (generally non-monetizable) habits of mind and body (presented here in alphabetical order) that go a long way to preserving and improving youthful vitality:

 Breathe.  As in deep, nourishing belly breaths.

 Drink water.  We are mostly water.

 Care for your teeth.  Not just for cosmetic reasons, not just to avoid dental crises but because gum disease has been linked to systemic inflammation which has been linked to more age-promoting diseases than you want to know.

 Eat plants. And not because Michael Pollan says so.  Because the healthiest, longest-lived cultures on earth do so.

 Move.  If there is a Miracle Pill, this is it.

 Sleep.  You need it, and you know it.

 Stand up straight.  Posture matters big time. (My next post will be devoted to this.)

 Stay curious.  Interest in the world around us keeps us young (and interesting ourselves).

A bunch of drop-dead gorgeous actresses (think Halle Berry) are now in their forties, so all of a sudden, forty is fabulous, forty is hot, forty is sexy.  When Halle Berry is eighty, eighty will be sexy.  Good for her.  But how about the rest of us?  What perks do the advancing years bestow on us?  I mean, besides the promise of reduced admission to the movie theatre.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.  Although I intend to stay vibrant and vital, energetic, resilient and generally kick-ass for as long as possible, I don’t deny that the seasons do change and the calendar pages flip over and my children are getting older.  Which means I must be too.  I mean chronologically, of course.  Biologically I am fighting the good fight and, so far, holding my own.

Still, I feel I need to come up with at least a few solid benefits to this aging business. “Aging has nothing to recommend it,” a mid-70ish Woody Allen told an interviewer a few years ago.   I refuse to believe that.  But I am also skeptical of those who say, “I have never felt so comfortable with myself as I do now that I am (fill in the age).”  At least half wishful thinking, right? And that claptrap about older meaning wiser?  Please.

So what do I see as the benefits of getting older?

1.  I (occasionally) know what I’m talking about.  That’s because I’ve lived through some stuff, and on those occasions when I did so with eyes (and heart) open, I may actually have learned something.  I’m not talking wise here.  Just less stupid.

2.  I am deeply knowledgeable about and completely up to speed on the New Trend in Health and Fitness.  That’s because the new trend for 2013 is exercising the way we all used to in gym class back in the day:  jumping jacks and squats, push-ups, rope climbs, bear crawls – all that P.E. misery is now de rigueur.

3.  I am old enough to understand the idiocy of “no pain, no gain.”

4.  I can look forward to being even happier than I am!  That’s because, according to research I’ve been reading, the “mature” neurons in older brains react less intensely to negative experiences while still responding strongly to positive stimuli.

The rectangularization of morbidity.

It’s not exactly a phrase that glides off one’s tongue, but it’s one that came to me yesterday during an intense pool tabata exercise class. (If you want to know what pool tabata is, shoot me a comment and I’ll be glad to give details.) The instructor was playing music, rather loud music, from a boom box set beside the edge of the pool.  In between huffing and puffing, I found myself singing along to John Cougar Mellancamp’s classic “Jack and Diane,” the refrain of which goes like this:

Oh yeah, life goes on
Long after the thrill of living is gone

And I thought: Right.  That’s what aging has become in America.  It’s about the extension of life in the absence of health and vitality.  It’s about living to 80 or 90 but spending the last ten (if you’re lucky, more if you’re not) years frail, incapacitated, on multiple medications, worried, feeling useless, joyless, disconnected.  It’s about living long after the thrill of living is gone.

I think that’s because our attention has been focused on mitigating the symptoms of illness rather than preventing them, on the extension of lifespan, not healthspan.  Lifespan is the number of years you live.  Healthspan is the number of years you live well.  It’s the number of years you live with the physical stamina to do things that make you and others happy, the mental acuity to take on new challenges, the emotional strength to face challenges with learned optimism.

Increasing healthspan is known as the “rectangularization of morbidity.” It’s when our life-line does not look like a mountain, the physical/ mental peak being at 35 or 40, followed by a slow decline until death. Instead, the graph is “rectangularized,” flattened out.  We hit out peak and then maintain, as long as we can, a long long plateau of health and vitality until the end.   The end is not 15 years in assisted living. The end is a nice quick bout of pneumonia.

When I defined “anti-aging” for myself, when I spent more than a year researching that world and immersing myself in it for the book I wrote (see info on left while excusing this blatant promotion), that’s what I was after.  More years lived well.  More years lived at the top of my game.  More years to huff and puff through pool tabata.

Our negative and sometimes downright nasty stereotypes about age are entrenched, pervasive and very difficult to escape or ignore.  The other day I was standing in front of the birthday card section at a local store, and here’s what I saw:  On the front of one card were two older ladies blowing on party favors.  The text read:  “At our age, we don’t call it a ‘party favor’ anymore.”  Inside:  “We call it a work-out.”  Or how about this one:  An overdressed woman in a fur coat is standing outside a bathroom stall looking confused.  Inside the card, the text reads:  “At your age it all comes down to one question.  What was it I came in here for?” Really?  The “golden years” are about not having the breath to blow on a party favor and forgetting why you walked into the bathroom?

So, I wondered:  How old do you have to be for the birthday card industry to assault you with insults masquerading as humor?  Not as old as you think.  Maybe, in fact, as old as you – and I — are right now.  On one card, a cross-eyed cartoon vulture is perched on a branch.  The cover text reads:  “So, you’re 50.  Hey, look on the bright side.”  Inside: “Okay, so there is no bright side.  There’s a bright light, but you’re gonna want to stay away from that.”

Whaaat?  At fifty there is no “bright side”?  At fifty you’re eyeing death?  But wait…it gets worse.  The card next to it proclaims in big bubble letters: “40 isn’t old!”  Inside:  “Cover isn’t true!” Forty is old?  What about “40 is the new 30”?  Aren’t magazines targeted to women of a certain age (now apparently defined as the first day after our thirty-fifth birthday) proclaiming just this in upbeat stories accompanied by airbrushed, studio-lit photos of gorgeous women who are forty but look twenty-five?

I’m confused.  No, I’m not confused about why I find myself in the bathroom.  I’m confused about these conflicting you’re old no you’re young no you’re old messages.  I’m confused (and angry) about the damaging, sometimes self-fulfilling stereotypes about aging.  Aren’t you?  Please vent (in the comments section)!  Venting is an anti-aging strategy.