Excessive focus is no good for us

We keep talking about remaining 'focused' on whatever we are doing to achieve best results. We have been told that the ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits. Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed.

The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in our brain. It can drain our energy and make us lose self-control. This energy drain can also make us more impulsive and less helpful. As a result, decisions are poorly thought-out, and we become less collaborative.

So what do we do then? Focus or unfocus?

In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing us to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too, according to Dr Srini Pillay,M.D.( May,2017). When we unfocus, we engage a brain circuit called the “default mode network.” Abbreviated as the DMN, we used to think of this circuit as the Do Mostly Nothing circuit because it only came on when we stopped focusing effortfully. Yet, when “at rest”, this circuit uses 20% of the body’s energy (compared to the comparatively small 5% that any effort will require).

The DMN needs this energy because it is doing anything but resting. Under the brain’s conscious radar, it activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, we develop enhanced self-awareness and a sense of personal relevance. And we can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, thereby leading to better decision-making too. The DMN also helps us tune into other people’s thinking, thereby improving team understanding and cohesion.

There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day.

Using positive constructive daydreaming (PCD): PCD is a type of mind-wandering different from slipping into a daydream or guiltily rehashing worries. When we build it into our day deliberately, it can boost our creativity, strengthen our leadership ability, and also-re-energize the brain. To start PCD, we choose a low-key activity such as knitting, gardening or casual reading, then wander into the recesses of our mind. But unlike slipping into a daydream or guilty daydreaming, we might first imagine something playful and wishful—like running through the woods, or lying on a yacht. Then we swivel our attention from the external world to the internal space of our mind with this image in mind while still doing the low-key activity. PCD activates the DMN and helps in connecting ideas across our brain (to enhance innovation), and assists to pick up long-lost memories that are a vital part of our identity. In this state, our sense of “self” is enhanced that helps us to enhance our agility and manage change more effectively too.

Taking a nap: In addition to building in time for PCD, we can also consider authorized napping. Not all naps are the same. When our brain is in a slump, our clarity and creativity are compromised. After a 10-minute nap, studies show that we become much clearer and more alert. But if it’s a creative task we have in front of us, we will likely need a full 90 minutes for more complete brain refreshing. Our brain requires this longer time to make more associations, and dredge up ideas that are in the nooks and crannies of our memory network.

Pretending to be someone else: When we’re stuck in a creative process, unfocus may also come to the rescue when we embody and live out an entirely different personality. In 2016, educational psychologists, Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar found that people who try to solve creative problems are more successful if they behave like an eccentric poet than a rigid librarian. Given a test in which they have to come up with as many uses as possible for any object (e.g. a brick) those who behave like 'eccentric poets' have superior creative performance. This finding holds even if the same person takes on a different identity.

When in a creative deadlock, try this exercise of embodying a different identity. It will likely get us out of our own head, and allow us to think from another person’s perspective. For years, focus has been the venerated ability amongst all abilities. Since we spend 46.9% of our days with our minds wandering away from a task at hand, we crave the ability to keep it fixed and on task. Yet, if we built PCD, 10- and 90- minute naps, and 'eccentric poets' into our days, we would likely preserve focus for when we need it, and use it much more efficiently too. More importantly, unfocus will allow us to update information in the brain, giving us access to deeper parts of ourselves and enhancing our agility, creativity and decision-making too.

(Adapted from an article by Srini Pillay, M.D. who is an executive coach and CEO of NeuroBusiness Group) 

Positive parenting tips--Old and New

Whenever I meet my friends or other people, most of them being parents, invariably topic comes to parenting! And everyone has his fair share of advice for positive parenting. It seems as if we, modern time parents, have coined this term 'positive parenting' and what it includes. But wait! Reference to this is found in ancient Thirukkural text.

Thirukkural was written by Tiruvalluvar (a Tamil poet/writer) more than 5,000 yrs ago. It’s one of the ancient sciences on Human Behaviour, which has not changed in spite of modern education & technology!

Some golden thoughts of Thirukkural:

1. If your children lie to you often, it is because you over-react too harshly to their inappropriate behaviour.

2. If your children are not taught to confide in you about their mistakes, you’ve lost them.

3. If your children had poor self-esteem, it is because you advice them more than you encourage them.

4. If your children do not stand up for themselves, it is because from a young age you have disciplined them regularly in public.

5. If your children take things that do not belong to them, it is because when you buy them things, you don’t let them chose what they want.

6. If your children are cowardly, it is because you help them too quickly.

7. If your children do not respect other people’s feelings, it is because instead of speaking, you order & command them.

8. If your children are too quick to anger, it is because you give too much attention to misbehaviour & you give little attention to good behaviour.

9. If your children are excessively jealous, it is because you congratulate them only when they successfully complete something & not when they improve at something even if they don’t successfully complete it

10. If your children intentionally disturb you, it is because you are not physically affectionate enough.

11. If your children are openly defiant, it is because you openly threaten to do something but don’t follow through.

12. If your child is secretive, it is because they are sure that you would blow things out of proportion.

13. If your children back-answer to you, it is because they watch you do it to others & think its normal behaviour.

14. If your children don’t listen to you but listen to others, it is because you are too quick to jump to conclusions

15. If your children rebel it is because they know you care more about what others think than what is right

The importance of moderation in diet

For maintaining a good, resilient health, we need to eat healthily. One of the keys to sustaining improvements in the way we eat is the ability to practice moderation in our diets. As a society, we tend to take an 'all or nothing' approach to food; eating too much of something or trying to eliminate that food or category of foods all together. That tendency towards extremes becomes even more obvious when we look at what's happened to the food on the shelves of our local supermarkets. On the one hand, we've super sized everything, and on the other hand, we see claims like fat free and sugar free everywhere in the supermarket, and these claims attract us because they're absolute.

However, if we can master the skill of eating with moderation, then no single food needs to be forbidden. We can eat the foods we enjoy as long as we don't consume too much of them. How much we eat is a very important question. But how to regulate our appetite is very hard for most of us. We socialize to eat until we're full. That's not a natural thing. And it's not a universal thing.

In France when you're hungry you say, "I have hunger". And at the end of the meal you don't say "I'm full"; you say "I am no longer hungry". That's very different than being stuffed. The moment at which you're no longer hungry is many bites before the time when you're stuffed. And we ask our kids the wrong questions. We ask, "Are you full?" We should rather ask, "Are you satisfied?" or "Are you still hungry?"

So you see, there are cultural ways and manners that help us deal with quantity of food we eat. We have to look at things like the way we talk about food. Are people really looking for lots of calories when they eat? I think they're looking for lots of food experience, an intense satisfying food experience. If you look at the French, and many other cultures as well, they get more food experience with less food. And they do that partly by eating more slowly, eating socially, and eating better quality food. There is a trade off between quality and quantity.

 
In fact, one of the biggest contributors to the obesity epidemic throughout the world has been our tendency to consume enormous quantities of low quality food. This is not to suggest that the foods we eat need to be expensive, but we need to spend our food budget wisely on the foods that will support both good health and enjoyment. What about having less of the better food so that every bite is enjoyable? So let's focus on those first few bites-- smaller portions of better quality food. Many cultures actually have a rule that basically says stop eating before you're full. Japanese suggest to eat until you're 80% full, Chinese say eat until you're 75% full, and in the Ayurveda it says you should eat until you're two thirds full. Everything but a 100%, which is what most of us do.

Next time you're going to eat something, ask yourself a few questions about it. Will this food bring me pleasure or Am I eating is because it's a food I feel I'm allowed to eat? Eating food that doesn't bring you any pleasure is another form of taking in empty calories, because they're empty of enjoyment.

The very next question to ask about a food you're considering eating is this, "Is this food worthy of me?" And it means, will this food support me in achieving all of the things I want to achieve, including good health? If the answer to this question is yes, then the very next question is, "How much of this food do I really need to eat to feel satisfied, knowing that I can have it again tomorrow or later this week because I've mastered the art of moderation?"

Each day should include moderate amounts of food that bring us pleasure. Moderation allows us to enjoy our food, knowing that subtle variations won't be make us sick!

The curse of processed foods

One of the biggest problems with our diet today is that much of our food is refined, or highly processed. I call it the 'curse of processed foods'! Let me explain why?

A refined or highly processed food is one which lasts longer on the supermarket shelf because pests, like mold for example, are less attracted to foods that are low in nutrients. But the question is, if highly processed food is so low in nutrients that even the pests don't want to eat it, how healthy can it be for us?

In fact, the nutrient content of any given food is directly related to the spoil rate of that food. Foods that are very low in nutrients spoil much more slowly than foods that are rich in nutrients. One of the best predictors of a healthy diet is whether it is cooked by a human being or a large corporation. And the reason is that when we outsource our food preparation to big companies, they tend to cook in a certain way that isn't very healthy. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar, all of which are problematic nutrients for our health, and they tend to use the cheapest possible raw ingredients.

Thinking about the nutrient density of the food is another conceptual way of making sensible food decisions. The nutrient density of a food can be thought of as the amount of nutritional value, including vitamins, minerals, and fiber, divided by the calories, or energy content, of that food. Foods that provide lots of calories with very little nutritional value are sometimes called energy dense foods, but their nutrient density is low. For example, a glass of soft drink is high in calories without providing much in the way of nutritional value. A bunch of fresh spinach, on the other hand, would be an example of a nutrient dense food because its nutritional value is relatively high compared to its caloric content.

When people talk about fast food being cheaper than fresh food, they're often referring to the fact that the cost per calorie of highly processed food is lower than that of fresh, whole food. This is often true because highly processed food is so high in calories that the cost per calorie is relatively low. But, if we instead look at the cost of food per unit of nutrient density, then buying fewer calories of higher nutrient density food is a much better use of our food budget.

In the midst of a serious epidemic of obesity, avoiding empty calories should be on the top of our list of priorities. One of the reasons why highly processed food is usually higher in calories is that in order to make these products sell, significant amounts of fat, sugar, and salt are added to make the nutrient-stripped foods taste good. Additives like colorants, artificial flavors, stabilizers, and other preservatives, are also added to enhance packaged products and increase their shelf lives.

The last thing we need to be aware of are highly processed foods that are sold as healthy foods. These are products that have synthetic nutrients added back to them after they've been refined, and this is usually done to make the product seem healthy to the nutrition aware consumer. It's important to remember that the most nutritious foods, like broccoli, don't come in packages which tell us how healthy they are. So we need to be 'beware' of the curse of the processed foods!

Differences between male and female behaviours

Have you ever wondered why men behave differently than women?

It is no secret that men and women are different; in fact, very different. Research shows that there are differences in behaviour due to major differences between male and female brains in some ways. Scientists have generalized four primary areas of difference in male and female brains: processing, chemistry, structural differences, and brain activity. As with all gender differences, no one way of doing things is better or worse. The differences listed below are simply generalized differences in typical brain functioning, and it is important to remember that all differences have advantages and disadvantages.

Processing

Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. What does this mean? Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific areas of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings.

White matter connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that women tend to more quickly transition between tasks than men do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects.

Chemistry

Male and female brains process the same neurochemicals but to different degrees and through gender-specific body-brain connections. Some dominant neurochemicals are serotonin, which, among other things, helps us sit still; testosterone, our sex and aggression hormone; estrogen, a female growth and reproductive hormone; and oxytocin, a bonding-relationship hormone.

In part, because of differences in processing these chemicals, males on average tend to be less inclined to sit still for as long as females and tend to be more physically impulsive and aggressive. Additionally, males process less of the bonding hormone oxytocin than females. Overall, a major takeaway of chemistry differences is to realize that our boys at times need different strategies for stress release than our girls.

Structural Differences
A number of structural elements in the human brain differ between males and females. “Structural” refers to actual parts of the brain and the way they are built, including their size and/or mass. Females often have a larger hippocampus, our human memory center. Females also often have a higher density of neural connections into the hippocampus. As a result, girls and women tend to input or absorb more sensorial and emotive information than males do. By “sensorial” we mean information to and from all five senses. If you note your observations over the next months of boys and girls and women and men, you will find that females tend to sense a lot more of what is going on around them throughout the day, and they retain that sensorial information more than men.

Additionally, before boys or girls are born, their brains developed with different hemispheric divisions of labor. The right and left hemispheres of the male and female brains are not set up exactly the same way. For instance, females tend to have verbal centers on both sides of the brain, while males tend to have verbal centers on only the left hemisphere. This is a significant difference. Girls tend to use more words when discussing or describing incidence, story, person, object, feeling, or place. Males not only have fewer verbal centers in general but also, often, have less connectivity between their word centers and their memories or feelings. When it comes to discussing feelings and emotions and senses together, girls tend to have an advantage, and they tend to have more interest in talking about these things.

Blood Flow and Brain Activity
While we are on the subject of emotional processing, another difference worth looking closely at is the activity difference between male and female brains. The female brain, in part thanks to far more natural blood flow throughout the brain at any given moment (more white matter processing), and because of a higher degree of blood flow in a concentration part of the brain called the cingulate gyrus, will often ruminate on and revisit emotional memories more than the male brain.

Males, in general, are designed a bit differently. Males, after reflecting more briefly on an emotive memory, tend to analyze it somewhat, then move onto the next task. During this process, they may also choose to change course and do something active and unrelated to feelings rather than analyze their feelings at all. Thus, observers may mistakenly believe that boys avoid feelings in comparison to girls or move to problem-solving too quickly.

These four, natural design differences between brains listed above are just a sample of how males and females think differently. Scientists have discovered approximately 100 gender differences in the brain, and the importance of these differences cannot be overstated. Understanding gender differences from a neurological perspective not only opens the door to greater appreciation of the different genders, it also calls into question how we parent, educate, and support our children from a young age.

Milk is unhealthy

I have been saying, "Milk is unhealthy", for many years; and now I believe strongly that milk and all dairy products, including cheese, ice creams, sweetmeats, etc. are detrimental for our health. Let me give you some evidence.

I stopped taking milk as a drink about 10 years ago, though I was still taking other milk products like cheese, sweets, etc. occasionally. Since last year, I removed all the dairy items from my meals. My overall health in terms of blood parameters, knee pain, gas formation and bloating, etc. has improved considerably, despite me being a vegetarian since birth. So now I am technically called 'vegan', though I still end up with some dairy products like yoghurt on rare occasions. And I took this decision of not taking milk after reading enough research in medical journals on this issue.

Yesterday I met one of my good friends over lunch who shared her experience about stopping taking milk in her diet. She is around 63 years old and had complained about gas and bloating in stomach, knee pain and frequent infections due to E.coli and H. pylori about 6 months ago. She was in town since last two weeks, and was eager to meet and share her recovery. So when we met yesterday, she explained how she is free of these infections for the last 3 months, and also her gas problems and knee pain almost gone. She sounded so happy and satisfied as if she had found a solution to her health issues!

Let me elaborate why I agree with the researchers that milk is unhealthy for us.

There is this belief that milk is a complete food and an important source of protein, iron and calcium. Not only does it have no iron, milk in fact blocks the absorption of iron. As far as calcium is concerned, the ability of the body to absorb calcium from milk is barely 32%, whereas it can absorb, say, 65% from cabbage and 69% from cauliflower. As far as protein is concerned, milk has lesser protein than any vegetable.

Even if it was a complete food, no one (we humans) can digest it. The reason is : we have no enzyme to digest it. Milk is produced in the mother for the newborn baby in mammals, including us. These babies have the milk digesting enzymes. Once the baby weans off mother's milk, those enzymes are no more produced in our body. If we cannot digest the milk, how do we get any of its ingredients effectively? Apart from this, milk has something called IGF-1. All cancer studies show that when IGF-1 rises in our body we get cancer. All the IGF-1 in milk stays in the body, making us prone to cancer. Milk also has a very strong role to play in causing asthma. In fact, asthma patients all over the world are told to avoid milk and milk products.

What is specifically harmful in milk? The calcium contained in milk actually becomes a health hazard as the undigested portions of it are deposited in the urinary system and become kidney stones. Another condition milk aggravates, rather than recover/alleviates is osteoporosis or bone loss. Studies have shown that it is excess protein rather than lack of calcium that causes it. So the more milk you drink, the more you are prone to osteoporosis. Countries like Sweden that have the highest milk consumption also have the highest incidence of osteoporosis.

Another misconception is that milk helps in peptic ulcers. Ulcers are caused by the corrosion of the stomach lining. When you drink milk it gives you immediate relief from pain. But that is only temporary. Milk actually causes acidity and further destroys the stomach lining. Besides, ulcer patients who are treated with dairy products are found to be 2-6 times more prone to heart attacks. This seems only logical because milk is designed to be the food on which a calf increases its body weight 4 times over in one month! It is so naturally high in fat that it leads to obesity, the cause of all modern diseases. Ayurveda actually lists milk as one of the 5 white poisons.

People say that we have been drinking milk for centuries, particularly in India, USA, Europe, etc., but all of us did not fall sick. Now, it depends on what you call illness. Most people regard arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma, headaches and indigestion as normal for the body and look on cancer as an 'act of God' or bad luck. Nowhere in our scriptures (Hindu shastras) is there any mention of milk being drunk. There is ghee mentioned and that too for havans. Unfortunately our memories are short and the things we are most adamant about are those we know the least about. Dr Spock is the Guru when it comes to child nutrition. Lately he has apologised for having advocated milk and says children must be kept away from it.

Let's see how is milk produced now? The cow is forced into yearly pregnancies. After giving birth, she is milked for 10 months but will be artificially inseminated during her third month so that she is milked even when she is pregnant! The expected production of milk (induced by hormonal injections) is more than her body can give. So she starts breaking down body tissues to produce milk. The result is an illness called ketosis. Most of the day she is tied up in a narrow stall, usually wallowing in her own excrement. She gets mastitis because the hands that milk her are rough and unclean. She gets rumen acidosis from bad food and lameness. She is kept alive with antibiotics and hormones. When they can't produce milk, they are sent to slaughterhouses.

It is no secret that the slaughterhouses are usually made by dairy companies. No cow lives out her normal life span. She is milked, made sick and then killed. Even worse happens to her child. The male calves are tied up and starved to death, or sent to the slaughterhouses.

To get more milk continuously from the cows they are given 2 injections of oxytocin hormone every day to make the milk come faster. This gives her labour pains twice a day! Her uterus develops sores and makes her sterile prematurely. In human beings, oxytocin causes hormonal imbalances, weak eyesight, miscarriages, cancer, etc. So oxytocin is banned for use on animals, but it is still used in the dairy industry.

The question arises then, what is the substitute for milk? It can be soybean milk, almond milk, or rice milk, if we still wish to drink milk or prepare milk beverages. In terms of nutrition, a meal having vegetables, dal or lentils with rice or chapatis is a complete meal. There is absolutely no need to consume any milk for nutrition purposes!

The Sacred Art of Pausing

In our lives we often find ourselves in situations we can’t control, circumstances in which none of our strategies work. Helpless and distraught, we frantically try to manage what is happening. Our child takes a downward turn in academics and we issue one threat after another to get him in line. Someone says something hurtful to us and we strike back quickly or retreat. We make a mistake at work and we scramble to cover it up or go out of our way to make up for it. We head into emotionally charged confrontations nervously rehearsing and strategizing.

The more we fear failure the more frenetically our bodies and minds work. We fill our days with continual movement: mental planning and worrying, habitual talking, fixing, scratching, adjusting, phoning, snacking, discarding, buying, looking in the mirror.

What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience?

Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving towards any goal. The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant, for hours or for seasons of our life. We may take a pause from our ongoing responsibilities by sitting down to meditate. We may pause in the midst of meditation to let go of thoughts and reawaken our attention to the breath. We may pause by stepping out of daily life to go on a retreat or to spend time in nature or to take a sabbatical. We may pause in a conversation, letting go of what we’re about to say, in order to genuinely listen and be with the other person. We may pause when we feel suddenly moved or delighted or saddened, allowing the feelings to play through our heart. In a pause we simply discontinue whatever we are doing—thinking, talking, walking, writing, planning, worrying, eating—and become wholeheartedly present, attentive and, often, physically still.

A pause is, by nature, time limited. We resume our activities, but we do so with increased presence and more ability to make choices. In the pause before sinking our teeth into a chocolate bar, for instance, we might recognize the excited tingle of anticipation, and perhaps a background cloud of guilt and self-judgment. We may then choose to eat the chocolate, fully savoring the taste sensations, or we might decide to skip the chocolate and instead go out for a run. When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.

Of course there are times when it is not appropriate to pause. If our child is running towards a busy street, we don’t pause. If someone is about to strike us, we don’t just stand there, resting in the moment—rather, we quickly find a way to defend ourselves. If we are about to miss a flight, we race toward the gate. But much of our driven pace and habitual controlling in daily life does not serve surviving, and certainly not thriving. It arises from a free-floating anxiety about something being wrong or not enough. Even when our fear arises in the face of actual failure, loss or even death, our instinctive tensing and striving are often ineffectual and unwise.

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance.

Often the moment when we most need to pause is exactly when it feels most intolerable to do so. Pausing in a fit of anger, or when overwhelmed by sorrow or filled with desire, may be the last thing we want to do. Pausing can feel like falling helplessly through space—we have no idea of what will happen. We fear we might be engulfed by the rawness of our rage or grief or desire. Yet without opening to the actual experience of the moment, Radical Acceptance is not possible.

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises. Like awakening from a dream, in the moment of pausing our trance recedes and Radical Acceptance becomes possible.

(This article is excerpted from Tara Brach’s books "Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha" (2003)).

Living Younger, Healthier, Longer:The Telomere Effect

My friend sent me an excerpt from the new book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel (2017). It was so thought-provoking and insightful that I decided to share it on my blog. More so when I am teaching Human Genetics this semester, where we talk of structure of genes, telomeres, their functions, etc. So here is the excerpt:

How can one person bask in the sunshine of good health, while another person looks old before her time? Humans have been asking this question for millennia, and recently, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to scientists that the differences between people’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions among genes, social relationships, environments and lifestyles. Even though you are born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves. Some lifestyle factors may even turn genes on or shut them off.

Deep within the genetic heart of all our cells are telomeres, or repeating segments of noncoding DNA that live at the ends of the chromosomes. They form caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material from unraveling. Shortening with each cell division, they help determine how fast a cell ages. When they become too short, the cell stops dividing altogether. This isn’t the only reason a cell can become senescent — there are other stresses on cells we don’t yet understand very well — but short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old. We’ve devoted most of our careers to studying telomeres, and one extraordinary discovery from our labs (and seen at other labs) is that telomeres can actually lengthen.

HARMFUL THOUGHT PATTERNS

What this means: aging is a dynamic process that could possibly be accelerated or slowed — and, in some aspects, even reversed. To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres are listening to you. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

Scientists have learned that several thought patterns appear to be unhealthy for telomeres, and one of them is cynical hostility. Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. Someone with hostility doesn’t just think, “I hate to stand in long lines at the grocery store”; they think, “That other shopper deliberately sped up and beat me to my rightful position in the line!” — and then seethe. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages. They also have shorter telomeres. In a study of British civil servants, men who scored high on measures of cynical hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low. The most hostile men were 30 percent more likely to have a combination of short telomeres and high telomerase (an enzyme in cells that helps keep telomeres in good shape) — a profile that seems to reflect the unsuccessful attempts of telomerase to protect telomeres when they are too short.

These men had the opposite of a healthy response to stress. Ideally, your body responds to stress with a spike in cortisol and blood pressure, followed by a quick return to normal levels. Instead, when these men were exposed to stress, their diastolic blood pressure and cortisol levels were blunted, a sign their stress response was, basically, broken from overuse. Their systolic blood pressure increased, but instead of returning to normal levels, it stayed elevated for a long time afterward. The hostile men also had fewer social connections and less optimism. In terms of their physical and psycho-social health, they were highly vulnerable to an early disease-span, the years in a person’s life marked by the diseases of aging, which include cardiovascular disease, arthritis, a weakened immune system and more. Women tend to have lower hostility, and it’s less related to heart disease for them, but there are other psychological culprits affecting women’s health, such as depression.

Pessimism is the second thought pattern that has been shown to have negative effects on telomeres. When our research team conducted a study on pessimism and telomere length, we found that people who scored high on a pessimism inventory had shorter telomeres. This was a small study of about 35 women, but similar results have been found in other studies, including a study of over 1,000 men. It also fits with a large body of evidence that pessimism is a risk factor for poor health. When pessimists develop an aging-related illness, like cancer or heart disease, the illness tends to progress faster. Like cynically hostile people — and people with short telomeres, in general — they tend to die earlier.

Rumination — the act of rehashing problems over and over — is the third destructive thought pattern.How do you tell rumination from harmless reflection? Reflection is the natural, introspective analysis about why things happen a certain way. It may cause you some healthy discomfort, but rumination feels awful. And rumination never leads to a solution, only to more ruminating.

When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over, in the form of prolonged high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and higher levels of cortisol. Your vagus nerve, which helps you feel calm and keeps your heart and digestive system steady, withdraws its activity — and remains withdrawn long after the stressor is over. In a study, we examined daily stress responses in healthy women who were family caregivers. The more the women ruminated after a stressful event, the lower the telomerase in their aging CD8 cells (the crucial immune cells that send out proinflammatory signals when they are damaged). People who ruminate experience more depression and anxiety, which are, in turn, associated with shorter telomeres.

The fourth thought pattern is thought suppression, the attempt to push away unwanted thoughts and feelings. The late Daniel Wegener, a Harvard social psychologist, once came across this line from the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Wegener put this idea to the test through a series of experiments and identified a phenomenon he called ironic error, meaning that the more forcefully you push your thoughts away, the louder they call out for your attention.

Ironic error may also be harmful to telomeres. If we try to manage stressful thoughts by sinking the bad thoughts into the deepest waters of our subconscious, it can backfire. The chronically stressed brain’s resources are already taxed — we call this cognitive load — making it even harder to successfully suppress thoughts. Instead of less stress, we get more. In a small study, greater avoidance of negative feelings and thoughts was associated with shorter telomeres. Avoidance alone is probably not enough to harm telomeres, but it can lead to chronic stress arousal and depression, both of which may shorten your telomeres.

The final thought pattern is mind wandering. Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth (TED Talk:Want to be happier? Stay in the moment) and Daniel Gilbert (TED Talk: The surprising science of happiness) used a “track your happiness” iPhone app to ask thousands of people questions about what activity they are engaged in, what their minds are doing, and how happy they are. Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered we spend half of the day thinking about something other than what we’re doing. They also found that when people are not thinking about what they’re doing, they’re not as happy as when they’re engaged. In particular, negative mind wandering — thinking negative thoughts, or wishing you were somewhere else — was more likely to lead to unhappiness in their next moments.

Together with Eli Puterman, we studied close to 250 healthy, low-stress women who ranged from 55 to 65 years old and assessed their tendency to mind-wander. We asked them two questions: How often in the past week have you had moments when you felt totally focused or engaged in doing what you were doing at the moment? How often in the past week have you had any moments when you felt you didn’t want to be where you were, or doing what you were doing at the moment? Then we measured the women’s telomeres.

The women with the highest levels of self-reported mind-wandering had telomeres that were shorter by around 200 base pairs. (To put this in context, a typical 35-year-old has roughly 7,500 base pairs of telomeres; a 65-year-old, 4,800 base pairs.) This was regardless of how much stress they had in their lives. Some mind-wandering can be creative, of course. But when you are thinking negative thoughts about the past, you are more likely to be unhappy, and you may possibly even experience higher levels of resting stress hormones.

The negative thought patterns we’ve described are automatic, exaggerated and controlling. They take over your mind; it’s as if they tie a blindfold around your brain so you can’t see what is really going on around you. But when you become more aware of your thoughts, you take off the blindfold. You won’t necessarily stop the thoughts, but you have more clarity. Activities that promote better thought awareness include most types of meditation, along with most forms of mind-body exercises, including long-distance running.

Thought awareness can promote stress resilience. With time, you learn to encounter your own ruminations or problematic thoughts and say, “That’s just a thought. It’ll fade.” That is a secret about the human mind: We don’t need to believe everything our thoughts tell us. Or, as the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”