- [Rhonda]: Getting to the psychological stress part, you have looked a lot at various types
of psychological stressors.
And those seem to be, as you mentioned, biomarked by have shorter telomere.
But you've also looked at a variety of other types of stress, which seems to be positive,
more healthy.
And that seems to sort of buffer some of those negative effects to some degree.
Maybe talk a little bit about that.
- [Elissa]: So just to be really simplistic, when we think about stress, I know it has
a bad rap, but that's because it's toxic stress that is causing dysregulated health and depression.
And that means something really big, not necessarily what we're all suffering from that neurotic
feeling of stress and time pressure.
But rather, having traumatic things happen to you, particularly as a child, sets you
up to feel threat responses much more in your brain and your body.
So there's that kind of programming that happens in childhood.
And then there's like the chronic stressors that we have as adults which are things like
caregiving, or job stress, or domestic violence in relationships, so things that go on for
years and years.
So those are the types of things when we do see telomere shortening and inflammation.
And all the rest like work stress is not related to telomere shortness.
- [Rhonda]: Really?
- [Elissa]: Burnout is when you're really... you know, it's gone on long enough that you've
gotten this kind of profile of demoralization from it.
But not that typical adrenaline type stress that we deal with a lot.
I mean, it's not good for us, but I'm just saying that's not gonna show up as much or
more consistently, you know, what [crosstalk 00:25:47].
- [Rhonda]: What about rumination when you're like constantly thinking about something that's
maybe...
- [Elissa]: So I would say that rumination is part of chronic stress.
That is when things happen and we carry it with us, moment to moment, day to day, where
can we keep ourselves in a stress state.
So that's one of our targets in our interventions.
We really like to look at rumination, that's why meditation is so interesting because it
really targets... you know, you can't be present and be ruminating at the same time.
- [Rhonda]: Right.
So you think that... because you know, oftentimes, you know, with something high stress, if I'm
working on a project, definitely work-related, I do tend to ruminate.
But I mean, it's not like, I'm ruminating on it for a year, so that...do you think there
is a difference between that sort of short term rumination where you're distracted by
whatever projects you have to go and you're not present as much, versus like a very traumatic
type of stress that's like, you know, the financial stress or something?
- [Elissa]: I think that it's easy for us to study the big events and the chronic events
to see that showing up in our data on accelerated aging.
What you're talking about is much harder to measure and study but I absolutely do think
it matters.
And we are looking at daily stress in our current studies and seeing that people who
have this profile of more elevated...we call it perseverative cognition or perseverative
thought processes, they have accelerated biomarkers of aging, telomere length, and inflammation.
So what is that?
- [Rhonda]: What is that type of...
- [Elissa]: So you wake up and you're already worrying about the day, feeling like you can't
control it, feeling anxious, so there's a wake-up response.
Because what is waking up?
It's should be a clean slate but it's not because we have these different tendencies
to maybe jump ahead already in the future, right?
So worrying, planning, anticipating, we find that our caregivers do that a lot more.
They wake up, they're already in a stress state.
Their cortisol is higher.
- [Rhonda]: That's what I was gonna ask.
Are there any other type of markers?
- [Elissa]: Whereas some caregivers wake up and they feel positive, they're looking forward
to the day.
They feel joy.
They look better in their telomerase enzyme, in their cortisol.
So waking up states are really important to notice.
- Rhonda]: So like a pessimistic view versus optimistic view is that [crosstalk 00:28:06].
- [Elissa]: So that's absolutely related and that's kind of the bigger you know, personality
thing you take with you and you see the world in that way.
So if you're high in pessimism you just expect bad things to happen.
Pessimism is related shorter telomeres, we have that scale on our website because I think
it's so important for people to like know their style.
You can't necessarily change your style but if you know it, you can be aware of it, you
can laugh at it.
It's just going to diffuse its power more.
Like, you know, that's my pessimistic thought, that's how I work.
- [Rhonda]: I actually find that a good workout, a very good like, you know, if I do a really
hard intense run, or a sprint, or a high intensity bicycling spin class or something that if
I'm anxious, or I have a, you know, like a sort of a pessimistic view of something, absolutely
it helps alleviate that.
- [Elissa]: Yes, absolutely.
Your N of 1 is also been shown up in, you know, studies of exercise and studies by Eli
Puterman showing that exercise actually does reduce ruminative processes.