The benefits of mindfulness on your health & wellbeing

Many of life’s demands can cause stress, particularly work, relationships and money problems. When we feel fearful or anxious, our body's hard-wired response, evolved over millennia of dangerous encounters in wild, is the "fight or flight" reaction. The problem is that these days, probably the two worst things we could do when faced with, for example, an impending deadline, or an overbearing relative is (1) punch them/someone or (2) run away...

Stress-proofing

Practising meditation and/or yoga, particularly with an emphasis on awareness and mindfulness, has been shown to be an incredibly effective way of stress-proofing ourselves. It does this in two ways: firstly by providing us with a little oasis of quiet in amongst the business of the day (some me-time); and secondly by teaching us how to see things clearly. There's a huge difference between conscious and unconscious stress. The great Zen master Hakuin compared people who were conscious and aware to water whereas ordinary people are like ice. Our mindfulness is like the warm sunlight that can melt away the perceived stress. It's our relationship to the feeling that changes.

Science has been making some great progress in understanding the why exactly lowering our stress levels boosts our health and wellbeing. Let me talk about just a few of the recent discoveries.

Tell me about telomers

Telomers: chromosome caps

Why of course... Telomers are a repeating DNA pattern that act as a kind of protective cap on our chromosomes, shielding their ends from potential damage each time our cells divide and the DNA is copied. In the 1980s an enzyme called telomerase was discovered that can protect and rebuild telomeres. Even so, our telomeres dwindle over time, and when they get too short, our cells start to malfunction and lose their ability to divide – a phenomenon that is now recognised as a key process in ageing. The discovery of telomers won Elizabeth Blackburn the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

As detailed in this lovely article, Blackburn and her group began a study back in 2000 to test the effect of stress on telomer length (at the time genes were seen as being the most important factor, so at the time this idea was highly controversial). The results from their pilot study showed that the more stressed the participants were the shorter their telomeres and the lower their levels of telomerase. Scientists are always marvelled when they manage to connect real lives and experiences to things happening on the molecular level, and in this study they'd done it! Feeling stressed doesn’t just damage our health – it literally ages us!

Researchers have since linked perceived stress to shorter telomeres in Alzheimer’s caregivers, victims of domestic abuse and early life trauma, and people with major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

How does it work? The presence of the stress hormone cortisol seems to reduce the activity of telomerase, while oxidative reactions and inflammation (all physiological effects of the stress response) appear to erode telomeres directly. Age-related conditions from osteoarthritis, diabetes and obesity to heart disease, Alzheimer’s and stroke have all been linked to short telomeres.

In one follow-up project, Blackburn and her colleagues sent participants on a three-month meditation retreat, and found that afterwards they had higher levels of telomerase than the control group. A study in 2013 of dementia caregivers found that, after practising 12 minutes of meditation a day for eight weeks, they had significantly higher telomerase activity than a control group. And in another study in 2012 Epel et al. measured the association between telomere length and peoples' natural level of mindfulness. They found those who reported high mind wandering (i.e. lower mindfulness) had shorter telomeres, even after adjusting for stress.

So stress and ageing are clearly very related. No wonder Wallace et al. back in 1982 found that people who'd been practising meditation for five years were physiologically (as shown by their blood pressure, vision, hearing, and skin elasticity) up to 12 years younger than their non-meditating counterparts! For more on that, see this article showing some photographic evidence, or just look at any photo of a prime minister or president – in just a few years they go from looking fresh and vibrant to grey, haggard, and worn out!

New genes, new neurons

In another study, a group based in Massachusetts took blood samples from a group of 19 people who had regular meditation practice, and 19 others who never meditated, and ran genomic analyses (identification of genomic features such as DNA sequence, gene expression, etc) of the blood. They found that the meditating group had suppressed more than twice the number of stress-related genes than the non-meditating group. This is an incredible result, since the more these stress-related genes are expressed, the more the body will have a stress response. This study is in the field of epigenetics, which I've written about before.

Lastly, I just wanted to mention this article detailing some work done here in London that found that increased levels of cortisol seems to decrease neurogenesis (the ability of the brain to produce new brain cells) in adults. Studies have shown that these adult-born neurons appear to have a role in the regulation of stress by possibly augmenting the role of the hippocampus in controlling the stress reaction and/or inhibiting the amygdala (the region of brain responsible for the fear reaction). Neurogenesis has also been linked to brain plasticity.

So, it's never too late to start practising mindfulness and meditation, and slowing down – possibly even reversing – the ageing process!

My next 8-week course in Mindfulness for Health & Wellbeing will start on Friday 16th January, and I'm now taking bookings. See my website for further details.

 

I'd love to hear from you

If you've noticed that, like me, your mindfulness practice is leaving you looking younger and more radiant, your skin is shiny and there's more of a healthy glow about you, I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

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Karma and epigenetics - exciting stuff!

In this post I wanted to talk a little about karma and the exciting (pretty new) field of epigenetics. My knowledge on both subjects is a little shaky, but it seems that new research in epigenetics is showing hints of how the effects of events from our lives and those of our ancestors may be passed down through our genes.

Firstly lets look at what karma is. The idea of karma was around in India before the Buddha, but it was the Buddha who explained and formulated it in the form we have it today.

According to Buddhist philosophy, there are five orders or laws of nature and mind:

• physical order/law: winds, rains, seasons, time
• organic order: characteristics of plants, their tastes, cells, genes, heredity
• karmic order: I'll come on to this one more below
• universe order: gravitation and other similar laws of nature, the natural phenomena occurring at the advent of birth
• mind order: thoughts, consciousness, will, intention.

In this traditional view-point, the law of karma is only one of these five that govern the unfolding of the universe.

Why is there inequality in this world? According to these laws, inequality is due not only to heredity (organic order), environment (physical order), "nature and nurture", but also to karma. Karma is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. Karma is the law of moral causation. (So says Wikipedia) any action is a "seed" in the mind that will sprout into the appropriate result when met with the right conditions - be that "good" or "bad". It's equivalent to saying "what goes around, comes around."

In Buddhism, 'samsara' is the continual repetitive cycle of birth and death that arises from grasping and fixating on a self and experiences. (Here birth and death traditionally refers to re-birth but it could also be thought of as periods/times/events within our life.) This is what gives rise to feelings of dissatisfaction or dis-ease with the world. The root cause of samsara is our belief in a single, independently-existing self, which gives rise to wanting (attachment), aversion and delusion/confusion - and it's these that create karma.

The Buddha taught of a way of breaking out of this repetitive cycle through wise/enlightened/true intention, speech, action, livelihood, thoughts, etc. This is how we neutralise all that built-up karma and start along a different path.

Ok, so you can take this or leave it. But one thing that has sparked my interest recently as an ex-scientist is the field of epigenetics and how that relates to this idea of karma.

We all know about how DNA is inherited from your mother and father. Our genome (our "genetic makeup") is encoded in DNA (or sometimes RNA) and includes all our genes that control biological traits such as what eye/hair colour, how many limbs you have(!), blood type, your pre-disposition to certain diseases/illnesses, etc.

But we now know that genes aren't a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from one generation to the next, as was once thought. Epigenetics has shown that genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment.

Epigenetics is the is the study of changes in your genes caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. Epigenetic processes do not change the DNA sequence, but tell your genes to switch on or off, like a light switch. For example, in cell differentiation, it tells certain cells that they are a part of your skin (not a neuron or a liver cell), even though (for the most part) they all have the same DNA.

So genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment, huh!

Here's an example: according to this great article, "a woman's diet during pregnancy seems to have a major impact on her baby's epigenetic tags. Prenatal diets that are low in folic acid, vitamin B-12, and other nutrients containing "methyl groups" — a set of molecules that can tag genes and cause epigenetic changes — have been linked to an increased risk of asthma and brain and spinal cord defects in children. Stress, too, can alter fetal epigenetic tags. Pregnant women who were traumatized at the World Trade Center on 9/11 were far more likely than other women to give birth to infants who reacted with unusual levels of fear and stress when faced with loud noises, unfamiliar people, or new foods."

Changes to our genes by epigenetic processes can also happen during our life (i.e. they're not just inherited). For example twins may inherit a gene that predisposes them to cancer, but only one will develop the disease because diet, toxins, or smoking turn on that gene. According to Andrew Feinberg, director of Johns Hopkins University's Epigenetics Center, even eating foods rich in methyl groups — such as soybeans, red grapes, and green tea — might protect against disease by silencing detrimental genes.

So it seems we can control anything up to 70% of our genetic makeup with things like lifestyle, diet, exercise, what we put on our skin, stress, etc. Isn't that exciting?!

As far as I can see this is the closest science has come to karma. How we live our life - the actions we take and environments we put ourselves in - can have a direct effect on our genes through these epigenetic processes. If negative actions lead to negative consequences for our genes, then positive ones must lead to positive consequences. If that's not karma I don't know what is!

"Enlightened (wise) action leaves no wake" - Zen Master Jiyu-Kennett

If you're interested in some positive experiences in south London, why not come down to one of my zen yoga classes, or sign up for a course in mindfulness!

 

I'd love to hear from you

If you're interested in this topic of epigenetics and how it connects to the Buddhist concept of karma, I'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

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