This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Making Healthy Choices: Impact Your Well-Being on a Cellular Level, with Rudolph Tanzi, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard University
Understanding Epigenetics
Epigenetics is allowing you to mitigate your risk for certain diseases or even personality traits that your parents gave you. So, you know, you’re dealt a certain set of genes from your parents and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t change your DNA, right. Let’s say you’ve inherited risk for a certain disease like cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. Where it’s not one of those rare mutations that guarantee the disease, like what we found for Alzheimer’s previously. But genetic variations that predispose you to higher risk. So how do you offset that risk? That’s where epigenetics comes in. If you make the right lifestyle choices about your diet, exercise level, stress level, ways to stave off inflammation, getting enough sleep. In this way your gene activity is going to better serve you. And we say this because if you could look at studies in mice and you can see all of the ways in which your gene activity is negatively impacted by things like stress, by toxins, pesticides, fast foods, lack of sleep, social isolation, you know, not being able to engage socially.
All of these things have adverse events on your genetics. So the thing is to live in a way that doesn’t invoke gene activities that are bad for you but it invokes gene activities that are good for you. And then you can say well so what. That’s just today. What about tomorrow? Well this is the beauty of epigenetics is that if you do the same habit every day that’s good for you, your genes are actually trained. This is what we know. The genes themselves get chemically modified to be turned on or off in networks of 100 or 1,000 genes at once, up and down, on and off, in a way so it’s automatic. So good habits not only become behaviorally automatic but genetically automatic so your genes are now serving you. That’s what we call super genes.
Managing Stress
Stress is probably the worst thing for you. If you look at studies in mice where you can cause them to be stressed in different ways. People might give them a foot shock every time they step on a certain pad or they might isolate them in the dark in a cage, you know, social isolation causes stress. Being cut off from others. Or sometimes when a mouse is just born they may take it away from the mother so the mother can’t, you know, before it’s weaned. This causes a lot of stress. All these situations you see crazy changes in gene activity, really bad changes in gene activity that promote inflammation that lead to a whole host of different disorders, eating disorders make them more prone to diabetes, to mental disorders as opposed to like social abnormalities, behavioral abnormalities. All of this from stress. And in humans you have to think, well we’re no different. I mean we’re not mice but you have to extrapolate a little bit, you know, a lot our genomes are the same and a lot of epigenetics works the same way.
So the first step is to know you’re stressed. Step out of your own brain. If you’re letting your brain use you, you’re just along for the ride. Your brain is bringing you sensations, images, feelings and thoughts. Some of them could be negative. If you identify with them then, you know, you’re not going to be able to recognize them. So I’ll give you an example. If you see a lemon you say I see a lemon. You don’t say I am a lemon. But if somebody throws that lemon at your head and hits you in the head with the lemon, you might say I’m angry. Well wait a minute. Your brain brought you the image of a lemon and you said I see a lemon. You didn’t say I am a lemon. Now you felt pain and your brain brought you the feeling of anger. That’s what the brain does, it delivers these things to you. And instead of saying oh, I feel anger. You said I am angry. And that’s the mistake.
If you identify with a negative emotion and become it and you can’t recognize that you’re there you’re stuck in it. So the first thing is what I call the mountaintop view. You sit on the mountain, observe and say what’s my brain doing right now? Okay, my brain’s bringing me anger. My brain’s bringing me fear. It’s bringing me anxiety. Once you’ve done that you have to say, what is the source of your anxiety? Why am I stressed out?
And you know what one of the biggest stressors is today is expectation. Expectation has never been higher. Thanks to email, texting and social media, we are constantly expecting others to get back to us. And others are constantly expecting us to get back to them. Instant communication. Great for the hive but really bad for your stress level. I mean most of the time we’re anxious and worrying and the reason why we’re constantly on our phones is because we feel this obligation to get back to people. While we feel that others haven’t gotten back to us and we feel discouraged or disappointed. So, think about expectation and what it’s doing in their life and try to manage expectation both of others and others of you.