The final conclusion is that my friends and I have gradually reached the age of 30, and the elders around us have gradually retired and gradually entered old age. Such unfortunate things will be more and more in the future. Therefore, recently, I also began to pay attention to health knowledge unconsciously. What inspired me was an original English book about genetic knowledge, Telomere Effect, which was interpreted by teacher Wan Weigang. His authors are Elizabeth Blackburn and Erica Epel.
This book reveals to us that what directly affects the aging process of human beings is something called "telomere" in our body, and the anti-aging method is also related to telomere.
As we all know, our body is made up of countless cells, which grow and renew through division. Therefore, from the perspective of molecular biology, people get old because some cells in the body no longer divide, or can be said to be no longer updated.
The limit of the number of cell divisions is determined by telomeres.
As we all know, each cell in the human body has 23 pairs of chromosomes. Chromosome contains a person's complete genetic information, which is composed of DNA and protein. DNA stands for genetic information coding and is a double helix structure composed of base pairs. The so-called gene is a DNA sequence on the chromosome. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes.
The DNA on telomere is not involved in coding, and the sequence is fixed. You can think of chromosomes as shoelaces, and telomeres are the plastic heads of shoelaces. Wrap your shoelaces. In other words, the role of telomeres is to protect DNA sequences during cell division. Every time a cell divides, the chromosome is copied. Every time a chromosome is copied, the DNA in telomeres is completely copied, but the DNA in telomeres is less and less every time. This means that telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides. When telomere is short to a certain extent, its protective effect on chromosomes is gone, chromosomes can't replicate normally, and cells can't divide. In this way, the essential reason why people get old is that telomeres become shorter.
According to further research by scientists, a person's life span is closely related to the length of telomeres and the speed at which telomeres shorten.
Just like driving a long-distance bus. How far this tank of oil can go depends not only on the capacity of your tank, but also on how low your fuel consumption is.
Next, I will share with you how to prolong life from two aspects: the length of telomeres and the speed of shortening.
First of all, the initial length of telomere mainly depends on heredity, and telomere length can be inherited without gene, which is called "direct transmission". That is to say, if parents' telomeres become shorter during pregnancy due to acquired environmental reasons, their children's telomeres will become shorter at birth even if neither of them carries any genes that can shorten telomeres.
Therefore, in order to make the child's initial telomeres long enough, parents must keep them long enough during pregnancy. In other words, make sure your telomeres shorten slowly enough before the baby is born.
Therefore, whether you want to live longer or let the next generation live longer, you must try your best to make your telomeres as short as possible.
So what causes our telomeres to shorten faster?
The answer given in this book is long-term serious negative emotions. The book mainly introduces three kinds.
Suppose you are a middle-aged man with a strong personality. Your work has been a bit bumpy recently, and the people around you don't cooperate well with you. You don't think anything is right. After a day's work, you come home with discontent. My wife is cooking, and you notice many useless advertisements on the kitchen table. You thought to yourself, when you left in the morning, you told your wife to throw away the advertising garbage. Why didn't she throw it away? You think your wife is too lazy, so you blame her.
This is hostility. You only saw small advertisements. Can't you see that she is cooking? The same is true in daily life. It is normal to complain about the long queue, but if you think that the long queue is because everyone in the queue is wrong and doing the right thing for you, it is not normal.
Men are the majority of people with strong hostility. Hostility will make your relationship with the people around you worse, and you will fall into a more indulgent lifestyle, such as overeating, smoking and drinking. Your health will get worse and your telomeres will get shorter.
There are more women among pessimists. Pessimism means that there is always a negative expectation for things. For example, two people walk together in the Woods and find a road that they have never walked before. Normal people may want to explore this road, think it is fun to take a road that has never been taken, and there may be some surprises. However, when pessimists encounter this uncertain situation, they always think the bad side. This road may be full of dangers, including wild animals and bad people. We can imagine that when a pessimistic person is under pressure, because he always expects that he can't handle it well, he must feel more threats than challenges. Pessimists do have shorter telomeres.
Why are people pessimistic? Pessimism is a kind of psychological protection to protect you from disappointment. If you expect well in advance and the result is not good, you will be disappointed. Therefore, some people prefer to be pessimistic in order not to be disappointed.
Man is the only animal species that doesn't "live in the present". Other animals are thinking about what they are doing now. Only people can think about one thing at the same time. Some people have done serious large-scale research and found that what people think in 50% of the day is not what they are experiencing. The problem is that in many cases, people think negative things.
There is a word in English called "meditation", which is translated into "meditation" in Chinese dictionary, but meditation is not an ordinary meditation, but a negative thing. You know it's useless to think about it, and it's not worth thinking about, but you just can't remember it. Meditation weakens your telomeres.
The above three negative emotions seriously affect the length of life, so how to overcome these negative emotions?
You have to jump out of this game, realize that this is a bad mood and label it. Then you can't avoid it. You have to accept that you have this emotion.
For example, you have done something wrong and regretted it very much, so you have been blaming yourself for it. This is a typical rumor. Then when your self-blame comes up, you can say to yourself with a self-deprecating attitude: "How have I often blamed myself recently? How interesting! " This strategy of dealing with negative emotions in a relaxed way will gradually disappear.
An important principle of meditation is to pay attention to the present. If you concentrate on what you are doing, you will devote yourself to your work. When you eat it, you will realize how delicious the meal is, and other thoughts will naturally disappear. This is why we often hear that people will "cover up" their inner sadness with their dedicated work. Actually, this is a fact.
The study found that people who can't concentrate on thinking forever, even if they don't feel any pressure, their telomeres are 200 base pairs shorter than others on average.
"The goal of life" is not chicken soup for the soul. Studies have proved that it has tangible benefits. Some people have done research on retired people, and the survey found that the risk of depression will increase by 40% after retirement. Why is this happening?
Because most old people have basically achieved their life goals before retirement, or feel that they are too old to achieve them, they give up setting new life goals. This causes retired old people to become aimless, and most people daydream every day. Over time, depression appeared, and negative emotions began to catalyze telomere shortening, which eventually affected life expectancy.
Therefore, no matter at which stage of your life, you must find your own life goals, such as "becoming an excellent speaker", "changing the entertainment environment of children in the community", or "traveling all over China" and so on.
Therefore, it doesn't matter how much stress you have to deal with in life, what matters is how you deal with them. Whether you take the initiative to accept the challenge or passively admit defeat directly determines your mood and life span.
Finally, I hope every friend can master the methods of guiding emotions and prolong life.