Why Stress is Aging You! (Featuring Dr. Kaplan)

So the first question is, most people think of stress as purely psychological, but you treat it as a physical disease.

Why is that?

So let's back up on what stress is.

I mean, one definition of stress is when your mouth says yes and your stomach says no.

So you're doing things that you're really not, your body's telling you, screaming at you, saying, don't do this.

The other thing about stress is that stress in and of itself isn't bad.

In fact, it's absolutely necessary.

So if you're working out, you need to stress your muscles in order to build them and help them grow.

So stress is something that's important in proper dosing to be able to help us grow, keep our immune system functioning.

And in fact, if you look at little kids, they're getting infections all the time.

And part of the reason they're getting infections all the time is their immune system's revving up going, you know, let's go fight this and learn how to do this.

So that kind of a stress on the system is extremely important to help us grow and to help us stay healthy.

So stress in and of itself isn't bad.

Chronic stress is a whole nother story.

Chronic stress is where the whole system keeps being revved up.

And unfortunately, we think in terms of stress as the problem came in because you were stressed because you're in a car accident and you're recovering from the results of that.

You've had surgery and you're recovering from the results of that.

So those are unquestionably stressful events for the body.

But stress is Psychological stress has very real and severe consequences on the body if it's not dealt with in a regular way.

So basically, stress is less an idea than it is biochemistry.

So sustained cortisol and adrenaline hammer at the cells in a couple of different ways.

Your mitochondria falter and start leaking, have oxidative damage.

Telomeres, the protective caps on your chromosomes, which are like plastic tips on shoelaces, shorten, okay? Shortening telomeres is part of what ages us.

And the cell can slip into senescence, becoming a zombie-type cell that spews out a lot of inflammatory factors but doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

You know, there's a landmark study dating all the way back to 2004 by Dr. Epple and Dr. Blackburn that found mothers caring for chronically ill children, okay, and I deal with a lot of that because we see a lot of pans-pandas in our practice.