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Meditation can make your cells younger
By Jerry Brownstein
Steven Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), has spent several decades investigating the connection between our emotions and our biology. He and his team of researchers have found proof that our level of happiness directly affects the function of our DNA and helps our cells to remain younger. Their studies show that stressful (unhappy) experiences increase the inflammation in your immune cells and weaken your ability to make healthy new cells. In other words, when you are stressed and unhappy your cells feel those emotions, and this causes disease and aging in your body. So how can you make your cells more “happy”? Cole says that “One way is through mind-body practices, like meditation, which have been shown to cultivate positive and happy cells.”
Previous research has linked meditation to many health benefits, but now we are finding out that it can actually change your DNA. These new studies have found that meditation affects the ends of the DNA known as the telomeres, which act as protective caps for your genes. The longer the telomere, the greater the protection for the DNA, and the better the cell will replicate itself (thus the younger you will remain). Telomeres tend to get shorter over time, and this is the main reason why our cells and our bodies age. However, this new research has shown that telomeres, like immune cells, seem to respond to emotional cues. Negative external conditions like stress tend to age our cells faster because the shortening of the telomeres is accelerated. According to Dr Cole, “stress-reducing activities like meditation can slow down or even reverse the loss of telomere length, thus making cells function as though they were younger.”
