Adore Yoga Blog

Stress ages you. It’s something we’ve always suspected, but a landmark study in 2004 proved it. 

Inside our cells are structures called Telomeres. Telomeres are the caps at the ends of chromosomes, the molecules that carry genes. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter until eventually they get so short that the cells can’t divide any more and they die. As more and more cells reach the end of their telomeres and die, we experience the effects of ageing - muscles weaken, skin wrinkles, eyesight and hearing fade, organs fail, and thinking abilities diminish.

The 2004 study, conducted by University of California at San Francisco, showed that chronic stress speeds up the shrivelling of the telomeres. But it gets worse. The study also showed that chronic stress lowers levels of telomerase, an enzyme that helps to rebuild the telomeres, slowing down the rate at which they shorten and thereby lengthening the life of the cells and staving off the effects of ageing.

It ALSO increases levels of oxidative stress – that’s the rate at which free radicals that damage DNA, including Telomeres.

The study compared test results of a group of mothers with disabled children with a group of demographically similar women whose children did not have a disability. 

The women with disabled children, who had experienced many years of stress, were shown to have a faster rate of cell death due to telomere destruction, lower levels of telomerase, the enzyme that builds telomeres back up AND higher levels of oxidative stress. 

The chronically stressed mothers were aging at a much faster rate the less stressed group.

Why Yoga is your secret weapon against anti-aging 

Doctors and other health professionals are realising what yogis have known for centuries – yoga is one of the most effective stress-busting techniques. The Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas recently compared breast cancer patients who did stretching exercises with patients who did yoga, along with a control group who did no exercise.

Women in both the yoga group and stretching group reported less fatigue than the non-exercise group. But those who practiced yoga reported lower stress levels, greater benefits to general health and were more likely to perceive positive life changes from their cancer experience than the other groups. 

Now going back to that 2004 study of chronically stressed mothers, there’s a crucial point made about this positive perception. The Washington Post reported on the findings of the University of California study like this:

“A key factor appears to be people's perception of how much stress they are under, the researchers found. The greater a woman's perception of her stress in the study, the worse she scored on all these factors. Compared with women with the lowest levels of perceived stress, women with the highest perceived stress had telomeres equivalent to someone 10 years older, the researchers found.”

Your PERCEPTION of stress can age you by 10 years! This goes some way towards explaining why yoga is so effective. 

Yoga works on the WHOLE person – body & mind, not just the physical. As well as relaxing, strengthening and toning your body, Yoga changes the way you feel about yourself, it changes how you deal with challenges, it changes your perception and responses to the world around you.

Here’s what makes yoga your stress-busting super hero:

1. Yoga makes you mindful. When you concentrate hard on coordinating body and breath together, it shuts out all the mind chatter that is the source of your stress. Through yoga, you learn how to focus your busy, whirling mind, short-circuiting destructive thought patterns that cause stress.
 

2. Yoga changes how you breathe. The way you breathe has a direct impact on your nervous system. Calm, slow breathing triggers the ‘rest & digest’ response of the parasympathetic nervous system. Rapid, short breathing triggers the ‘fight or flight’ response of the sympathetic nervous system. If your ‘fight or flight’ response is triggered too often, you experience chronic symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, poor digestion and, of course, all the early aging signs that come from premature cell destruction. Regulate your breath and you regulate your nervous system. 

3. Yoga makes your body relax, which in turn relaxes your mind. Physical tension is dissolved as your muscles stretch and contract in a calm and controlled way during the poses. When your body relaxes, your mind soon follows 

4. Yoga teaches you to surrender to the moment. You can’t change the past and you can’t control the future. Yoga teaches you that it’s ok to just be present in the here and now. That’s not to say we should forget about the future! But when we can be truly present, we’re able to make better life choices based on how things REALLY are, rather than making knee-jerk decisions based on past experiences or projections of how the future might be. It’s a BIG relief to let go, relinquish control and just be. If you practice doing that regularly, you find that everyday stresses have a lot less impact on you.

If you’re looking for the secret of eternal youth, or maybe just a way to age beautifully, yoga could be your best beauty treatment. Join our monthly Yoga Stressbuster class, 3rd Friday of every month at 10.30am, Military Rd studio. Book now.

I’m a yoga teacher, so I know a fair bit about yoga techniques for stress management. I’ve taught stress reduction techniques to executives in large corporations. I’ve helped people with stress related diseases reduce their symptoms. I’ve devised and taught full day workshops devoted to yogic relaxation. So, I was completely astounded when my hair started falling out and my GP suggested it was due to stress. “But I’m a yoga teacher, “ I protested.  However, even as I said it, I knew she was right and that somewhere along the line, I’d stopped taking my own advice. Sure, I’ve been practicing yoga several times a week, but have I really been adhering to the key principles of Swadhyaya (self observation) and Ishwarapranidana (surrender)? No.

I’ve had a busy year. Apart from running two yoga studios, parenting a 2yr old and a 5yr old and managing the usual ups and downs of family life, I thought it would be a great idea to move house and start a whole new business, too. I met each new challenge in the same way – battle on. Whether it was a sick child, a partner’s redundancy, tradesmen in the kitchen or a blow out in the budget for my new business, I just soldiered on.  I felt that if I dropped one of the many balls I’d been juggling, the whole show would screech to a halt, so I kept going and used my yoga practise as a kind of band-aid. 

The thing with band aids is that they’re not a permanent solution so eventually something had to give and in my case, it was my hair. Great handfuls of it.  After the reality check from the GP, I realized I had to get serious about reducing my stress levels. I tell my students every day to bring their attention back to the breath, but it seems I’d stopped listening to my own. I created a program of pranayama for myself, 15 minutes morning and evening, plus regular times to check in with my breath during the day. On desk-bound days, I set my computer to alert me once an hour when I’d stop work, close my eyes and listen to my breath.

The difference this made was palpable. I felt better the moment I focused on my breath.  Slowly I became aware of the stress ‘flash-points’ in my day and used breath awareness to help me navigate these challenges.  I’m doing it now. As soon as I feel my shoulders tense up when I’m typing (or driving), I check in with my breath, relax my jaw and take a few breaths into my belly. It’s not a magic ‘fix’, but it helps me recognize tension when it first creeps up and gives me a tool to prevent it from overwhelming me.

Practising simple breath awareness techniques is an easy way to recognize and reduce tension and an effective step towards a regulating the stress response. Here are two very simple techniques that can be used any time to check in with the breath and start to dissolve stress:

Belly breathing

Lie down on your back and place the palms of your hands on your lower belly. As you inhale, breathe into your palms and feel them rise. When you exhale, just let go of the breath and allow the belly to passively fall back to the starting position. As you continue to breathe into your palms, consciously relax your face, jaw and shoulders. Continue 12-24 breaths.

Breath awareness practise

Now place your hands down by your sides and bring your attention to the tips of the nostrils, where the air passes in and out of the body. As you inhale, become aware of the feeling of the cool air passing over your nostrils as it enters your body. As you exhale, be aware of the warmer, moister air that passes over your nostrils as it leaves your body. Repeat for 12-24 breaths.

With either of these techniques, you may find your mind wanders off. That’s fine, it’s what your brain is programmed to do. The trick is to catch it when it does that and bring it back to observing the breath. These simple techniques only takes a few minutes, but, practised regularly, can make the world of difference. They can, quite literally, help you keep your hair on!