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How to carry out establishing warm social relationships and coping with stress

Think Happy Thoughts
Optimism, adaptability and a willingness to try new things are all personality traits that seem to be linked to better aging. This became obvious during something called “the Nun Study”, which for three decades collected data from the School Sisters of Notre Dame living in Mankato, Minn., as well as elsewhere in the US.

Extensive family, medical and social history from the nuns was available for the study and helped aid in finding answers. The goal of the Nun Study was to determine the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain diseases, as well as the mental and physical disability associated with old age in order to try and find methods of prevention for such ailments.

Among many notable findings has been a study of handwritten autobiographies from 180 nuns, who wrote them, on average, at the age of 22. The writings were scored for emotional content and compared with survival rates from the age of 75 to 95. What researchers noticed is that the nuns who wrote with the most positive attitude at a very young age were 2½ times more likely to be alive in late life than the sisters who came across with a more negative point of view at a young age.

What’s notable about the Nun Study is that they all lived very similar lifestyles limiting the potential variables — the food they eat, the quality of medical care they receive, the life they lead — and that’s why the differences are so striking. Consistently, the nuns who age well are those with distinct personality traits such as a sense of humor and adaptability. Many of these nuns still developed illnesses and health problems associated with aging — but those who aged the most successfully were those who adapted to each new challenge, including illness or disability.

Staving off mental decline
The Nun study, as well as others, has also taught us that stress management may be particularly important in staving off mental decline.

Consider what happens to the brain during times of stress. For about the first 30 minutes of a stressful event, the body boosts glucose delivery to the brain. The short-term effect of this is that senses are sharpened and memory is improved. But if the stress lasts longer, the body calculates that all that extra glucose is probably more urgently needed by muscles engaged in fighting or fleeing. And so, even if you are actually just sitting in a chair stressing out over a job deadline and you really want that extra brainpower, the body shifts gears anyway and stress hormones begin to inhibit glucose delivery to the brain.

The impact of this is readily apparent in the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory and learning. Stress hormones not only inhibit the development of neurons in the hippocampus, but they kill neurons as well.

The end result of all this carnage is a shrunken hippocampus. Notably, strokes, long-term depression and trauma can all shrink the hippocampus. And, as brain studies of the nuns after their deaths have shown, a smaller hippocampus is also a tell-tale signal of Alzheimer’s disease.

What Do We Do About It?

Clearly stress takes a significant physical toll on our bodies. Complicating matters is the fact that not only does stress appear to accelerate aging, but also the older we get, the longer it takes for our bodies to turn off the stress response. So while managing stress is important at any age, it’s absolutely crucial as we get older.

So how do we do it?  Follow the basics and add coping skills.
The first step, of course, is to cover the basics — eat well, manage your weight and exercise. If you take care of yourself, you’re essentially giving stress less to work with — a healthy body is more resilient against the onslaught of stress.

But that’s not enough. At some point in life, everyone faces chronic stress — whether it’s uncertainty at work, in a marriage or about health. Successful agers have faced the same stressors as the rest of us, they just have better coping skills. The good news is that the rest of us can change and learn better coping strategies.

Seek control when you can
Successful agers typically feel in control of their day-to-day lives, and they don’t fret about issues they can’t control. In his book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” Dr. Sapolsky cites a nursing-home study in which one group of residents was given far more control over their daily lives. They were given responsibility for meals, social activities and even caring for plants in their rooms. Soon, those residents became noticeably more active, more engaged in social activities and were generally happier. Death rates among the residents given more control were half that of other residents during the study period.

Information can relieve stress.
Stress doesn’t take as much of a toll if we can predict it. For instance, in one study nervous public speakers loosened up after a few days of the task. They knew what to expect, and they were less stressed. In rat studies, animals given food on a predictable schedule become highly stressed when given the same amount of food on a random schedule.

The lesson is to seek accurate information in the face of a stressful situation. If you are worried about a job layoff and uncertainty at work, arm yourself with information about the job market and opportunities elsewhere. If you are facing cancer, long-term fears are certain to cause stress, but you can minimize the overall stress of the illness by learning about treatments and side effects so you know what to expect.

Keep friends and family close.
Here’s one for you.  Baboons that take part in social grooming have lower blood pressure. Breast-cancer patients who join support groups have lower stress-hormone levels. And nervous public speakers had lower blood pressure if they had a friend in the audience. Study after study shows social support makes a measurable difference in how we cope with stress and how we age.

Exercise you hate won’t help as much as exercise you like.
Exercise is the solution for pretty much every health problem, but it especially makes sense in dealing with stress. That’s because the stress response is all about boosting energy to the muscles, so using those muscles during exercise is the obvious outlet for releasing stress.

But exercise, by definition, is a form of stress. If you overdo it, you’re not helping yourself. At the same time, finding an exercise you like not only will increase the likelihood you will stick with it, but also may give you more benefit. Studies show that rats freely allowed to trot on the exercise wheel have lower stress hormones. But rats forced onto the wheel are stressed by the experience and end up with a high stress response.

The good news is that it’s never too late to reap the benefits of exercising. In fact, the older you are, the more immediate benefit you get from exercise.

Get enough sleep.
When you start to lose sleep, your body responds the way it always does in a crisis — it activates the stress response. It has been shown that sleep deprivation increases stress load. Study subjects who get only four hours of sleep for several nights had higher nighttime levels of cortisol and blood glucose — indicating higher stress load. But let participants sleep as long as 10 to 12 hours a night and the stress load disappears.

Pick and choose your stress relief wisely.
In the end, everyone deals with stress and aging differently. Stress-management classes, meditation, massage, yoga, religious services — all of them can relieve stress in the right person and cause stress in the wrong one. A person with a cynical outlook on life might find a touchy-feely stress-management course discomfiting. Few experiences are more stressful than trying to keep up with a fast-paced aerobics class — but some people love the experience.

Successful agers carry out all of the above healthy behaviors, but each person picks and chooses what works best for him or her.

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