So what is a “telemere” anyway?  And why would I chose to talk about them in my first blog.  Well, learning more about telemeres has gotten my attention in a major way because of the latest research in the area of stress.

Telemeres are the very tips of our chromosomes, and are the markers of aging (they are likened to the plastic end of our shoe laces).  The shortening or lengthening of the telemeres is amazingly conditional on the very things we chose to do in our lives.  Only until recently did scientists verify this fact.

This is so important in many ways. Chronic stress is damaging to our cells, our bodies and therefore our lives.  The newest information about the telemeres and stress is in a wonderful book called Stress Less by Thea Singer. In it, she cites several studies indicating that chronic stress shortens the length of our telemeres and therefore ages us quicker and makes us more vulnerable to disease.

Knowledge is power…isn’t it?  What I intend to do in these blogs is provide that knowledge so that you will be awakened to the reality of this and start measures to counter and manage stress.  I like to look at this as a major step to empowerment.

Being a believer in the Law of Attraction, I am particularly interested in the impact of negative thoughts on the brain and our cells.  These negative thoughts are not only prevalent and pervasive (we think 40,000 to 60,000 a day, most are inner critic negative thoughts) but are also addictive.   Now there’s an addiction that truly is damaging more than we ever thought.

“It has been said that stress is 10 percent what happens to us in life–the uncontrollable part–and 90 percent how we react to those circumstances” (Elisa Epel, PhD).  We do have many options to use in dealing with stress.

In my experience, there are immediate behavioral measures we can take and also measures such as exercise and meditation which seem to have a definite buffering effect when stress occurs.  These I will discuss in more detail later.  The most important matter is thinking.  You really are what you think about most of the time.  Chronic worrying is allowing oneself to play a negative movie over and over in the mind which triggers in real time a stress chemical soup to occur in the body.

The chronic worrier takes it on as their job.  What I have found is that worrying is passed down from one generation to the next too.  There is also a superstitious part of worry which seems to have a lot of us hooked.  In other words, if I worry a lot about this happening (and stress myself to the max), then it may not happen.  So what I tell these folks is to set aside 30 minutes a day and do the “worry work”, then go about your real business of living.  Just understand…the body/mind knows no difference between reality and imagination…so as you dwell on all that negativity, your body is reacting biochemically just like it was happening in real life.  Tired yet?

Now back to the Tememere.  This is a fascinating area and one too of many persuasions.  There are skeptics of course who despite some very excellent studies still feel that aging especially is due to many factors including how well our parents aged.  Still..as expressed by Thea Singer, there is a gathering storm of new evidence which makes it harder and harder to discount the argument that telemere length is a reliable biomarker of aging, even in the qualifier world of science.

So, what can you do right this moment, to deal with stress and it’s negative effects? I would suggest that you begin to monitor your thoughts.  Awareness is the first step to changing anything.  Then begin to focus less on those negative, inner critic and stressful thoughts and begin to focus more on more life affirming/self affirming thoughts.  If you are a worrier, do what I mention above, and set aside a period of time to worry.

If you are worrying about things over which you have no control, practice ‘turning it over’ to God or your Higher Power.   Saying a  prayer for whoever you are worried about does much more good and, perhaps a lot of good, than focusing on all the negative castastrophic  thoughts.  And, if you are a believer in the Law of Attraction, why put the negative out there…you just are attracting more of it.   It takes 30 days to make a habit and 30 days to break a habit.  Try this for 30 days and you will begin to feel better. If you have other measures to work with your thinking, I would love to hear from you.