Stress and long and longevity go hand in hand.

0:00 Speaker 1 Well with us this morning is doctor Peter Milos, and you know our model live long and prosper and he is teaching us on what not to do well. Doctor Peter, give us the advice for this Sunday morning.

0:17 Speaker 2 Well, today we’re going to talk about a very important topic and how stress is involved in the aging process. And we now know that chronic stress causes accelerated aging, and chronic aging in some studies is thought to speed up aging by nine to nineteen years and that’s a lot wow. Stress now we know is associated with heart

0:40 disease asthma, obesity, stress eating, diabetes, headaches, depression, anxiety, and gut problems like rital bowels syndrome. And when people are stressed out, that’s one of the things they start complaining about. They feel that distress in their stomach. And that has to do with the fight flight mechanism, which basically means when we’re stressed out, what happens is the blood starts

1:04 leaving your stomach and going into your arms, into your legs, and anticipation of a fight or a trauma. And that’s why in stress, anticipation of trauma, we think we’re going to be attacked by a wild animal or getting stabbed by an adversary, or getting yelled at and screamed that by a husband or a wife. It all activates our

1:24 flight or flight and our epinefrin and adrenaline. But what they found interestingly is in anticipation of getting traumatized or bleeding, our clotting system goes into overdrive and which helps us to stop bleeding. The problem is that clotting system and overdrive is probably why when people are stressed out they get more heart attacks and strokes, because your body is

1:45 preparing for a trauma anticipation and your play let’s start going into overdrive. And the reason why again our stomach feels that blood rush because it’s leaving our intestine to go into our arms so we can fight, and our legs so we can run and fight. And the gut brain connection is why some people throw up when they’re

2:05 stressed out, because the body’s trying to get rid of any food so it can focus on fight or flight and not focus on suggestion. And what we’re finding out is we’re really a big bag of chemicals and we live in a place called the hormetic zone. And what hormesis is is too little or too much of anything

2:22 and affect us Like too little sodium you can get mental status change. Too high sodium you can get a stroke, or your blood pressure goes up. So we live in this very delicate strong a little bit of stress, like for example, that’s why people do cold plunges, and they stress the body a little bit and it turns on

2:40 the longevity genes and tells the body, hey, shape up outside. It’s cold or it’s too hot. Well, there’s not enough food. You better start getting on board and start healing and repairing. And that’s what hormesis is all about. So the bottom line is that stress affects us. And now because we have blood tests, we can find out how our blood

3:01 is affected. Our cortisol level is effected and goes up in stress. Our insulin level is different in stress. Our seer reactive protein, which is an inflammatory marker, our ESR, this sedimentation rate can go up in stress. So it turns out that moderating stress is very important. And as recently, you and I discussed over dinner about that centarian and

3:24 one of the things she said that many of the people in blue zones, they avoid stressful people. So you have to learn how to be very grateful when you have some good friends who don’t stress you out. And good relationships are very important for longevity, and sometimes, unfortunately even relatives can drive us a little bit.

3:46 Speaker 1 So, in otherwords, you want to live long. Besides eating the right foods, et cetera, et cetera, stay away from relatives, stay away from friends that were going to get that tend to give you stress.

3:59 Speaker 2 Yet everyone knows that a Thanksgiving dinner there is always those one or two people who will give you. What our Italian friends say is ajita, and you want to avoid ajita al cause, and as our Yiddish friends would say, you want to avoid service. We just want to try to be happy, healthy, eat healthy, sleeping properly to recover.

4:19 We’ve learned that side sleeping is better for you because the brain glymphatic system, which turns out to be the cleaning mechanism of our brain, works much better when we side sleep versus sleeping on our backs. There’s a lot of women who like to sleep on their backs to avoid wrinkles. Guess what, that increases your risk of dimension

4:37 and Alzheimer’s and slows down that washing machine glymphatic system that cleans out all the toxic chemicals and waste products from our brain. So we’re learning so much more from people who live longer and these studies which are telling us what we can do to add years to our lives, and if we can follow them, we can try to

4:58 not only have a lifespan, but what we’re interested in is health span, and we want people to keep listening to WABC for more tips on health span and longevity. And we’re very grateful that you give us this microphone to spread the work and keep our people healthy because health is the most important thing, mental and physical and

5:18 the rest will figure out.

5:20 Speaker 1 Doctor the other thing that makes you live wrong and relieve stress I understand from other doctors that I spoke to. Another research that I did is laughter and crying.

5:35 Speaker 2 No, absolutely, laughter is a release mechanism. It’s a natural way to reduce stress and it actually can help you slow your heart rate down and feel less stressed. And sometimes crying is a way to let it all out because when we bottle things up inside, and men especially have a way of doing that that they don’t show

5:57 their emotion and we’re raised to be tough and show emotions, and you bottle everything in and sometimes just a good cry and just letting it all out. And guess what when they measure people’s blood pressure after a good cry, I guess what happens. Blood pressure drops, things, things get better.

6:14 Speaker 1 Doctor Milos, thank you so much, and live long and prosper and I’ll catch up with you real soon.

6:20 Speaker 2 Thank you John for always getting the truth out on the Cat’s Mount Table.