I have harped on and on ad nauseum about how unhealthy and disempowering the trend within personal development to discard hard science and embrace new age hogwash is. I realize, of course, that some people find the idea of being genetically “predisposed” towards one thing or the other distasteful; it seems to threaten cherished notions that we are masters of our fate, captains of our soul. If our actions to some extent are the results of chemical processes in our minds, and some have different chemical makeups than others, it instinctually seems that science offers constraints, rather than bold new opportunities.
This is a fallacy. No matter what the world is, it is what it is, and to command it you have to know how it works. Only by getting a deep understanding of the fascinating machinery in our own minds can we hope to discover ways to maximise our potential. I deal with this in the blogpost Self Improvement in the Era of the Chromosome on this blog.
Which brings me to the second article of the day from edge.org, the title of which summarized my position on these matters so well that I saw fit to steal it for this blogpost.
It is written by Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at UCSF, and deals with primarily with preventing or healing disease, but the lessons are widely applicable.
Some exerpts:
J. Craig Venter has shown that one way you can change your genes is by making new ones. We are finding that another way you can change your gene expression is simply by changing your lifestyle.
In May of this year, we published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Craig was the communicating editor). We found that changing lifestyle actually changes gene expression. In only three months, we found that over 500 genes were either up-regulated or down-regulated—in simple terms, turning on genes that prevent many chronic diseases, and turning off genes that cause coronary heart disease, oncogenes that are linked to breast and prostate cancer, genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress and so on.
These findings may capture people’s imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism: “Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?” Well, it turns out you can do a lot, more quickly than we had once realized and to a much greater degree than had been thought possible.
Ornish goes on to detail a study of women suffered from stress due to taking care of chronically ill children. Under the microscope it torned out that these women as a result of that stress had lower levels of telomerase. Telomerase is en enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the part of our chromosomes that control how long we live.
In my experience, most things in biology go both ways. If stress reduces telomerase and makes telomeres shorter, perhaps stress management techniques, exercise, improved nutrition, and social support might increase these?
Well, that’s what we found. After just three months, telomerase increased by almost 30 percent and thus telomere lengthening is likely to have occurred as well. In this context, comprehensive lifestyle changes not only work as well as pharmaceutical drugs, but even better, as no drug has yet been shown to increase telomerase or to lengthen telomeres.
Sorry little Johnny, “my genes ate my homework” won’t do.
By the way, it gets even better. This Ornish is a very smart guy.
There are lots of ways we have of numbing ourselves and distracting ourselves from our pain, literally and figuratively bypassing our pain.
But the pain is not the problem. The pain is a messenger. It is saying, “Hey, listen up! Pay attention, you are not doing something that is in your best interest.” Our goal is to help people connect the dots between when we suffer and why. Then, the suffering becomes information, a teacher, a catalyst for change rather than something to be numbed out.
I wish I could quote it all, but it is probably better you go and read the whole article. Warmly, whole-heartedly recommended.
Odin
Tags: genetics, lifestyle, self-improvement
