Life Extension Series Part Three- The Immune System

It may seem strange to talk about the immune system in a series on life extension and how to live longer, but hey, you can’t live forever if you get sick and die, right?

It’s more than just dealing with the sniffles.  The same principle we’ll be discussing about the immune system also applies to the body’s ability to maintain itself over time.  Specifically, we’ll be talking about stress.

Less Stress Means Life Extension

We’ve already seen that stress can affect aging throught the action of cortisol in the previous article about living longer.  There’s more to it than that.  To understand how stress acts as a double-whammy to our body, we need to talk breifly about the stress response and how our body functions on autopilot.

First off, your central nervous system (CNS), which is your brain and spinal cord, run the show.  You know already that you have things about your body that you can control voluntarily (like muscle movments) and there’s other things you don’t control voluntarily, that act on a sort of autopilot (like digestion).

Well, we science types like to make big names for stuff, so we call the autopilot part of your nervous the Autonomic Nervous System. Don’t act like you’re not impressed with that name.   It’s actually easier to remember as just the Automatic Nervous System, but that doesn’t sound as jazzy or give you an extra word to use to win a difficult Scrabble game.

Autopilot Settings

These autopilot functions bascially operate on one of two settings.  The big fancy words are sympathetic and parasympathetic; we’ll just call them “Fight or Flight” and “Feed and Breed”.

You may have heard of the term “Fight or Flight” before in reference to the stress response.  It’s what it sounds like.  When your body is under stress (feels threatened), it responds as it evolved to respond over the course of many thousands of years of living under dangerous conditions.  In short, it jacks you up temporarily so that you can fight like crazy or run like the devil.  So blood flow increases to the muscles, eyesight becomes more acute, stuff like that.

This temporary boost comes at a cost.  The other systems… the Feed and Breed systems… shut down to conserve energy so that the Fight or Flight systems can have everything.  So digestion, tissue repair, reproductive functions, all shut down, including the immune response.

Your body is a survival expert.  It will kill you in the long term to keep you alive in the short term. After all, it’s no good to be able to digest your food nicely, if YOU’RE also being digested nicely by a sabre tooth tiger.  So the stress response is designed to get you out of a pickle, fast, and then shut down so that the regular maintenance fuctions (Feed and Breed) can take back over again.

Stress Is Stress

Much like “parts is parts”, stress is stress, according to your body.  Remember, the body does not think on a conscious level, it responds.  So any stress your body encounters, physical or otherwise, will be responded to the same way… Fight or Flight.  This includes emotional stress, which I’m sure you have very little of in your daily life.

Or, you could be like most people and have CONSTANT emotional stress.  And that’s where the real problem comes in.  Our physiology is designed to handle short bursts of stress followed by long pauses during which we can repair and maintain our bodies.  If we’re always stuck on RED ALERT, our bodies can’t ever switch back into the autopilot mode that lets us repair our bodies.

And so, things start falling apart.  Listen, your body is a complex piece of machinery.  It requires constant maintenance.  Individual cells are constantly dying off or wearing out and need to be replaced.  Nutrients need to be delivered.  Waste products need to be removed.

If the maintenace crew is constantly on break because your body thinks you’re at war, then all that stuff just doesn’t get done.  That’s why I say chronic stress makes you get sick and die young… but what I should say is it makes you get sick and get old before your time, because that’s what is really happening.

Less Stress Means Living Longer

So what can be done?  Well, the simple thing to do with stress is to avoid it as much as possible.  I’ve been talking about emotional stress in this article, but make no mistake, there’s other stresses, too… chemical being the next most common.

Such as, all the nasty chemicals we spray on our crops and dump in our water and spew into the air, or mix into things that we constantly come into contact with (like clothing or furniture).  All of that crap wasn’t around during the hundreds of thousands of years that our bodies evolved.  Some of those chemicals (most of them, really) are going to be recognized as a threat by your body and then… yep, you guessed it.  Red Alert.  Fight or Flight.

In other words, yet another reason to stick to unprocessed, organic whole foods and drink filtered water.  You’re not going to be able to eliminate all industrial chemicals from your life, but you can reduce some of the volume.

Emotional stresses are the tough one to deal with.  Our society is built around them. Mortagages, careers, student loan debt, family obligations… it comes at you from all sides.

Again, you’re not going to be able to get rid of all of it.  But try to at least not VOLUNTEER for extra stress in your life.  Keeping up with the Joneses is one of the most common (and useless) causes of stress out there.  Forcing yourself to work in a stressful job you hate and going to debt all to buy a bunch of crap you don’t need is a recipe for permenant, unrelenting stress that you could voluntarily avoid.

Surround yourself with positive, supportive people as much as you can.  A lot of emotional stress is due to mental outlook, and the more social support you have, the more likely you are to avoid over-reacting to life’s problems (which would just make a little bit of stress into a whole lot of stress).  The more positive social support a person has, the more they’re able to not “sweat the small stuff”.

We’re social creatures and we want some degree of acknowledgement from our peers, which a lot of us feel we have to create with lots of money or things or good looks or other material whatnot.  If you already have that acknowledgement from your friends and family, you’re not as likely to feel you have to chase after it with that whole materialistic Keeping up with the Joneses nonsense.

Series Recap

So if you’ve read through part one on how to live longer, and part two on living longer, you probably have realized that a lot of this stuff overlaps and feeds off of each other.  And, a lot of things you do for life extension in one area works for another.  So here’s a quick list of things you can do to keep from keeling over dead before your time:

• Eat whole, organic foods and drink filtered water.
• Exercise regularly.
• Get enough sleep and don’t eat right before bedtime.
• Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs in general… all are a no-go.
• Do your best to avoid other sources of toxins and supplement with antioxidants to deal with those you can’t avoid.
• Keep up with friends, family, and positive social support in general.
• Avoid taking on unnecessary garbage that will lead to more emotional stress.

Those are the basics, my friends.  Our time on this Earth is short enough.  No need to speed up the inevitable, so take care of yourself!