How Negative Thought Patterns Make Us Age Faster and Die Sooner

Our thoughts influence our cellular health

Science has validated the wisdom of many spiritual practices like mindfulness, meditation and yoga.

Spiritual traditions have warned us to watch and regulate our thoughts to achieve optimal physical and mental well-being.

When the ancients said thoughts were things, we laughed at them. They used the metaphor of physicality to describe how thoughts impacted brain structures and cellular health.

Science has since endorsed the belief that thoughts are powerful enough to impact our health, ageing and longevity.

Telomeres are the biological clock

The ageing process is inevitable, but people age differently. Some seem to age slowly while others age faster.

Cells cannot multiply indefinitely. Cell degeneration hastens the ageing process.

How cells divide depends on the quality of telomeres, which act as the biological clock.

Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009 for discovering the molecular nature of telomeres.

Telomeres are caps at the ends of the chromosomes. Every cell division shortens the telomeres, speeding up cellular ageing. When the telomeres become too short, the cells stop dividing altogether. Short telomeres are one of the significant reasons for cellular senescence.

In the book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer, which Elizabeth Blackburn co-authored with Elissa Epel, she said

“To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres are listening to you. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

Elizabeth Blackburn says telomeres can lengthen, which implies we can accelerate, slow or reverse ageing, which is a dynamic process.

Negative thought patterns damage cellular health

Blackburn says scientists have identified mental habits that are harmful to telomeres.

Cynical hostility

Blackburn and Elissa Epel said,

“Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted.”

Somebody with cynical hostility would accuse the driver ahead of them of deliberately slowing down even if the traffic had been moving at a snail’s pace.

Blackburn conducted a study of British civil servants and found that “men who scored high on measures of cynic hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low.”

The hostile also had fewer social connections and less optimism. They carried a high disease and mortality burden.

Pessimism

When Blackburn’s research team conducted a study of 35 women and another study involving 1,000 women, people who scored high on pessimism had shorter telomeres.

Cancer and heart-related diseases tend to progress faster in pessimists who are predisposed to die earlier.

Rumination

People who rehashed negative thoughts in their minds repeatedly had weakened immune systems and short telomeres.

Balckburn and Elissa Epel wrote,

“When you ruminate, stress sticks around in the body long after the reason for the stress is over, in the form of prolonged high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and higher levels of cortisol.”

Thought suppression

According to the two authors, refusing to accept negative thoughts and suppress them causes stress and shortens telomeres.

They refer to the late psychologist Daniel Wegener who coined the term “ironic error” for the phenomenon where “the more forcefully you push your thoughts away, the louder they call out for your attention.”

Mind-wandering

People who are disengaged from the present and let their minds wander to think about adverse events experience stress, which shortens the length of the telomeres.

Mind-wandering can be creative, but the fixation with negative things causes unwanted stress.

Thought-awareness and positive thinking can help check negative mental patterns

Blackburn and Epel say that automatic negative thought patterns exercise a powerful hold on our minds.

We can break free of these negative patterns by becoming more aware of our thoughts. The two scientists say we should participate in activities that promote thought awareness. Most types of meditation, along with most forms of mind-body exercises, including long-distance running, will help to check the negative spiral of thoughts.

Final thoughts

Habitual negative thought patterns cause cellular damage by shortening telomeres, which act as the body’s biological clock. The negativity-induced stress hastens the ageing process and causes premature death.

Thought regulation involves accepting only positive thoughts and letting the negative thoughts pass away.

How and what we think can make or mar cellular health, hasten or slow down ageing, and decrease or increase our longevity.

Beware of your thought patterns.

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