Anti-Aging Remedies

Stress is a classic example of the interaction between body and mind, the physical and the mental. Your mind may perceive a threat of some kind, and your body reacts by secreting hormones to help you deal with the threat. Some have called this process the "fight or flight" response because ages ago, when our bodies first evolved, the process of stress was normally a response to a life-or-death situation. Making the right choice between fight or flight could literally be a matter of your survival.

The hormones in question are substances such as adrenaline. They tend to hop you up and increase your physical capacity. If you respond physically, the hormones are used up. If you vegetate, as is unfortunately often the lot of modern desk jockeys, the hormones can just build up, possibly consuming you from the inside.

Amid the happy talk about the wonderful things you can do to improve your life in your forties and beyond, there is no denying that you are getting older, not younger. Though I'm not suggesting your lives won't change with age, I suggest that there are ways to cope with anxiety to really make those years challenging and fun.

Recent research done on stress suggests that the threat from too much unresolved mental turmoil may be even greater than we realized. Although most people realize that ulcers could be one result of too much stress, few are truly aware of the effects of stress on "killer cells"vital components in the blood that float around like free-lance bodyguards. If they see something they don't likesomething they perceive as foreign to the bodythey "kill" it. This includes cancer cells. Cancer can begin as a single aberrant cell or as a few abnormal cells that start to grow in an out-of-control manner. Killer cells discover these cells and try to off them. Some experts theorize that this happens in the human body all the time, and that only on rare occasions do cancer cells grow enough to cause trouble.

The problem is that stress, according to these theories, depresses killer cell activity, thus reducing your ability to fend off disease and, potentially, one big meltdown.

Usually, you get home late and are totally whipped. More often than not, you are a two-income family and need every penny of it. Your wife arrives at about the same time you do, probably having beaten the closing of day care by only minutes (though that's just as likely the dad's job these days), and she's as toasted as you are. It quickly becomes evident that you can't expect her to perform the support services for the family that your mother supplied for your father.