Stress sucks.

[garote]

Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called "free radicals" are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are quite damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having the right number of mitochondria for your energy needs is important.

Unfortunately this creates a paradox. Free radicals are the signal that you need more mitochondria. When they are released they damage the DNA in the mitochondria you already have. The only way to correct the balance is for the mitochondria to divide, making more of themselves, and as an unfortunate consequence, the damage done by the free radicals gets magnified. Eventually, there are more mutated mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.

As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces its effectiveness as part of a functioning organ.  (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline in other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.

Here's what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.

This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have.  Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into other capacity modes - higher stress modes - you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radical elements inside cells.

In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode.  It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases.

This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so... And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.

Comments

[moi-drug-daun.livejournal.com]

Doesn't "consistent aerobic exercise" expose our bodies additional stress?

[garote]

All things are stressful to the body. Living is stressful to the body. Damage from stress is a signal for the body to repair and strengthen itself. The idea is to send a steady signal to repair and strengthen, while doing the least damage.

It's the difference between getting a tan, and getting a sunburn.

[bluepapercup]

Also, regular exercise has been found to keep the population of mitochondria higher. A complete lack of exercise is harmfully stressful, and exercise to the point of breakdown is harmfully stressful, but nearly every body has a point in the in-between that benefits more than harms.

[juan-gandhi.livejournal.com]

This kind of explains in details.

Now I'm weighing, should I sell a part of myself for money, like most people do? Probably should stop gambling on stocks. Kills too much of me.

In addition, with my diabetes, a stress means higher sugar level (can't explain) which somehow does not burn. Omfg.

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

I'm skeptical that the damage can't be undone. There are many little gizmos in the body dedicated to finding dysfunctional self components and cleaning them up (cue one of my favorite words, apoptosis). The broken ones may multiply along with the healthy ones, but they're preferentially targeted by immune processes,* so they would still decline proportionally over time IF your immune system can outpace your sources of damage.

* My cell/micro biology is 10 years rusty, so I don't know of any specific immune pathways that monitor mitochondria, but very, VERY highly doubt there is nothing that tends to mitochondrial DNA in the same way that threats to cells (i.e., cellular DNA) are reigned in via macrophages/TNF, etc.

[garote]

Assuming that there is some way for immune system cells to determine whether some other body cell has inefficient mitochondria humming away inside it, that process would boil down to a less efficient version of what the cells themselves do already: Commit suicide.

What's necessary - and perhaps I'm misreading your comment and this is what you're talking about - is a mechanism inside a cell that is able to track the efficiency of each of its mitochondria on an individual basis, and weed out only the bad ones. As far as I know, no such mechanism exists.

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

I did mean that there is probably some mechanisms of mitochondrial repair/surveillance.

Basic googlin' turns up this: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/can-damaged-mitochondria-repair-their-dna.php

[rudetuesday.livejournal.com]

I wonder about the effects of chronic stress. I can't help but think about anxiety and panic patients grinding along for years.