Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 30

At five o’clock on the night before you leave for holiday, you look at your predeparture checklist. You still have to pack your bags, pack the kids’ stuff, drop Fido off at the kennel, print out your online confirmations, get your son to football practice, pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy, fill the car up for the trip to the airport, and remind your spouse to fix the dripping toilet tank before you leave. On the way to football practice – and with Fido panting in the car – your “check engine” flashes on, taunting you at your breaking point. Your initial reaction?

A. You bawl like an underfed infant.

B. You pummel your intestines with a bag of chips.

C. You drive to the nearest garage for a diagnosis, then systematically knock off everything else on your list.

D. You repeat, “Tomorrow, the Bahamas, tomorrow, the Bahamas …”

E. You curse car manufacturers, throw your mobile phone against the windscreen, and lash out at poor Fido for the time he peed on the carpet four months ago. The filthy bleeping mutt.

Results: If you answered C, it shows that you have a healthy stress response. D is not so bad either. Other responses make you more prone to stress-related ageing.

In the old days, we typically knew one kind of stress: life-or-death stress. It may have come in the form of a stalking tiger or a thirty-day famine, but that’s the way life was. You hunted, you cooked, you danced by the fire, you told stories, you whittled wood, you procreated. With all due respect to Ms. Hilton and Ms. Richie, that was the simple life.

These days, your energy and your attention are pulled in more directions than a piece of gum on the bottom of a shoe. Your boss wants you, your kids want you, you’ve got telecommunications gadgets that beep and buzz in symphony, you’ve got deadlines, you’ve got bills, you’ve got meetings, you’ve got twenty-minute traffic hold-ups, you’ve got six appointments in four hours, and you’ve got about wee much patience to juggle it all. And, oh yeah, how about a little lovin’ for your neglected honey-poo?

Most of us are so beaten and bruised and burdened by stress that we’ve actually got used to it. But here’s the thing: we like to write off stress as an element of life that we just live with. It is what it is, and we deal with it. Because it’s intangible, it can’t be bad for us, right? Nope. Stress is as concrete a condition as any of the others we cover in this book. While we all know that stress is unpleasant, many of us don’t realize how unhealthy it is for our bodies – and how it makes us age.

In this chapter, we want you to understand the biology of stress: how it works, why it’s important to combat it, and how your stem cells are weakened by it. But we also want you to learn how to manage stress not just in the temporary take-a-bath kind of way but for the long term. We’ll teach you how to handle and redirect your stress, not necessarily eliminate it. As you’ll learn in a moment, stress isn’t all bad. After all, the only time you’re free of stress is when you’re dead.