De-stress Your Genes: How Mind-Body Practices like Gratitude and Meditation Optimize Human Health

Meditation, breath work, yoga. While the old scientific paradigm may have written these practices off as “woo-woo”, strictly practiced by hippies, the latest evidence-based research is proving that there is actually some physiological benefit.

If you read my last post, you're fully aware of the negative effects that stress, worry, and anxious thoughts have on human physiology. If you've been feeling stressed or anxious during this crazy time in all of our lives, don't fret. This is where you will learn how you can regain control over your stress response, reverse those anxiety-induced epigenetic changes, and prime your genes to create an environment of health.

I. Your Body on Rest

In times of relaxation and ease, the body produces what is popularly known as the “happiness hormone” – serotonin. Serotonin effectively activates a pathway involved in cellular communication known as the cAMP pathway. Activation of this pathway ultimately acetylates, or prevents the methylation (silencing) of the glucocorticoid promoting genes we discussed in my last post - those that govern the optimal production of immune-boosting hormones. In a similar fashion, a state of presence or relaxation can enhance the microbiome’s production of short-chain fatty acids - more specifically (you guessed it) butyrate.

As discussed in a previous post, butyrate is a highly highly beneficial prebiotic metabolite that promotes health over disease. In a healthy, non-stressful environment, butyrate downregulates or turns off the pro-inflammatory pathways in your body, ultimately boosting your immune system. Similarly, butyrate in this relaxed state enhances the expression of a protein known as mucin. Mucin, living up to its name, produces a thick viscous gel similar to mucous that lines the gut barrier, trapping pathogens inside. In this way, relaxation states – those which can be achieved through practices such as yoga, meditation, and gratitude – effectively inhibits the development of leaky gut.

II. Mind-Body Practices De-Stress your Genes

All of that science is nice and all, but how do we use it to our advantage? While the old scientific paradigm may have written these techniques off as science fiction, the latest evidence-based research is proving that there is actually some physiological benefit to meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, and more. As you now know, dysregulated and chronically elevated levels of stress-induced proinflammatory proteins increases our risk for disease, poor healing, and mortality as it dampens our immune systems. Fortunately for us, we can target these unwanted manifestations of stress with meditation...

Meditation

Meditation, at its core, is described as the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment. Think of the proverbial Buddha sitting quietly under a tree – its goal is to train an individual to observe their thinking mind, rather than be consumed in it, as a means to maintain awareness of the present moment. In its foundation, meditation and the concepts preceding it are based on the fact that you – your soul – is not the thinking mind; you are not the collection of erratic, often times worrisome, thoughts running through your head all day every day. Applying this to the scope of science, it is defined as a form of mental training that aims to improve an individual’s core psychological capacities, such as attentional and emotional self-regulation. Along with its benefits related to mental health, a repeated mind-body practice has been shown to regulate the stress response by taking us out of fight or flight mode, thereby enhancing the efficiency of our immune system. To get specific, meditation effectively downregulates or turns down the expression of the RIPK2 and COX2 – two genes that code for molecules whose responsibility it is to induce widespread, systemic inflammation in the body. Likewise, concentrations of IL-6 and C-reactive protein (CRP), both biomarkers of inflammation, decrease with a meditation practice as well. With this in mind, by suppressing inflammation and modulating the body’s immune system, meditation ultimately maintains the health of our gut barrier as well, seeing that it reduces the production of those compounds that weaken it.

If you think this is interesting, it gets even more crazy. In clinical trials, the immune systems of individuals who meditate were shown to produce an increased antibody response following flu vaccine administration in comparison to nonmeditators. This means those individuals who meditated were better able to make a stored memory of the flu virus, ultimately allowing their immune systems to attack it in a more efficient and successful manner when they were subsequently exposed to it.

Gratitude

Gratitude, or the practice of appreciating positive life features, is highly related to quality of life in both the physical and mental realms. Seeing that the abundance of past research clearly elucidates the positive impact that a gratitude practice on mindset and mental wellbeing, a recent randomized clinical trial set out to analyze its impact on the physiological manifestations of health. More specifically, this group of scientists observed changes in the physical symptoms of heart failure following an eight week period where the participants were asked to record 3-5 things for which they were grateful for over a daily basis. After the completion of this intervention, they discovered that this gratitude journaling practice effectively reduced heart failure related inflammatory biomarkers, increased the tone of the "rest and digest" parasympathetic nervous system response, and increased the participant's heart rate variability. What does this mean exactly? As you may recall from above, pro-inflammatory factors such as CRP and IL-6 are typically activated and increased in the beginning stages of most all disease, and as a result, reducing levels of them remains one of the largest goals underlying many therapeutic interventions. So the fact that, like Advil and Tylenol, simply focusing on the things that you are grateful for on a daily basis can literally decrease the amount of inflammation-causing molecules circulating throughout your body is a pretty exciting notion.

Speaking to the way that this gratitude journaling practice impacted parasympathetic tone, concentrating on the good in life successfully enhanced the participant's ability to switch into the "rest and digest" mode. As we learned in the last post, constantly operating from the "fight or flight" mode increases one's risk of disease as this protection mode shuts down or diminishes the effectiveness of many biological processes such as the immune system. Seeing that this "fight or flight" sympathetic nervous system increases heart rate and the force that is needed to pump blood out of the heart, the inability to switch out of this state is highly correlated with the development of heart disease. If you find yourself worrying or being fearful, you're most likely functioning in this unpleasant state but don't worry...How cool is it to now know that you can easily and effectively remove yourself in under 5 mins - without a pill?

Knowing that many of us are staying home now more than ever, this is the perfect time to create and cultivate your own stress-reducing mind-body practice. While this bizarre ripple in time will ultimately come to an end, it’s almost guaranteed that our day to day stress will not. We may no longer stress about our stock of toilet paper in the future, but it will be all too easy for us to once again become consumed in the irritations of our jobs, our commute, etc. That in mind, I challenge you to take advantage of this collective pause to build some habits that will allow you to approach the new world with a fresh perspective. Equip yourself with the tools to not only survive, but thrive in a world where nerve-wracking circumstances are inevitable. Take it from me, 15 minutes a day - five spent reminiscing on the things we can be grateful for and ten dedicated to quieting the mind through meditation - is all it takes to care for and cultivate wellbeing in the face of the deeply-rooted belief that life is not fair.

Want to incorporate these practices into your daily routine but don't know where to start? Lucky for you, in the next post I will be sharing my favorite free mind-body resources - meditations, gratitude prompts, yoga flows, breathing exercises - you name it, it'll be there.

Resources:

Househam, A. M., Peterson, C. T., Mills, P. J., & Chopra, D. (n.d.). The Effects of Stress and Meditation on the Immune System, Human Microbiota, and Epigenetics. 16.

Redwine, L., Henry, B. L., Pung, M. A., Wilson, K., Chinh, K., Knight, B., Jain, S., Rutledge, T., Greenberg, B., Maisel, A., & Mills, P. J. (2016). A pilot randomized study of a gratitude journaling intervention on HRV and inflammatory biomarkers in Stage B heart failure patients. Psychosomatic Medicine, 78(6), 667–676. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000316

Tang, Y.-Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3916