Optimism may help you live longer

Editor's note: This column was originally published Oct. 13, 2005.

We all intuitively know how stress can age us.

Just take the other day. After nine hours in the office, I spent another hour on the phone, getting commands from an annoying electronic voice to punch numbers that took me nowhere.

On the way home, I suffered the shock of spending $60 to fill up my car. Splattering my groceries all over the ground as I open the front door, I discovered that my dog has decided to take off unannounced for a vacation somewhere south of here.

OK, so it isn't nearly what a lot of people have had to deal with lately. But you look in the mirror after a day like that. Can you spell "haggard"?

I could cite study after study that establishes the marriage made in hell between stress and aging. But trust me on this one: the more stress, the more we accelerate our aging process.

Take heart disease, the one most likely to get most of us (if high gas prices don't). According to a report put out by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, modifying stress reduces one's chance of cardiac events by a significant 30 percent.

When we are under stress, our sympathetic nervous system (what activates our "fight or flight" response) readies us for action by increasing our blood pressure, heart rate: all helpful when you encounter a coiled rattlesnake on a trail.

But if you are chronically stressed-out, then this heightened demand on the heart can be damaging and even result in all kinds of nasty cardiac events. Chronic stress also encourages people to act badly when it comes to their health: smoking more, eating more, becoming sedentary, in general being less motivated to do what is necessary to maintain good health.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things to come out of the huge Harvard Study of Adult Development is the finding that stress itself is not the culprit. A stressful life didn't shorten life. What was predictive of longevity was how well the person adjusted to or coped with the stressful event.

That is what Drs. Margaret Silver and Thomas Perle found when they interviewed more than 200 centenarians and reported their results in their book "Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age."

The authors concede that these long-lifers are probably genetically gifted, something not all of us can be. They did find that they all had a long "healthspan," remaining in good health up to the very end of their lives.

How did they do it?

The authors call them "the natural athletes of stress" and praise their adaptability. The centenarians in the study did not live easy lives, void of stress. Most were immigrants, encountering many hardships.

However, these long-life champs shared the sterling quality of optimism. They were able to take advantage of new opportunities that came their way. And perhaps most importantly, they almost never saw their age as a limitation.

In short, they had the right attitude.

I think the most helpful conclusion to come from this is that stress itself is not the killer. It is distress.

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh is a Cape Girardeau native who is a licensed clinical psychologist in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com. For more on the topics covered in Healthspan, visit his Web site: www.HealthspanWeb.com.