DR. JAY KUMAR

So what do good food, chocolate, watching a sunset, and getting a massage all have in common? In addition to perhaps being the key ingredients for a romantic and memorable evening, recent studies indicate how they all appear to promote health by decreasing stress and stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain. We all enjoy passion and pleasure in life, and I am the first one to admit that! I actually began writing this blog piece while in Paris, the city where food, wine, romance, art, passion, and pleasure are considered the very fabric of life. Of course, uncontrolled and excessive passion and pleasure in life can lead to unhealthy addictions. While I am not advocating you lead a hedonistic or excessive lifestyle, however, the latest research in neurobiology and in social neuroscience finds that by mindfully experiencing moderate doses of pleasure in your everyday life, you can promote a healthy immune system and even increase your longevity of life. In the first part of this series on the Neurobiology of Pleasure, we start by defining what is pleasure, its relevance for human survival, and how pleasure positively affects the brain and health.

Why We Need Pleasure?  
When we speak about passion and pleasure in neuroscience, they are not the hedonistic, excessive aspects of debauchery or gluttony that come to mind. Rather passion and pleasure in neurobiology are defined as feelings or sensations, opposite to but also closely associated with pain. Just like pain, pleasure appears also to be a biological mechanism wired into our human nervous system and brain for survival. It’s easy to understand how the human brain’s pain mechanism is essential for survival, e.g. think of the first time you accidentally placed a hand on a hot stove and quickly learned as something not to do again. You might, however, wonder how can pleasure be an evolutionary tool for survival? I’ll offer two good examples to illustrate this point–food and sex! Both eating and reproduction are essential for the survival of the human species. Neuroscientists now believe that over the course of time the human brain developed specific “reward circuits” and “pleasure centers” to associate and foster all pleasurable experiences as being joyful and beneficial for survival. Eventually, other pleasurable experiences that were not necessary for human survival, such as smelling the fragrance of a rose, watching a beautiful sunset, or hearing a piece of soothing music, would trigger these same pleasure areas in the brain. In all of these situations the brain releases a host of “feel good” neurotransmitters, endorphins and peptides that the brain ultimately associates with positive emotions and feelings. While small and regular doses of these neurochemicals in the body are now shown to be healthy, the problem arises when we experience too much or even too little of these pleasurable activities that might lead to addictive and compulsive behavior. I will explore this topic in my next piece.  

How Pleasure is Healthy for the Brain and Body
My previous blog piece on Health, Stress, and Aging discussed how medical evidence shows that when you are under chronic stress, depression, and anxiety, elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline in the body suppress your immune system, inhibit the cell’s ability to divide, and accelerate the aging process! In fact, numerous studies on the adverse effects of stress indicate that for every one year of life under chronic stress your body can age as much as six years! While that is certainly discouraging news to many, don’t worry, I have hope! By allowing yourself to experience healthy doses of pleasure in your life–whether it’s enjoying a great meal with friends, playing with your kids, walking the dog in the park, being intimate with your partner, or my personal favorite laughing to an episode of the Simpsons–you can actually lower stress, boost up the immune system, and most importantly possibly slow down the aging process. Let’s explore how!

In the growing medical field of psychoneuroimmunology, researchers explore the intimate relationship how human behavior, the brain, and body promote health and ward off disease. At the Neuroscience Research Institute at the State University of New York in 2004 Dr. George Stefano conducted experiments to show exactly how pleasure triggers the “feel-good” chemical proenkephalin, a hormone that plays an important physiological function to regulate pain perception and response to stress. Most surprising of all, the study indicates that healthy amounts of pleasure release an important antibacterial agent in the body, known as enkelytin, an opioid peptide that appears to attack bacteria and strengthen the immune system.

All Work and No Play
You’ve probably heard of the old adage that all work and no play make for a dull life. Well, it also now appears that all work and no play also make for an unhealthy and short-lived life! The notion that pleasure is not only healthy but an integral part of human behavior and survival might run counter to our long held stereotypes about the pursuit of pleasure. While the philosophical foundation of this country was established on a Puritan work ethic that viewed passion and pleasure as the sinful path to debauchery and vice, neurobiology and the growing field of social and affective neuroscience now advocate differently. Contrary to what many of you might have been taught, when you lack healthy pleasures in life, your brain experiences a “pleasure and reward deficiency,” which in turn inhibits the release of beneficial neurochemicals into the body to reduce stress, promote a strong immune system, and create overall health and wellness! So the next time someone criticizes you for “having too much fun,” just smile and know that not only is having pleasure good for the soul, it actually now turns out to crucial for your health and well-being!

As Neal Diamond Walsch eloquently states, “Give yourself abundant pleasure, that you may have abundant pleasure to give others.” 

May you always be Living Your Light as you enjoy all of life’s pleasures and passions!

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
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We all aspire living a long, healthy, and abundant life. Despite our best intentions to remain young and stay healthy, aging is a fact that we all have to accept. While the latest anti-aging products, Botox injections, or cosmetic surgery maintain the outward appearance of youth and beauty, medical research now shows how you can additionally slow down the aging process on the cellular level. Want to learn how?

Let's begin by exploring the aging process from a biological perspective. While many might regard aging as an external condition of looking older, in actuality physical aging is the biological result of the inability for your cells to replicate and produce new ones as the body advances over time. One of the most startling and revolutionary ideas to come out of the medical sciences is the discovery of telomeres, an enzyme in your genes that regulates cellular division and, in turn, determines your length of life. In essence, the length of your telomeres now appear to act as your body's natural biological clock. When under constant stress, your biological clock speeds up, resulting in the shortening of telomeres. On the contrary, when you're more calm and relaxed telomeres appear to extend their length, thus slowing down the body's biological clock. Let’s take a closer look at how telomeres function, how stress accelerates their decay, what you can do to slow down their eventual breakdown, and ways to live a more healthy and long life.

As you grow older, your hair turns gray, your organs begin to work less, your bones become weaker, and your body generally ages, all of which now appear to be the result of the shortening of the telomeres in your cells. So what exactly are telomeres? In every one of your genes, there exist 26 pairs of chromosomes that are capped off by telomeres. A nice analogy is to visualize your chromosome as a shoelace with a cap at the end of the lace as the telomere. Over the course of time due to natural wear and tear these caps at the end of your shoelaces begin to fray. In a similar manner, the telomeres that act as caps at the end of your chromosomes also begin to wear down and shorten. In the emerging medical field of psychoneuroimmunology, the intimate connection of the mind, brain, and stress with our immune system and aging is being greatly understood. In essence, a growing medical body of evidence concludes that stress advances the shortening of your telomeres, which in turn prevents cellular reproduction and eventually accelerating the aging process.

This remarkable finding regarding the effects of stress on telomere shortening and age acceleration actually earned Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and her colleagues the Nobel prize for medicine in 2009. Her study examined people exposed to chronic stress, depression, and anxiety and concluded that for every one chronological year of aging, the shortening of these people’s telomeres accelerated by as much as 600%. Basically, in just one year the aging process of these people amounted to six years of biological aging! Watch full video here

So before you resign yourself to hopelessness and despair, I now have some good news! Another study by Blackburn and her colleagues indicates that you actually not only can halt the shortening and deterioration of telomeres, but possibly increase their length, i.e. slowing down the body's aging process! Techniques such as meditation, regular exercise, and other forms of centering that trigger the body's natural relaxation response all appear to slow the aging process by increasing the length of your telomeres! So it might just be that the secret for eternal youth doesn't reside in a bottle of anti-aging cream, with an injection of Botox, or in cosmetic surgery. The key to eternal health and longevity might just be learning how to relax! Now that's some good news worth living!

In the apt and true words of the famous centenarian and eternally happy comedian, George Burns, “If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn't ask me, I'd still have to say it."

Keep on Living Your Light with abundant health, happiness, and long life! 

Dr. Jay Kumar  

www.drjaykumar.com
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