Bringing offspring into the world is much more stressful for salmons compared to humans, even if the two species secrete the same stress hormone, cortisol. Unlike humans, salmon fish age soon after spawning. They undergo a massive hypertrophy of the interrenal gland. Because of this, they secrete massive amounts of corticosteroids.
They usually die of fungus infections. Their bones turn brittle. Their coronary arteries get swollen up with atherosclerotic plaques and their inner epithelium cell layer gets bigger.
Does all this seem familiar to you?
That’s a morbid form of accelerated senescence, the same process we undergo in decades instead of days and weeks.
The way we age and the way the salmon ages have one thing in common: the cortisol stress hormone. We undergo a mild latent hypercorticism as we age too. We secrete more cortisol during the day. We have an increased cortisol response to challenges. No wonder aged people look like pseudo Cushing sufferers.
What’s that? you may ask.
A higher than normal cortisol secretion – whatever the cause – produces in people a collection of symptoms and signs known as the Cushing syndrome. Whether such people have more cortisol because they ingest it as drugs for other life-threatening diseases or whether their adrenal glands produce more cortisol than necessary or whether their master gland, the hypophysis gland, does more than its share of work, the result is the same.
Take a look at the following image of a typical Cushing syndrome:
These patients get the similar fat pattern seen in the elderly people with more fat around their bellies, while their muscles look disused and their bones get brittle. Their immune system is compromised. They easily get depressed or anxious; clear thinking is difficult to achieve when their brain is bombarded with steroid hormones. Corticosteroid hormones increase their blood sugar, blood pressure, blood lipids. All these are vital during an attack, but it’s too much on a daily basis.
So what can you do today to decrease your daily cortisol level before some kind of cortisol blocker will be invented and used on a massive scale to postpone aging? Here are a couple of tips:
- Drink tea instead of coffee.
- Quit smoking.
- Smell the roses. Meditate. Take a walk in the park.
- Be selective about the news you consume: tabloids give you shocking information that you can’t make use of. Avoid them altogether. Choose reputable sources for getting updated.
- Sleep during the night and stay awake during the day. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
If you have any more tips for the rest of us, don’t forget to comment in the section below!
Anca Ioviţă is the author of Eat Less Live Longer: Your Practical Guide to Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition available on Amazon and several other places. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to sign up to receive updates on her second book regarding a comparative biography of aging from the simplest to the most complex organisms known.
One personal thing I have noticed is that during days with prolonged stress (like when working on something complex with a deadline coming soon) for many hours, my hair and skin needs washed more often (there is an accumulation of dead skin cells etc). Same if I stay busy for half of the night or more.
Maybe I am mistaken, but my hypothesis is that during such days, the body housekeeping mechanisms, in particular the immune system, kinds of shut down.
I was wondering whether similar things (accumulation of various debris and toxins) actually go on not only on the surface, but also inside the body?
Corticosteroids are used in the clinics to depress the immune system – like in allergies or autoimmune diseases.