We appear to be the same from day to day and month to month, but that is an illusion. Every second you are losing two million red blood cells. Every hour forty thousand skin cells fall off of you. Half the dust in your apartment is yourself. However, you are also replacing those cells, and billions of others. For every cell you lose, a new one takes its place. So every day you do pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. Different parts of your body replace at different rates. Your skin is completely replaced every month; your skeleton about every two years. The body is a marvelously self-repairing and self-regenerating machine. All of this takes energy and resources. Before the age of about forty you have resources to spare and the regeneration can keep ahead of the degeneration. The reliable and unchanging nature of the body gives one the feeling of immortality during this period. Eventually though the ability to regenerate falls behind the wear and tear, and that’s how we age.

What to do? One strategy is to decrease the wear and tear as much as possible by doing what everybody knows you are supposed to do and about one in four actually does – avoid junk food, soft drinks, chain restaurants, smoking and drinking too much. Do exercise regularly and get out into nature. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require a Dr. Oz diet. It does require moderation and persistence, which I guess only one out of four people have. All of these things will slow down the degeneration of the body as much as possible.

But what about the regenerative side of the equation? Is there anything you can do to increase your regenerative capabilities? Yes you can. Getting eight hours of sleep a day is a good start. Most of the rebuilding we do happens in sleep. Another useful thing is to reduce stress. When a person is stressed out much of our resources that should be going into regeneration go into being stressed out instead. Stress and regeneration compete for body resources.

One of the biggest problems with stress is its interaction with the immune system. The immune system is very expensive to run too. It defends us from infections and orchestrates the inflammatory process whenever we are injured. When a person is stressed out on a regular basis the immune system gets cheated of resources and starts making immature white blood cells. These immature WBC’s end up causing excessive inflammation and interfere with the body’s ability to regenerate itself. Diabetes, arteriosclerosis, stroke and heart attack have all been linked to too much inflammation from an overworked underpaid immune system.

Massage to the rescue. The two main hormones that mediate inflammation are epinephrine (adrenalin) and cortisol. Many, many studies have shown that massage decreases the amount of these circulating stress hormones by 50%. It also lowers blood pressure and the heart rate. It stimulates the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that calms us down and should be running the body most of the time. These effects of massage are not permanent, but it is definitely a step toward reducing stress and putting more resources toward rebuilding the body then breaking it down. Massage on a regular basis helps the body to maintain itself.

Does regular massage increase the life span? Probably, but it would be difficult to prove. There is a large body of evidence that stress reduces the lifespan by exacerbating inflammation and making all those diseases mentioned earlier worse. That is well established. But stress also does something much more sinister – it damages the telomeres in your cells. The way you regenerate yourself is by mitosis – body cells divide to replace cells that are lost from wear and tear. So why don’t we live forever? The cells accumulate genetic damage over the years to the point where they can no longer divide. Your ability to replace lost cells is diminished and you eventually run out of cells. That’s how you get old. That’s how you die. Aren’t you glad you chose to read this essay?

One of the important parts of a chromosome is the telomere at the tip. It is responsible for orderly cell division. The telomeres get frayed at the edges and eventually don’t work anymore. While that doesn’t kill the cell the cell can’t divide anymore so other cells have to pick up the slack, wearing them out faster. Stress is known to cause degradation of the telomeres. It accelerates the aging process! However, there is an enzyme called telomerase that can repair the telomeres and give new life to an ailing cell. So the formula would be get regular massage – rebuild your telomeres – your cells divide for longer and you live longer and healthier.

Designing a research project to prove this would be difficult. You could take 1000 stressed out people and give 500 of them massages once a week for life and follow them throughout life and see who dies first. That would be an expensive study but if there are any researchers out there reading this I volunteer to be a subject getting a massage once a week – for the advancement of science of course. A faster way to go would be to use rats. They don’t live as long and you could control things more easily. Take 1000 healthy rats of the same age and stress them all out evenly, say force them to watch three hours of Fox “News” every day. Then measure their stress hormones to see if Fox is doing its job. Half of these rats also get massage a few times a week, so you would need “rat massagers” (I’m sure there is a workshop on this somewhere). Then you could follow their stress hormones. Measuring the effects on the telomeres directly would be difficult to do but you could measure it indirectly by their lifespan. I would wager the massaged rats would live longer and that would prove the theory.

Now you may say that the rats might not be stressed out by Fox. Maybe some rats are jerks and they’d actually like it. That is certainly true for adults. Some people watch it on purpose. In that case we could administer mild shocks to supply the stress.

Joking aside, rich people live longer than poor people, partly because they can afford better health care, but partially because they can afford to take better care of themselves. For example, they can afford massage once a week. If you are one of my massage students reading this, you know plenty of therapists to trade with. Would you like to live longer and healthier? If the answer is yes, set up a trade.

Another major way that massage changes the body is to alter the cellular structure. That’s in the next post.