Transcription
Well, then what's what's going on with aging? I've got two women in front of me and they have two different colors of hair. Now, let's just pretend for argument sake and for the sake of this uh explanation that this is someone's hair that's gone gray because of stress. Um, and this is what she used to look like or he used to look like in terms of the color of their hair. What I found really interesting because it kind of speaks to lots of things that are going on going on in the body is you're saying you can actually reverse gray hair without dying it. And if so, what does that tell us about what gray hair is? But more broadly about stress, energy, mitochondria, and everything in between.
>> Yeah. Uh what we discovered is that hair graying is reversible. And and that was surprising because what I've learned and what most people learn is that when you age, it's kind of this linear progressive decline and and there's kind of nothing you can do about it. Uh but it turns out that if you look on most people's head, um you can see things like this. This is obviously, you know, this was dyed and all of the hairs were were white and then all the hairs are are are dark. And if you take a hair like this, uh the tip here, right, was inside the body long time ago. This is almost like if you looked at tree rings, >> right? You take a tree and you cut it in cross-section, you see like the rings and then you can say, "Ooh, this ring was uh 30 years ago, right? And this ring is today." Uh so you can use that to kind of map the history of what happened in the environment of of the tree. You can do the same thing. We all walk around with biological history crystallized in in this hair. And that's why if you want to know if someone had a drug for example like a month ago or six months ago or two years ago depending how long the hair is you can actually use the hair and all along would be you know the chemical signature of what you took. So you can find marijuana in in the hair you know here but not here. So if you if you have marijuana six months ago it's going to be in your hair and you're going to walk around uh with that trace that physical trace in in your body. I need to get a haircut. I'm joking.
>> And the idea was if we could find hairs on someone's head that the tip was uh dark, right? And then when you look closer to the body, it becomes white, right? And you would say the hair was young, it was young, it was young, it was young, and then boom, it became old, right? It lo it lost color. Hair growing is a a classic hallmark of aging. Um then we thought then you would know something that something was happening in this hair follicle in this person's body right that made this young hair become old and then maybe we could understand the mechanisms of the aging process. So this became kind of an interesting scenario and through doing this we found people started to send us hair samples in ziplockc bags you know over the mail uh and we were looking for two colored hairs a a single hair that has two colors kind of like this uh and we found hairs that uh you know head hair, beard hair, pubic hairs that showed the signature. The hair was dark and then it became white or the hair was white and it became dark again. Mhm.
>> So we had physical evidence from like multiple people that showed white hairs can go back to being dark and this contradicted this idea that you know aging is this linear progressive process that we're kind of doomed to experience without any flexibility. I was one of the participants in that study. I ended up finding five hairs that had this pattern. And when we looked at when the reversal happened, we found that the re reversal happened when I went on vacation and I would go back in those days on annual uh cycling uh training camps. So I would go for a week. Yeah. Where all you do is you bike, you eat, you sleep. Uh energy started to move very differently in my body during that that time. Um, and then when we looked at the hair and we analyze the the composition, the molecular composition, that's what scientists do. You can take a hair like this, snip the pieces, the white segment, the dark segment, it's all the same genome, right? Every hair has the same genome, the same genetic material, same food, uh, same physical activity, same everything. Why some hairs are like this or like that, uh, was an opportunity to understand the dynamics, the plasticity, like how life can go from being young to old or old back to young. Uh, and what we found was that the main signal was a mitochondrial signal. And in the white hair, I thought there's going to be less color, right? Obviously, but also probably less mitochondria, less, you know, some other things. We found that the white hairs have more mitochondria >> and there was an upregulation of the body, the the hair follicle where the hair was becoming old wasn't kind of letting go of things. It was doing more. So that means during that period of time you are more stressed and using more energy.
>> When cells become old instead of just dying right they struggle. And when a cell has damage in the DNA or the mitochondria not working properly or for some reason they accumulate damage they become old. The cell struggles to make more mitochondria and it it tries to kind of compensate and then ends up wasting a lot of energy in the process. So on that hair what you looked at that was gray let's call it um it had more mitochondria because it was struggling and why was it struggling?
>> It looks like stress hormones can you know make a cell struggle for example >> cortisol. Cortisol. Yes, if you're a cell, right, and your perspective on the world is pretty simple, uh you don't have, you know, the senses that, you know, we enjoy, but you do never let us, you know, sense the environment. If cortisol comes and you get the signal, uh it means there's something out there in the environment that's dangerous, right? You should be preparing for having to fight or to flight or there there's something out there that's dangerous. Our cells evolved to interpret cortisol in that way. Um, so we did an experiment in the dish. We wanted to know how much energy does it cost to worry about the future, right? Or how much energy does it cost to ruminate about yesterday?
>> Mhm.
>> The thing you didn't do or the mistake you made at work or that conversation that went sideways, you know, with your partner. Uh how much energy does that cost to be thinking about this, to be, you know, engaging your stress system, to be releasing cortisol? Uh so two students in the lab, Gabriel and Natalia, did that experiment. You put you put cells in a dish. You give them the equivalent of cortisol. how much energy is going to cost for these cells to prepare. There's nothing damaging to the cortisol itself, but the cortisol is a signal that there might be something dangerous outside, right? That's like when you're sitting down, you get an email, you're like, I might lose my job, right? Or I might not get this contract, and then you you have this whole stress response. Your heart starts to beat faster. How much energy does that cost? Uh so in cells in a dish, we can isolate that question really well. We found that the stress hormone increased energy expenditure the cost of life by 60%.
>> So when I'm stressed I'm using 60% more energy theoretically.
>> I don't know about you but cells in a dish.
>> Okay.
>> So there the beauty about like bodies and you know with the mind and you know this complex organism they're buffering systems right. So you might I don't think your energy expenditure increases by 60% if you're stressed out but it increases somewhat. What is that graph there?
>> So there are two graphs here. Uh the top one is the color of the hair of a single hair from a young Asian woman who was part of the study. And what we see here this is called a hair pigmentation pattern the HPP that we we developed in the lab to understand quantitatively bring science to this to hair graying and and reversal. And so what you see here is this hair was dark and then it became white for two centimeters and then boom completely regained color. Actually it regained it was darker here than it than it used to be, right? And then stayed dark afterwards. So this is a hair that we received uh in the mail as we were starting to to collect uh two colored hairs. Um and then when we when we saw this, we we had found from a few different people white hairs that had regained color. We've never seen a hair like this. That's dark, white, and then dark. Right? So, I remember holding this hair. I was like, "Oh my god, this is in the same hair." This was incontrovertible evidence that growing of hair is reversible. And it can be pretty pretty fast. Like this transition here is just a few weeks. This is about one week, right? So, this white hair completely white regained color in just about a week.
>> Um so then we developed an instrument which was a simple sheet on the yaxis the vertical is most stressful thing that ever happened to you. No stress at all 10 and zero. And then on the x axis the horizontal was time. Yes. On the far right is now. Right. This is now. This is a year ago. And then we labeled all the months. And then we ask people and we ask this uh lady put a dot on the graph that was the most stressful time in the past year that anyone can do the exercise past year most stressful time. Okay, maybe last March and then you put a dot right in March number 10 and then least stressful part zero and then put other like meaningful things that happened that were challenging. So people put dots, you know, along the this last year, then connect the dots, right? The red graph is her dots connected >> and it correlates perfectly to her hair going gray.
>> Correct. And what happened to her life? She said she finished her PhD thesis and she was jobless, but she was fine. She was happy to be done with her studies and then broke up with her boyfriend.
>> Oh, damn. And her hair went gray.
>> Yeah. Broke up with her boyfriend. She didn't know what was happening with her life. She had to travel to Europe. There was some family drama. Uh she said these were the la the most stressful two months of my life.
>> There's a killer question here which is if that remains chronic, does that hair follicule go gray forever?
>> Yeah.
>> I.e. If I go through an a a stressful period for two to three weeks and my hair goes a bit gray, as long as I get out of that stressful period as quick as possible, does that hair then return to to black or dark?
>> Yeah.
>> Do you see what I'm saying here?
>> Yes. It seems like and we ran some like fancy mathematical model to understand why this would be possible, why it could happen like now for this hair and then be reversible. But we know, you know, very well if you have a full head of gray hair and you're 70 years old, you're not going to regain your color. Yeah. Yeah. So there seems to what the model the mathematical model suggested is that there's a window of opportunity right where a hair slowly accumulates damage becomes more and more probably energetically inefficient right so there's more and more energy resistance and then there's a barrier and then when the the hair hits that threshold now it loses color >> it's done.
>> Yeah. But then if something changes in the body, right, you go on vacation or you start to do intermittent fasting and then there's more energy available for your dark hair. Now it can be reversed, right? Because you can go back up against that threshold. But then eventually this hair is going to go gray again. And then if you're way way down like this hair turn gray 10 years ago and you go back up, you're too far away from threshold to regain color.
>> Okay? So it suggests some threshold model that there's a window of opportunity for some something as binary as hair color. It's black or it's white, right? So there's kind of a window of opportunity there where >> where you can reverse gray hair.
>> Yes.
>> I >> I do want to come back to this hair thing, but it did make me think cuz you you added a layer of nuance there which is about the mind.
>> Mhm. Like if I go through my life um with a more resilient mind and you get that bad email and you go and I get the bad email, I go, "Fuck it. Who cares?"
>> Yeah. Am I therefore going to be a way more productive person throughout those 24 hours because my mitochondria are using less energy because there's less cortisol?
>> Yeah. Based on what we know, I think that's likely correct. So, it's not the stress that burns us down, it's the response to stress. And nothing is free in biology. and for your heart to beat a little faster. If you mount a response to that email, right, you're burning energy in your heart. And then you're tensing your, you know, your your shoulder, that's burning energy. Now your brain is going into like rumination mode and then this thing and then then it makes you think about your childhood and this and like and then the an the anxiety that and then you start to sweat like everything costs energy.
>> So the chain of events is I get the email. It's a very bad email says you're fired Stephen from the diversity. We found a different host.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, I look at the email that goes into my psychology, my mind. I then have a story I tell myself about what that email means for me, my future, my children, whatever, which then causes a physiological response of like chemicals like cortisol.
>> Yeah. um which goes into my cells, my mitochondria, which then have to work a little bit harder or use more energy,
>> which is ultimately then going to mean that I'm more tired because I have a finite amount of energy per day.
>> Mhm.
>> Is that is that sequence of events? I ask about that sequence because it offers me an opportunity to intervene at some point.
>> Yes.
>> Yes. That's a great way to think about it.
>> Don't open the laptop
>> or like get a little bit better with bad news.
>> Yeah. or you know learn to be less reactive, right? Or learn to to feel and and um you know sit with be aware of that reaction because the key solution to kind of to to cutting that sequence of event that ends up draining you is to become aware of it.
>> Yeah. Become aware of it. Yeah.
>> Right. uh so you can kind of interrupt this and people who study contemplative practices and and meditation and you know mindfulness approaches I think many of them think this is kind of the key right the the awareness the somatic awareness or introsception so if you feel into your your bodilies responses you become free of do I mount a response is that needed now or not
>> there's different types of stress right there's like the acute stress which is just you get the email you feel a little bit of a spike but 5 minutes like you're fine.
>> Yep.
>> And then there's the more chronic type of stress where
>> you're waking up every day with the same feeling of stress deep inside you for many many days in a row, many weeks in a row.
>> Um I hear that acute stress isn't all that bad and it's very normal and useful,
>> but it's this chronic stress that can cause a lot of damage.
>> Yeah. And I think that brings us back to the concept of how is energy flowing through the body. And if it flows with not enough resistance, you can't survive. But if there's too much resistance, then you get drained.
>> How do I think about this resistance thing? Because I'm really struggling with like understanding it.
>> Maybe one good example to to frame this is exercise.
>> Yeah.
>> Right. When you start to exercise, there's increased resistance in your muscle, right? Your muscles are contracting. So there's a physical resistance there, but there's also energy resistance. So the the energy is trying to flow through the muscle and then there's you have mitochondria. If you have just a few mitochondria and the muscles are contracting really hard like you're running, you're sprinting, right? You're doing interval training. Um, now the mitochondria don't have the capacity to flow as much energy as the muscle is asking, right? So that imbalance of demand to flow capacity. Now the the product of this the demand divided by flow capacity is resistance.
>> Okay? So if you demand a lot of your muscle because of your your your sprint uh but you don't have a lot of mitochondria right it's going to feel terrible uh and then because the resistance creeps up and then your muscle you know becomes really hot and then eventually there's inflammation uh and then it burns and and then it's uncomfortable uh but then so that's like an acute bout of of energy resistance. What happens with exercise is once you recover right the benefits of exercise don't happen during the exercise they happen after during the recovery. So if you recover now you you're the muscles are relaxing and you're resting eventually you go you know for you go to sleep. Uh it's the in during the decrease in resistance now the cell says next time this happens I better be ready. Like this was really uncomfortable. There was too much energy shoved into a system that couldn't take it right. So I need next I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that that's what happens if you go from being a sedentary couch potato, right? To training for a marathon. You can double the amount of mitochondria you have in your muscles. And that's the system feeling the the rise in resistance like I don't have the capacity to flow that much energy and then adapting for this for the next time and next time I'm going to be ready. Let's make more mitochondria. So that's probably what where the benefits of exercise come from. this spike in and and why stress is is not a bad thing intrinsically, right? If you have a spike of stress, it stimulates the process the the the it stimulates the body to put in place things that in the long run makes you more efficient, decreases your resistance. Then you can go through life with with less resistance.
>> Coming back to this gray hair thing. So if if we consider gray hair, my hair going gray to be the last domino that fell. So like the symptom >> y >> then what is what are the what is the first domino >> and can you walk me through the sequence of events because one would assume that if I understand that sequence of events I can also understand how to then reverse it >> how to kind of take I got a couple of gray hairs now and I actually anecdotally do think weirdly now you've said this that I have like gray hair flare-ups where I'll go I'll you know go through a couple of weeks or months of doing something and I'll look in the room like what I have 12 now I'm being generous there's more like 25 I I have 25 now. In terms of those dominoes, the symptom is gray hair. What is the first domino that that falls? And what is the sequence of events that leads to the gray hair in the follicule?
>> So, there's a finite energy budget and then what the organism does is it allocates energy in different places like a business, right? You have this budget. Do I put more energy here? Do I put, you know, more resources here? If so, I need to take resources away from here. Right? So as stress happens in your life, it pulls energy away from some of the things that keep you young, right? So there's uh there's a kind of a hierarchy of energy needs in the body. Not everything can be prioritized the same way. Do you know Maslo's hierarchy of human needs?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. So Maslo's insight was uh >> Oh my god, I just freaked out. My hand reached down and I just felt someone's head. It was just I was >> acute stress response.
>> Yeah. I just Yeah. Caught off led. Sorry. Maslo's hierarchy of needs. Yeah.
>> So there's there's a hierarchy of energy needs in the body that's works similarly to Maslo's hierarchy of needs. Maslo said for a human being to be fully realized first you need to have safety and food and shelter secured. Right? Once you have this and you feel this is kind of covered in your life, then you can start to think about building relationships with other people, right? Loving relationships. Once you have this settled, now you can start to think about building your skills, right? Like becoming really good at something. Uh and then once you have this covered now you can devote energy to the more frivolous things like spirituality what do you call self-actualization and kind of becoming your best self flourishing. Uh so he saw this very much as uh this is this needs to be covered uh and when things get really hard and there are constraints on your life the first thing to go is the top of the pyramid right your meditation practice or the long-term type like I'm going to be a better person no like I need to make sure we can put food on the table next week right um so this hierarchy of of human needs I think aligns with hierarchy of uh of energy needs in the body and as far is the importance of hair color goes, it's pretty low on the hierarchy. So as the body gets older and you have more and more cells in the body that start to uh be less efficient right there mitochondria working a little you know less efficiently and uh and then there there's more inflammation in the body that's costing energy and uh there's more worries about you know professional obligations and all of these things kind of stack up and steal energy away from the things that are there we call them growth maintenance and repair. These are like the anti-aging processes in in the body and those need energy, but they're not as important as, you know, facing the stressor that you think is life-threatening. Now,
>> so if there's a lion chasing me, my body is going to commit all the the energy I have to getting away from this lion, and it might say, "Listen, Stephen, we're not going to repair the skin next to your eyes. you're going to get a couple more wrinkles and we're not going to make your we're not going to commit energy to making sure your follicles in your hair produce black pigment or whatever.
>> So, I would then look aged. I would look older.
>> But that's because all of my energy has been going to something else which my body considered to be a high priority.
>> Correct. Which also brings me to I guess the famous uh what we always talk about with presidents because presidents go into office often with dark hair >> and they come out with gray hair and usually one does not age that quickly in 8 years. We see the same in the Premier League with football managers. They walk in on that first day they look very spritly and energetic and two years later they have gray hair, bags under their eyes, wrinkles and they look like they've aged 10 years.
>> Yeah. So, you're telling me actually that the the real secret to anti-aging, if there was one, is this >> is the proper allocation of energy.
>> If you love the D CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.