A term you may see more and more often is epigenetics, but what is it really and what role does epigenetics play in everyday life?

Epigenetics significance

Epigentics is about how your behavior and environment cause changes in how your genes work. These changes can be changed back and do not alter your DNA. What it does do is determine how your body uses your DNA[1].

After all, you have DNA in all your cells, but not all your cells are the same. The way your body reads the cell determines its function and how it develops, such as that one cell belongs to muscles and another cell belongs to bones or nerves.

One way you can see that epigenetics is something that can change back is with smoking. Smoking causes you to have less of a certain substance in you than non-smokers, but when you stop smoking that substance can recover and you get as much of it back into your body as non-smokers. Sometimes this can happen as early as 1 year.

Physically, diet and exercise affects how your DNA is read by your body, and that still all sounds very logical, but it’s not the only thing.

Your environment and psychosocial factors also affect how your genes are used. Some experiences can change your epigenetics to the point that you can even pass them on to your children and even later generations[2].

Epigenetics affects your behavior, thoughts, personality and mental health. Often it is an event in your childhood that influences how your DNA is read, but your environment and experiences can also influence later and then still change your behavior, thoughts, personality and mental health[3].

And that presents opportunities.

Using epigenetics to your advantage

Actually, it’s about our own ability to turn on or turn off our genes or new genes. Quitting smoking, for example, is an obvious step you can take to do something epigenetic.

If you say something is down to your genes, you can stop that now. Because those genes and what they do can influence you. By changing your consciousness, meaning your mindset and what you think about daily and what grabs your attention, you can cause physical changes. So you can turn on the action you do want from your body and what you don’t want you can turn off. We can do this again through our mental strength and mindset.

You may have heard the saying “Thoughts become things,” thoughts become things. New experiences help your body read your genes differently, and you can also think of those new experiences before you act on them.

Often such childhood events can block you from trying certain new experiences, but fortunately you can do a lot with visualizations and the like. Your brain does not distinguish between reality and fantasy in this regard (which is why you can sometimes have illogical fears).

If you make that visualization as real as possible for yourself, your brain will adjust as if the event has already occurred.

When you practice this successfully often enough and thus get it done, you transform the body. At the same time, you are activating new genes in new ways to get epigenetic changes. Just as if your imagined goals are already reality.

This helps you to be healthier both physically and mentally, to be less troubled by negative thoughts and unhealthy beliefs acquired from childhood events.

Want to learn more about using epigenetics to your advantage? Please contact me without obligation.

Sources:

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1037/a0016301

[3] https://press.rebus.community/app/uploads/sites/52/2018/08/Epigenetics-in-Psychology.pdf