Regardless of politics, the energy and apparent longevity of the 79-year-old Donald Trump is historic. He works an almost 20-hour day each day. So much for getting the proper amount of sleep. He doesn’t have a great diet, although he has stayed away from drugs and alcohol throughout his life. He is physically active but has no real exercise program. He has the mental acuity and energy of people much younger than his actual age. What is his secret?
Many will argue he just has great genetics. That is likely a major factor. But as we’ve seen from many studies, the environment-led expression of genes is more significant than the genetics themselves. Epigenetics, the adaptability of gene expression to adjust to a wide array of environmental conditions, is what predominately affects health except in cases of major gene defects — and those defects will usually show up rather early in life. When someone reaches 79, epigenetics has mostly shaped that person’s life. Trump seems to be going strong despite the odds. How do we explain his energy in terms of epigenetics?
There is something else about Trump that amazes most everyone. Beyond his seemingly inexhaustible energy, he also seems to be unfazed by roadblocks, insurmountable odds, and even outright threats to his life. After he announced his candidacy for another term as President, he was quickly brought up on major charges under four different court cases. He also survived two assassination attempts and barely slowed his campaign in response. Some have said that he was fearless, others that he had a strong sense of purpose. Whatever drove him, no threat or roadblock slowed his stride, sapped his energy, or even robbed him of a sense of humor. Perhaps that unflappable nature, his indomitable spirit, is his secret?
We don’t want to forget the primary driver of epigenetics. Yes, that’s the environment, but the most significant environmental signals that our body cells receive come from the brain. If Trump’s spirit is that resolute, that unbreakable, the signals that his body receives are remarkably positive. This must be a huge factor in his impressive health span. It fits, it makes sense. Donald Trump, in all stages of his career, enjoyed his work, his life, and was always striving to be doing even more. Clearly he is driven, but he seems to thrive on that drive. His sense of purpose and meaning in life appears to be off the charts. That is giving him energy and drive that many of his younger staff have trouble matching.
Now for us normal people…
Many of us have the opposite reaction to trauma and adversity — our energy is sapped, and we are haunted by past events. PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome) is all too common: while only 13 million adults have been shown to have PTSD in any given year, many of us have issues that are at sub-PTSD levels. While we may not be haunted by nightmares of the traumatic events, they still are in the foggy, unconscious recesses of our brains. They are bad recordings which got extra emphasis and formed deeper memories because of high emotions surrounding the incidents in our lives. They are settled into the background but still affecting our lives. The studies being done on PTSD are relevant to most of us, just to a lesser degree. We are walking around with some sub-clinical levels of PTSD, so we can learn from studies that examine full-blown PTSD.
What does trauma do to us? Clearly, trauma means we are in an emergency, and our minds and bodies react accordingly. But then the trauma is over and life returns to normal, except that our brains hold the memory of each trauma. So the emergency is never completely over for us if thoughts, even subconscious thoughts, keep dredging up the emergency, the sensations and feelings surrounding the crisis, and perhaps the pain and torment that we suffered. And that means our health will suffer from events in our past that we know shouldn’t be bothering us now, yet they do.
Well researched
So let’s take a look at PTSD research. Published in Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine is a review study using a sample of 1828 veterans who had been diagnosed with PTSD, studying the health impact of PTSD while simultaneously studying effects of obesity (1). Either condition was shown to accelerate epigenetic aging, which meant that their cells were advancing more rapidly than normal in the process that we call aging, regardless of their initial genetic makeup. They found that PTSD resulted in greater aging across all measured aging scores: it was universally harmful to their longevity. Like a clock, aging tends to run only in one direction, so the sooner we can slow the aging cell clock, the better for us.
Their study also looked at obesity in terms of the age clock. Obesity didn’t show universal accelerated aging on all aging scores, but it was significant on some of the scores. While the brain is the supreme controller of the body, direct environmental factors still have a major impact on health and longevity. Their study saw a double impact for those with both PTSD and obesity on accelerated aging. So while the brain is powerful, pure physical factors also have a strong impact. Many have lived good lives otherwise but been smokers or alcoholics and saw their lives cut short. The environment does age us, and we want to minimize the damage it can cause. We can’t control all environmental factors, but obesity is well within the control of most people. Excess fat is not just hard to lug around, forcing us into bigger wardrobes — it is a constant stressor on the body. Fat itself gives off inflammatory toxins which are a constant load on the body.
Of course, mental-emotional conditions can lead to obesity. Those living with depression or even a pessimistic view of life may not put much effort into diet and exercise, even though they need these desperately. We absorb the trauma of those people around us — mostly close family — and build those traumas into our developing subconscious brains as we start out life. Research abounds with studies linking early life trauma with prevalence for disease, shorter lifespans, and accelerated aging symptoms. Published in Aging Medicine is such a study, where researchers reviewed 24 other studies that analyzed the connection between childhood experiences and the well-being of older adults (2). These studies showed various ways that early-life trauma affected adults: mentally in depression, anxiety, and tendency towards substance abuse; physically in chronic illnesses and lowered immune system function; cognitively in poor thinking and concentration, as well as memory problems; and socially in their ability to trust others, their emotional control, and tendency towards social isolation. While these studies varied in the ways the early life traumas affected the people studied, all showed negative, potentially life-shortening impacts.
Be less sympathetic.
In relation to your nervous system, “sympathetic” refers to your emergency response system. When you are operating much of your day in sympathetic-dominant mode, you are sacrificing long-term health for short-term performance. If you are “hyper” most of the time, you are running primarily in sympathetic mode. The emergency response system is for emergencies, but if your whole day is an emergency, your health is being thrown out the window to get you into “fight or flight” (maybe add the word “fright” in there as well) mode. In contrast, parasympathetic nervous response is your “rest and digest” mode. You can operate in sympathetic mode somewhat, so long as you are majority parasympathetic. A little hustle, a short-lived sympathetic response gets you out of bed and to work, or helps you avoid an accident on the road. But a lot means you are just stressed out.
So what ages you? Obviously, environmental factors are part of the answer. Getting too much sunshine ages your skin. Smoking ages you overall, especially your lungs. Alcohol ages your detoxification organs, particularly your liver. Drugs, whether prescription, “recreational”, or off the shelf, are toxic and age you internally. Excess fat might as well be a drug, because it constantly emits inflammatory toxins. But the most insidious aging comes from your brain, where old recordings of negative, emotion-charged events seep through your subconscious thoughts and put you into sympathetic dominance throughout the day. That ages you. Yes, time on this Earth ages you, but relatively slowly compared with the aging that comes from stress and poor lifestyle.
Remember that stress is perceived and may have little to do with reality. The same threat that intimidates you might not even faze another person. Two people are approached by a growling lion — the first has no defense, and the second is armed with a loaded and ready shotgun. How do both perceive the threat? The threats you encounter may just be challenges to another person. Your perceptions are based upon your previous experiences. If those experiences make your average day stressful, your subconscious thoughts are not helping you. But they can change, and you won’t miss them if they leave!
Dr. Nemec’s Review
What is stress?
It’s a perception: a physical, mental and emotional perception based on early life subconscious and conscious programming. What makes one person fearful can be another person’s purpose. Everything in life is how you see it, not how it really is and how it appears to you through your perception. But this perception was formed in utero and your first six years of life. What makes one person fearless and ready to take on the world and another person fearful, wanting to run away from the world? Their perception!
To one it is partly sunny this morning, but it’s going to be a sunny day. To the other one it’s partly cloudy today and it looks like there could be a tornado coming.
How is it in a courtroom when witnesses on a crime scene are interviewed, we get so many different viewpoints? This is because each sees life through their own perception filters.
In the Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine study the researchers looked at two important aspects of aging: mental-emotional stress and obesity. Both are inflammatory; both decrease lifespan and health span, but the mental-emotional stress was the clear winner over the physical stress of obesity. Yet, when you combine them, they have a multiplied effect doubling the rate of aging.
What’s the answer?
Change. When you change your perception, you change your reality. We’ll start with the easier of the two: obesity.
Why is someone overweight?
Well, that is a pretty easy answer: they consume more calories than they burn. That’s the overall reason, but there are many reasons why someone would not burn many calories. One reason is that the person has low thyroid function: this is the hormone of metabolism or how hot the furnace burns, so if the metabolism is low, they don’t expend that much energy each moment, this means they don’t have the luxury of another person that has a high metabolism where their basal metabolic rate burns more calories for energy each moment.
How do you fix your thyroid?
There are three ways to improve thyroid function
- Start taking thyroid medication — many people choose this option and feel better, but remember the question is: why do you have a thyroid problem? Taking a medication to patch it up potentially has other side effects in the body.
- Do natural protocol for the thyroid. This consists of vitamin, mineral, and herbal remedies to naturally improve thyroid function. These have benefit and they do not have side effects as medication does, but we’re still seeing the issue through the wrong eyes. We’re still looking at the problem like a specialist only working on one area of the body, but the body is a symphony orchestra, not one person playing one musical instrument.
- Balance the entire system from a holistic perspective, that is looking at the whole person, not the individual pieces alone. Why does a person have a thyroid problem? 95% of the time it’s because of other issues going on mentally, emotionally, and physically in the body — very rarely is it just an isolated thyroid problem.
The holistic perspective
With three ways to address a thyroid problem, it can be seen as three different viewpoints. The first is from the ground perspective. Next is from the higher perspective of a helicopter, and finally there is the satellite-view perspective.
From the ground
We see what’s going on in the immediate situation, considering the immediate surrounding environment. Our view is very limited. This is like driving your car on the highway with traffic. This is the conventional view.
From the air
From this perspective, we can see immensely more information about the situation. This is the air traffic helicopter, reporting a much larger picture: now one sees accidents and blockages in the traffic flow many miles ahead and can divert the traffic accordingly with this new information. This is the natural view.
From space
Now we cannot only see the car and the traffic — we can see the city, the state, the surrounding states, the country, and the world. With this view, we can see things so far upstream and downstream that we can give the complete and most beneficial advice for the person who’s driving the car. This is the holistic view
What is the holistic view?
It is looking at the whole person, at what makes up the whole person?
- The physical body made of 100 trillion cells arranged in systems, organs, glands, and tissues. The most important area in controlling health and the physical body is the brain. It is the master controller.
- The mind and emotions which stem from the early upbringing environment. This is the place where perceptions are formed early in life, along with belief systems, attitudes, and opinions. This was all programmed in those early years.
- The spiritual heart, which receives information from another source, independent of one’s upbringing.
Thyroid 101
No organ, gland, or tissue is an isolated island. It is a part of a community: that community is controlled by the brain, and the brain receives its information from the mind and from the heart.
So let’s go back to the obesity issue along with every other issue. Did these conditions start just in locally in that area? How did the car get into the traffic jam? Was it just the car’s problem or were there other factors beyond the car? This is the problem when we see everything through an organ /gland perspective instead of a much bigger satellite view.
So you presently are a product of your early environment and the environment that you’ve chosen up to this point, but that can all change in an instant. All you have to do is choose a different path, an extremely holistic path, one that sees from the satellite and sees all the variable factors — not some, but all. When you correct all the factors, when you treat the original cause, you correct all the effects — not just one, but all of them, and the thyroid was just one. There are many other organ / gland imbalances when the cause is being out of balance, which has multiplied downstream effects. The problem is that everyone is looking at the effect and not looking to the cause, or if they’re looking upstream they’re not looking far enough upstream — they’ve settled for either the ground or a slightly elevated air view, but the only answer is to go to the satellite view and see the whole picture rather than pieces and parts.
All these connect in the brain, so whatever the mind, during early upbringing, is programmed with, that is what the brain is telling the body: the thyroid gland along with all the other hundred trillion cells in the body. There is another source that tells the thyroid and all the other cells in the body what to do. This is the heart — the spirit — it also is programming the brain. And when the heart rules, this is the difference between healing and just temporarily improving.
At Revolution Health & Fitness we’ve been helping people on their journey with the holistic satellite view for over 40 years, helping each person optimize their potential and their health span, being balanced in body, emotion, brain, mind and spirit.
(1) Bourassa KJ, Garrett ME, Ashley-Koch AE, Beckham JC, Kimbrel NA; VA Mid-Atlantic MIRECC Workgroup. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Obesity, and Epigenetic Aging: A Replication Study in 1828 Veterans. Biopsychosoc Sci Med. 2025 Jul-Aug 01;87(6):355-361. doi: 10.1097/PSY.0000000000001397. Epub 2025 May 7. PMID: 40524549. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40524549/
(2) Parvin MR, Johra FT, Akter F, Wahiduzzaman M, Akter K, Das M, Mondal S, Debnath M, Ullah M, Rony MKK. The long-term effects of childhood circumstances on older individuals: A systematic review. Aging Med (Milton). 2024 Apr 12;7(2):239-251. doi: 10.1002/agm2.12299. PMID: 38725695; PMCID: PMC11077334.
