So this is complicated information, but let’s hang in there just a little bit longer. The ultimate point will be important for understanding the relevance of interventions and practices like mindfulness.

Now that we have some sense of the ways our DNA can be changed, let’s consider a question: Does the body respond in some consistent way to the experience of stress or adversity?

The answer appears to be yes.

It turns out that the body has evolved a characteristic way of dealing with adverse experiences, one which has been conserved from our evolutionary ancestors. It is called the Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity or CTRA. That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s unpack what it means.

Conserved means it’s a pattern that been retained from our evolutionary past. Transcriptional means that it refers to the way that DNA gets transcribed and read by the cells and then expressed. And response to adversity means what it sounds like. This particular physiological pattern of gene transcription happens when we are exposed to chronic stress or adversity.