Stress leaves a mark on the human body. You may have noticed it in your personal life by looking into the mirror after a stressful exam week or busy period at work.
Consequently, many questions arise: Does stress make you age quicker? Can stress cause an early death? Can it make your hair turn grey?
This article explains what stress is and what happens when you experience too much of it.
Can stress turn your hair grey? (Image Credit: goodluz via Shutterstock / HDR tune by Universal-Sci)
Stress isn't all bad
Perhaps you are familiar with the saying 'aging like a president.' It refers to the apparently accelerated aging that presidents endure during their term. A commonly referred to example is president Obama whose hair turned grey during his presidency. Some say that he seemingly aged 16 years in just 8 years.
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the introduction, stress does leave its mark on the human body. However, stress isn't always bad; it has its uses. In fact, according to Dr. Marieke Tollenaar, psychologist at Leiden University, we humans actually need a little stress to function well in our daily life.
It's an ancient instinct of the body to get ready for action, like fighting, akin to our ancestors when they encountered a dangerous predator on their path. The substances that are released in your body when you experience stress help you to take action.
Even today, you can still use that power, as it enables you to play your best game in a sports final or work harder when a deadline is approaching. In addition to a fighting response, stress can also induce a flight response. Returning to our ancestor example, if the dangerous predator mentioned above turns out to be a fierce sable tooth tiger, it might be best to flee from it instead of fighting it.
Like the fight response to stress, the flight response also has modern-day analogs you may recognize. Think of a situation where you need to give a talk in front of a large crowd of people, for example.
Whether it triggers a fight or flight response, stress makes your body brace itself. Fortunately, once the danger has passed, your body will calm down.
Giving a talk in front of a large crowd of people may instigate a flight response for some - (Image Credit: Matej Kastelic via Shutterstock / HDR tune by Universal-Sci)
What happens inside your body when experiencing stress?
What exactly happens in your body when you experience a short-lived stress reaction? Let's use an example where a large dog suddenly runs towards you. Your brain notices at that moment that a situation has arisen that requires you to be alert.
The part of your brain that is responsible for this response, located deep within the temporal lobes of the cerebrum, is called the amygdala. This part of your brain constantly receives stimuli from your senses and makes very quick decisions. It analyses what is going on and resolves how to best prepare the body for these situations.
In our case, a large dog is approaching, which means danger. As soon as the amygdala realizes that a dangerous situation is emerging, the so-called pituitary gland (an endocrine gland located in your brain about the size of a pea) sends hormones to your body.
The roles of adrenaline and cortisol
Hormones are substances that travel via your bloodstream to ensure that your body knows what to do. They function as a physical information distributer. In the case of stress, we are talking about stress hormones called adrenaline and cortisol.
Adrenaline raises your heart rate and blood pressure and narrows your blood vessels so that you become super focused, allowing you to swiftly respond to that big dog that is now coming in very close.
Cortisol comes in a bit later and ensures that the necessary energy is released by raising your blood sugar level. The interesting thing about cortisol is that it also suppresses other parts of your body that are of less importance at the time. Think of the immune system, the digestive system, and the reproductive system. In this manner, your body can focus as a whole on solving the threatening situation.
As soon as the barking dog is gone, a signal is sent from your brain, relaying that the danger has passed. The body can now go back into relax mode.
Image Credit: VectorMine via Shutterstock (click on image to enlarge)
The problem with stress in modern times
All in all, stress is your body's way of surviving hazardous situations. But in modern times, there are no constant life and death threats akin to what our ancestors experienced.
Most stress we endure these days is rooted in problems created within our heads. A tight deadline is not a life-threatening situation. A small amount of stress derived from work deadlines is okay because it lets you perform and focus on the task at hand.
But what if another deadline lives on the horizon after finishing the initial deadline? Or what if you are in the midst of moving house? Or expecting your first child?
Things stack up quite quickly, so your brain continues to dispatch stress hormones to your body, assuming you are constantly in a dangerous situation. This is called chronic stress, and due to the changing times, a large portion of the world population is experiencing chronic stress.
As stated by Dr. Tollenaar, the number of people with stress-related complications has risen in the past ten years. On top of that, approximately 30% of people suffer from anxiety-related issues.
How does stress affect aging?
But what does stress do to your body besides the aforementioned psychological issues? Will you age faster? Will stress turn your hair grey?
A large body of research shows these concerns are actually valid. Dr. Tollenaar even put this research to the test with a group of students. First, the study participants were asked how much stress they experienced. Then they were shown pictures of each other and had to estimate how old the others were.
It turned out that students who indicated that they experience a lot of stress were estimated to be older than their actual age. In contrast, students who experience little stress were estimated to be younger than their real age.
Can stress cause an early death?
In addition to adverse effects on appearance, people with chronic stress actually tend to live a shorter life on average compared to people who experience little stress.
Early deaths caused by chronic stress find their origin in different factors. It is not only an unhealthy lifestyle (think of stress eating and not enough physical exercise), often associated with high stress levels, that stands at the root of the problem, but also the mechanisms behind aging itself. According to Dr. Tollenaar, the process of aging in people with chronic stress happens at an accelerated pace.
How does stress make you age faster?
So how does this work? If you experience more stress, a larger amount of cortisol is released into your body.
In addition to sending signals to the organs and the brain, cortisol can also send signals directly to cells. Our DNA lies within every cell in our body, containing genes that determine how a particular cell should function.
Cortisol is capable of determining which genes are switched on or off. Through this mechanism, it can achieve various effects on the body, such as the aforementioned release of sugars into the bloodstream and suppression of the immune system.
Unfortunately, cortisol also has a detrimental effect on our cells. It literally requires cells to work harder. So hard, in fact, that cells tend to last for a shorter period of time than the cells of someone with lower base levels of stress.
Eventually, 'exhausted' cells have to be repaired or replaced. Cell replacement occurs through copying a cell's DNA, causing the fatigued cell to divide into new healthy cells. Sadly, this is not an infinite process (otherwise, we would be immortal). At a certain point, they can no longer recover or divide properly.
Research shows that cortisol speeds up this process. For example, a study done by Tollenaar and her colleagues has shown that children and adults who have experienced a lot of stress are biologically older than people who have experienced less stress in their lives.
Biological age can be determined through DNA changes that track how old body cells are. When more of these changes are measured on someone's DNA, the higher their biological age.
Can you get grey hair from stress?
A particular aspect of getting older commonly associated with stress is hair turning grey. According to research, it is actually not cortisol that turns your hair grey; in fact, adrenaline is the culprit.
Studies on mice have shown that adrenaline causes cells in the hair follicle responsible for melanin and color to deplete more quickly. A constant overdose of stress can cause your new hairs to lose color, optically turning your hair grey.
It may be that after reading this, you feel stressed about stress. This is, of course, not the aim of the article. Stress is a necessity for survival, but you have to know how to deal with it, which is precisely the problem in modern times, as many people can't seem to do that.
Dr. Tollenaar recommends contacting your GP if you think that you are experiencing too much stress in everyday life, be it from deadlines, perfectionism, or general anxiety. Your doctor can refer you for psychological support.
You may have to invest some time in learning to deal with stress, but you may literally get extra years of your life in return.
Sources and further reading:
Understanding the stress response (Harvard Health Publishing)
Concurrent Stress and Depressive Symptoms Increase Risk of Myocardial Infarction or Death (Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes)
Dr. Marieke Tollenaar via Leiden University / Universiteit van Nederland
DNA replication stress, genome instability and aging (Nucleic Acids Research)
Work stress and risk of death in men and women with and without cardiometabolic disease: a multicohort study (The Lancet - Diabetes & Endocrinology)
Prolonged Non-metabolic Heart Rate Variability Reduction as a Physiological Marker of Psychological Stress in Daily Life (Annals of Behavioral Medicine)
Cortisol (Cleveland Clinic)
Adrenaline (Cleveland Clinic)
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