Stress and Aging

Last week I found myself wide-eyed at 3 am, skin clammy, mouth dry, breathing shallow, mind racing, not able to stop thinking about workplace “issues.”  I was stressing out. What does it mean to “stress out”?  And what does this have to do with aging?  Read on.

Our bodies are masterfully designed to deal with threats that require us to react quickly and powerfully.  An emergency presents itself, and the brain immediately alerts the body’s automatic nervous system.  Whoosh… a flood of hormones, cortisol being the biggie. The heart beats faster; blood pressure elevates; blood vessels dilate; the digestive system slows; the liver releases glucose; the skin sweats.  The body stays in this overdrive state until the brain signals the emergency is over.  All this makes sense – perfect, wonderful, species-protecting sense – if there is danger, and a person needs to be hyper-alert and super-energized to deal with it.

If there had been a burglar trying to jimmy open my bedroom window at 3 am, or if I had jolted awake to the sound of a smoke alarm, this response would have been a completely appropriate, perhaps even life-saving.  But there was no such threat.  In fact, only about 10 percent of modern stress can be linked to actual physical threats to life or safety. The other 90 percent comes from our perceptions of worrisome life events, like domestic problems, money concerns, work issues.  But burglar at the window or bureaucratic meltdown at the office, our bodies react with the same flood of cortisol.

If the threat is a real emergency, when it is resolved, the body regulates itself back to normal.  But if the “threat” is ongoing, recurring or chronic (that is, if you continue to perceive the worrisome situation as stressful, or if you move from one worrisome situation to another), then the body never really goes back to its pre-emergency self.  You remain bathed in cortisol.

This is not a good thing.

This is a path to ill health and premature aging.

In fact, researchers in the psychiatry department of UC San Francisco (among many others) report a distinct link between psychological stress and accelerated aging in humans (also mice).  Stress – courtesy of the cortisol bath – can elevate cholesterol and blood pressure, increase bone loss, increase fat storage (especially around the middle), cause sleep problems, cause memory problems and suppress the immune system.  Yikes.

So what’s a person to do?  Avoiding situations that could trigger stress is probably not an option.  Choosing to react to those situations – training yourself to react to those situations – in more positive ways is an option.  The “It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge” way of thinking. You might like to know that people who exercise regularly are less susceptible to chronic stress.  And there’s some evidence that good nutrition and perhaps vitamin C and B vitamin supplements may help.  There’s always stress management techniques: deep breathing, yoga, progressive relaxation, music – or a self-designed strategy.  Whatever you do (I walk myself, mentally, through all the rooms of the house I grew up in…this both comforts and distracts me), the important thing is to stop the stress response before it begins to do real harm, before it fast-forwards the biological clock.