Stress Makes You Old

While researchers have long been piecing together all the ways chronic stress undermines our health, a new study from the University of California at San Francisco confirmed what we suspected all along; stress really does age you.

What happens, researchers learned is that constant stress causes the telomeres - tiny caps on cells' chromosomes that govern cell regeneration - to get smaller. When a cell's telomeres get too short, the cell stops dividing and eventually dies.

Researchers discovered that the telomeres of women with chronically ill children were much shorter than those of women the same age who weren't caregivers. Moreover, the greater the women perceived their stress levels, the shorter their telomeres - and the "older" their cell. "These telomeres are one of the few biological markers of aging we have," says Judy Moskoitz, Ph.D., a psychologist at UCSF who worked on the research.

But wait, you're probably saying: what happened to the women who didn't perceive their lives as stressful? Stress didn't age them nearly as much. "For them, stress is like water off a duck's back," says Thomas Perls, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Boston University and the director of the New England Centenarian Project, a nationwide study of 1500 people over the age of 100 and their children. "It isn't the amount if stress that matters but how you management."

In fact, number of centenarians Perls has studied have endured plenty of stress. After all, they lived through the Great depression and World Wars I and II, not to mention the usual array of divorces, deaths of loved ones, and even job losses. "Yet they don't seem to internalize it," Perls says.
They just let it go."