This body of research has led to the hypothesis that the key mechanism driving associations between stress and these health outcomes is an acceleration of the biological aging process, including increases in systemic inflammation and telomere shortening.
Stress aging is real, and the longer stress lasts, the more it can impact your skin. How fast stress makes you age depends on individual traits —skin type, age, lifestyle, or genetics.
Poor sleep: Studies show that low quality (or not enough) sleep makes your cells age faster. Stress: When you're stressed, your brain pumps out cortisol, a stress hormone. Cortisol blocks two substances that keep your skin looking plump and vibrant: hyaluronan synthase and collagen.
“There's substantial research that tells us stress makes older adults feel their age, or even feel older than they actually are,” says Shevaun Neupert, corresponding author of the study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University.
But there are ways to help your brain recover. For example: Regular exercise can help regulate your fight-or-flight response, and it can nourish areas of the brain to improve brain capacity and function. Meditation can both prevent and reverse the effects of stress.
The observed age pattern for daily stress was remarkably strong: stress was relatively high from age 20 through 50, followed by a precipitous decline through age 70 and beyond.
Getting enough restorative sleep can certainly help slow down the natural effects of aging and reverse the effects of premature aging. In the same way that getting too little sleep can lead to our hormonal dysregulation, getting enough sleep can restore hormonal balance in our bodies and reinstate healthy aging.
Or are they permanent? Dr. Yang: With short-term stress, there is always some reversibility. But the longer the person is under stress, the more permanent the wrinkles become.
Massive biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s, Stanford Medicine researchers find. We undergo two periods of rapid change, averaging around age 44 and age 60, according to a Stanford Medicine study.
A poor diet, smoking, alcohol and stress can also age the skin. "When we sleep, turnover and renewal occurs, and we know not getting enough sleep can lead to accelerated aging," says Friedman.
In your 40s, your ageing skin can become drier, making lines and wrinkles more pronounced. You continue to lose subcutaneous fat, but not equally from all areas. Fat pads around the cheeks and above the mouth are generally the first to go, followed by fat from around the sides of the mouth, chin and jawline.
Three types of hair loss can be associated with high stress levels: Telogen effluvium. In telogen effluvium (TEL-o-jun uh-FLOO-vee-um), significant stress pushes large numbers of hair follicles into a resting phase. Within a few months, affected hairs might fall out suddenly when simply combing or washing your hair.
It's a puffy or bloated facial appearance caused by extra cortisol (re: stress hormone) in the body. Think chubby cheeks, rounded jaw, and puffy eyes. Here's a little biology lesson: when your body gets ~stressed~ it releases cortisol aka the stress hormone.
Stress can temporarily change our biological age, but the process reverses when the stressor is resolved, according to a new study.
Lack of sleep magnifies visible signs of aging
Not getting enough sleep can make you look older. One study showed that people who didn't get enough sleep had more visible signs of aging, like wrinkles and under-eye bags. Their skin also took longer to recover from minor everyday damage from things like sunlight.
Skin becomes loose and sagging, bones lose their mass, and muscles lose their strength as a result of time spent living life. Most people begin to notice a shift in the appearance of their face around their 40's and 50's, with some also noticing a change in their 30's.
The researchers found people reached their happiest when they arrived at the age of 70. Life satisfaction decreased between the ages of nine and 16, increased a little until the age of 70, and then declined again until the age of 96.
Experts interviewed by Fortune say Hanks isn't alone in finding the mid-thirties age difficult. Neither the youngest or oldest kid on the block, people in their mid-thirties might be going through a bit of a slump with financial and family responsibilities setting in.
Younger people have higher stress related to the pressure to succeed. 60% of 18-24-year-olds and 41% of 25-34-year-olds cited this, compared to 17% of 45-54s and 6% of over 55s).
The swelling can make your face look round and puffy. Moon face is a common side effect of corticosteroid use and a symptom of certain health conditions. Although harmless, the condition can affect your self-esteem. The medical term for this is moon facies, but other people call it cortisol face.
Take deep breaths. Several studies reveal the benefits of deep-breathing exercises for at least five minutes, three to five times a day. Research shows that it helps to lower cortisol levels, ease anxiety and depression, and improve memory. To get started, try using a deep-breathing app like Insight Timer or Calm.
Water plays an integral role in how the body functions, can help the body heal from physical and emotional stress through flushing cortisol from our systems, and can even assist in regulating mood as well as our sleep wake cycles (Pross N, Demazières A, Girard N, Barnouin R, Metzger D, Klein A, et al., 2014).