Stress does more than simply make you feel frazzled and worn out. It can actually steal years off your life. You may not even realize that this is going on, but if you’re dealing with stress, your body’s aging process is ticking along faster than you think.
High Blood Pressure
Whenever you get stressed, your body kicks into high gear and starts pumping out hormones as a reaction to that stress. As that happens, the hormones push your blood pressure to rise because it speeds up your heart rate.
High blood pressure causes narrowing of the arteries, which in turn makes your blood pressure worse. Regardless of what causes the high blood pressure, it does age you. But when you have high blood pressure due to stress, it also impacts your appearance.
You can start to look several years older than what you actually are – and it’s noticeable to others as well as yourself when you look in the mirror. You’ll see changes in your appearance in areas such as your skin and in your face.
High blood pressure can cause saggy areas on your face as well as facial flushing. It also affects the way your blood pressure ages your mind.
Your brain can’t withstand chronically elevated high blood pressure without any negative side effects. Pressure in the veins from high blood pressure translates to pressure within the brain.
One study showed that a person who has high blood pressure can experience the same brain changes and brain aging of someone nearly a decade older. That means that if someone’s aging process is sped up by stress, they’re experiencing altered function and if it’s not relieved, it can lead to subtle damage within the brain.
The longer it lasts, the more damage is done – and this damage can start as early as in your 20s. Whenever the stress is consistent, it causes fatigue because your blood isn’t circulating as easily.
You can fight the effects of stress and slow or reverse the aging process. The best way to do this is to understand that your blood pressure is something that needs to be checked regularly – even if you’re young.
By keeping an eye on your blood pressure, you can bring it back down before it has a chance to cause damage. One way to track it is by having your doctor check it when you go in for a health checkup.
But you can also check your blood pressure at many pharmacies or buy a blood pressure monitoring machine for use at home. By getting into the habit of watching your blood pressure for any elevations, you can make the necessary changes.
Blood Sugar Spikes
Whenever you get stressed, your body goes into ‘fight or flight mode’. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small stressor or a big stressor, the response that your body gives is the same.
You get a sudden burst of glucose in reaction to the stress.
While this response is helpful during a normal stress event – such as when you’ve had a scare and need to react quickly, the response is not helpful when you’re dealing with the kind of stress that sticks around.
Your insulin levels will remain elevated the entire time you’re under stress, and this is bad for your body. High levels of glucose in your bloodstream wreak havoc on your body because it can speed up the aging process.
When you have extra sugar in your bloodstream, it starts to visually age your body. It does this outwardly by causing the appearance of dark circles beneath your eyes. It’s also a contributing factor in skin blemishes.
Wrinkles can be a by-product of elevated glucose. One of the reasons for this is because whenever glucose is elevated due to stress, it dries out your skin. The elevated glucose, when a direct result of stress, ages your body because it causes dehydration and affects collagen production.
So the skin ends up not looking as smooth and can be prone to splitting on the hands, elbows and heels of the feet. Studies show that people who live with stress and experience above normal blood glucose spikes end up looking older than people who manage their stress.
It also affects your body internally. People who experience elevated blood sugar spikes regularly can end up with similar health problems that both diabetics and the elderly experience.
It doesn’t take an extremely high spike to cause ageing effects in the body, either. As little as twenty points above what’s considered the normal range can have an effect.
When you experience blood sugar spikes, the elevated glucose keeps your body from healing the way it should.
This isn’t just with things like cuts or sores or bruises, either. If you work out and you have blood glucose spikes caused by stress, your muscle recovery period will increase, and you’ll find that your body recovers like someone much older.
The elevated glucose is preventing your muscles from snapping back the way that they normally would. Spikes in your blood sugar can cause you to feel mentally drained as well as physically fatigued, too.
Pain and Inflammation
Research has shown that whenever you’re under stress, it affects the ageing process by making you susceptible to pain as well as inflammation. Pain and inflammation are a direct result of the body reacting to the stress that you’re under.
It causes both short and long-term responses in the body. In the short term, you might feel a stomachache or develop muscle aches. But over time, you can develop conditions such as ulcers or chronic muscle pain or weakness due to stress.
The answer to why this happens is found deep within the body – in the cells, to be exact. When you live your life as healthy as possible and you effectively deal with your stress, you don’t experience pain or inflammation other than in normal circumstances.
Stress kills off what you need to keep you alive. When you’re under stress, it causes the telomeres, found on the end of the chromosomes to shorten. As these cells shorten, you lose years off your life.
When you’re stressed and it causes pain and inflammation, your cells begin to shorten faster and faster. Stress is literally speeding up your body’s countdown clock. Over time, your cells lose the ability to divide and they die off.
The more stress you’re under, the faster the process is. Studies found that people who live with stress are more likely to lose at least a decade and sometimes more of life. In these studies, it was found that the link between emotions is strongly connected to the body’s telomere cycle.
Another thing that stress does, in the area of pain and inflammation, is that it can make the body more susceptible to increased levels of pain and inflammation, and it can lower the threshold for developing conditions associated with aging such as heart disease.
Immune System Deterioration
Your immune system is meant to protect you from foreign invaders. It’s supposed to keep you safe from foreign invaders that you might pick up through your skin, or through breathing them.
It’s supposed to protect you from bacteria and more. But when you deal with stress, it speeds up the aging process and causes your immune system to deteriorate. That’s because stress always suppresses the function of the immune system.
One way that it does this is by creating a shortage of the number of white blood cells in the body. You need these cells to fight off both small and large infections. The minute your white blood cells decrease, your chances of getting sick go up.
When you get sick, your body is supposed to immediately send out the signal and rush healing cells throughout your body. Whatever the bacteria or virus is, your immune system is supposed to attack it and get whatever is making you sick out of there.
But stress hampers your immune system’s ability to work because the stress hormone basically puts a leash on the system. It holds it back and prevents your system from working properly.
A weakened immune system then begins to get overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the demands. T cell function naturally declines as a person gets older, but stress impacts the decline of T cell function in the immune system, regardless of your age.
Insomnia
Stress affects your health from head to toe, and it also affects your ability to get the amount of sleep that you need – which, of course, makes your health worse. When you’re under stress, you lie awake and it’s difficult to shut off your mind.
You can’t relax and your body stays in a position of tenseness as well as wakefulness. Sometimes people with stress-related insomnia find that they might fall asleep for a few minutes, but then they wake right back up. It’s as if you’re not quite awake and not quite asleep with “dreams” going on and on.
They can’t stay asleep. When this happens, the next day, it’s a struggle to keep up with the physical and mental demands of life. So that causes more stress and keeps the insomnia going.
Your body needs the rest and restoration that sleep provides. If it doesn’t get it, several things begin to take place that speeds up the aging process. One of these things is cell changes.
When you have insomnia, the cells in your body begin to age.
This damage and aging cell reaction will show up in things like wrinkles, lines and bags on your face. The pigment beneath the eyes will begin to darken. Lines and grooves on the skin can deepen.
On the inside of your body, the cell damage and lack of regenerative supply speed up health conditions and diseases that occur as a result of growing older. People who suffer from insomnia can experience a deficiency in growth hormone.
They’ll experience fatigue and loss of muscle strength, both of which are associated with aging but brought on by stress. And it doesn’t take several months for insomnia to take a toll on the body. You can experience aging changes in as little as one night of sleeplessness.
Memory Lapses
Stressful experiences happen to everyone. You can go through things like relationship issues, the death of a spouse or a divorce. You may go through things like losing your job or experiencing a catastrophic illness or event.
Or you might not even experience big stressors at all. You might encounter small stresses but over prolonged periods of time. One way to tell if you’re stressed is to check your level of frustration.
People who live with stress can begin to be forgetful earlier in life than the normal standard associated with ageing. Usually, those who struggle with memory issues chalk the lapses up to just being busy or being naturally forgetful.
The bad thing about how stress speeds up the ageing process with memory lapses is that while some of it can be a short-term loss, it can also lead to long-term memory lapses.
Weight Fluctuations
Stress causes changes in your weight. For some people, when they’re under stress, they lose weight. This type of change can be caused by a difference in calorie intake from what they once ate.
Because of the stress, they lose their appetite and usually end up losing weight, sometimes rapidly. But it can also be caused because stress is forcing your metabolism to speed up.
On the flip side, stress can cause others to gain weight. This can be due to eating more calories in an attempt to deal with whatever it is that’s stressing them. Either way that stress causes your weight to fluctuate, the bottom line is still that your body’s metabolism is undergoing change.
Stress is extremely hard on your metabolism. One of the reasons that it causes people to put on extra pounds is because during stressful times, cortisol is released at higher levels than when you’re not stressed.
Cortisol is responsible for increasing the desire to eat and specifically, it increases the desire to eat fattening or sugary foods. This metabolism change and weight fluctuation impacts everything from your brain health to your muscles.
There is a link between stress, weight fluctuations, metabolism and the aging process. Your metabolism naturally changes as you age. It’s supposed to happen slowly with the passing of time.
But stress kick starts that metabolic change and forces your metabolism to change effective immediately. What that means for you is that stress is overwriting the natural stage that your body should be in in terms of metabolism.
It’s making the structure, the molecular DNA of your body change – and not in a good way. It’s adding year after year to your DNA – all within the space of months. During this process, it’s giving you age-related changes.
It’s shaving off your life expectancy in leaps and bounds by skipping years and shortening your cells. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s introducing your body to health issues that are commonly associated with growing older, such as heart disease.
Weight fluctuations caused by stress break down your body’s natural cell production and that revs up your biological age. While it’s common to think that weight loss caused by stress from speeding up the metabolism is a good thing, it’s not. When your metabolism speeds up, it creates oxidative damage, which in turn speeds up the ageing process.
Digestive Issues from Stress
Your digestive system is part of an elaborate system within the body and it works in tandem with the brain. When you’re stressed by something, it can trigger a reaction in your gut.
Studies have shown that people who live with unresolved stress in their lives often experience temporary and sometimes life-altering digestive issues. Your emotions can drive how your digestive system reacts.
Your brain decides what your digestive system needs to do or not do and it uses neurons to communicate. When you’re under stress, and you’re feeling anxious or angry or sad, this information is relayed to the gut.
The stress that you feel then causes a reaction in this system and that reaction can be uncomfortable at best and make you physically ill at worst. Your body reacts to stress by limiting the amount of blood that travels to your digestive system.
It can make your stomach tighten up – even to the point of causing painful cramping. It can make you feel nauseated to the point you feel like you’re going to vomit. Stress can cause a boost in the production of stomach acid, which makes you feel heartburn or sick to your stomach.
Long-term stress often results in ulcers as a by-product of this overproduction of acid.
Stress can make you unable to have a bowel movement because you develop constipation, or it can lead to diarrhoea.
Stress can worsen certain digestive conditions such as IBS. It can also cause inflammation. You may experience an imbalance in the natural bacteria that are found in your gut.
Stress can affect your ability to eat the way that you usually do. Normally, when someone eats, the process of the food breaking down happens naturally and without incident. But when stress is in the picture, it speeds up the ageing process in your digestive system and you develop issues that are common in older people. What ends up happening is you can develop a multitude of symptoms – including the same symptoms as someone who has diseases such as gastroparesis.
In this condition, the stomach doesn’t empty like it’s supposed to. Stress can cause slow emptying of the stomach. It can also lead to common digestive conditions associated with aging such as flatulence, indigestion and even GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease).
Is there an answer to stress?
Wow, that was a long description of how stress steals years off your life, but is there an answer?
Yes there is. Stress isn’t something you have to live with. In fact, it’s a condition that can have serious side effects on you if you ignore it or learn how to merely live with it. Take control and reduce or eliminate stress that steals years off your life, starting now!
Do the 10 Day Stress Cleanse and you will learn a new way to deal with stress every day for 10 days. At the end of it, you will likely feel much better, and not only that, you’ll be able to keep using the information you learn for the rest of your life – potentially adding years on!
References: https://www.helloheart.com/blog/high-blood-pressure-premature-aging https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596698/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20620757/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428505/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200311100857.htm https://badgut.org/information-centre/a-z-digestive-topics/stress-and-your-gut/