I don't think we need to say it, but we should be trying to be less stressed.
Stress can help you motivate yourself. Studies have shown that stress can cause health effects to stack up and age you faster.
A new study shows that resilience is linked to less stress related negative effects.
Researchers from Yale University explain in a new paper that stress is leading to negative outcomes in our society.
It is possible that stress is related to accelerated aging.
Epigenetic clocks are markers that are able to provide an accurate estimate of biological age. It has the added bonus of being able to be tested from blood or saliva, because of the fact that every piece of your body's DNA has a marker called a methylation. The team used a name called 'Grim Age'.
The researchers looked at people in New Haven. They were given questionnaires that asked about cumulative stress, self-control, and their current health, and then blood samples were taken to do the GrimAge methylation check, and measure insulin resistance and adrenal sensitivity.
The team found that people who were stressed more had older cells than they should have. The team found that stress was associated with a number of health problems, including adrenal sensitivity and insulin resistance.
Not everyone with chronic levels of stress had the same issues. Those that were good at emotional regulation and self-control seemed to have less negative effects.
The results support the idea that stress makes us age faster, according to one of the researchers.
They suggest a way to possibly minimize these adverse consequences of stress through strengthened emotion regulation and self-control.
Self-control and emotional regulation can be learned and grown over time. If stressing less isn't an option, we might be able to limit the adverse health effects by working on these skills.
This is still very early for this. We can't tell if stress is causing the changes or if it's just correlation, as this is an observational study.
The team writes that the study is the first to show a clear relationship between cumulative stress and Grim Age acceleration in a healthy population.
resilience factors, including self-control and emotion regulation, moderated the relationship.
The paper has been published.
