Prolonged stress increases the risk of heart disease, addiction, mood disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. It can influence metabolism, accelerating obesity-related disorders such as diabetes. Stress also saps our ability to regulate emotions and to think clearly.  

In a new study, Yale researchers sought to determine how much chronic stress accelerates the biological clock. And are there ways to slow it down and extend a healthy lifespan? According to their findings: not surprisingly, stress does indeed make one’s life “clock” tick faster—but, somewhat unexpectedly, individuals can help manage the factors that cause this acceleration by strengthening their emotion regulation and self-control. They highlighted practicing mindfulness—which I will talk about more in a future post—as one technique for erasing the effects of stress on longevity.

Scientists in recent years have developed ways to measure biological age by tracking chemical changes in DNA that occur naturally as people age but occur at different times in different people. These so-called “epigenetic clocks” have proved to be better predictors of lifespan and health than chronological age. For their study, they enrolled 444 relatively young and healthy people, who provided blood samples used to evaluate the age-related chemical changes captured by a biological clock as well as other markers of health. The participants also answered questions designed to reveal stress levels and psychological resilience.

Even after accounting for demographic and behavioral factors such as smoking, body mass index, race and income, the researchers found that those who scored high on measures related to chronic stress exhibited accelerated aging markers and physiological changes.

However, stress didn’t affect everyone’s health to the same degree. Subjects who scored high on two psychological resilience measures—emotion regulation and self-control—were more resilient to the effects of stress on aging. “These results support the popular notion that stress makes us age faster,” Harvanek (a study author) said, “but they also suggest a promising way to possibly minimize these adverse consequences of stress through strengthening emotion regulation and self-control.”

When I started to feel greater stress and anxiety in my life, learning about and putting into practice the techniques of mindfulness greatly helped me cope. According to this study, not only can you handle stress better through emotional regulation, but you can also eliminate the aging effects of stress on your body. If you are feeling high levels of stress in your life, I would strongly recommend seeing how you can put mindfulness and other stress reduction methods to work for you. I will talk more about stress reduction in future posts.