Grey Hair And Stress

According to some scientists the grey hair and stress connection has yet to be proven.  Because genetics plays such a prominent role in hair cycles, researchers have tended to focus on these trends rather than on the effects of chronic or long term stress and the graying of hair.  According to new research however, the stress/grey hair connection is as real as those white hairs you plucked out this morning in the bathroom mirror. 

Hair turns grey when it stops producing melanin, the color pigment.  The hair has three distinct cycles: anagen, catagen, and telogen.  The first of which is the active stage in which hair grows fast, each strand growing for approximately two to four years.  After this the hair enters the catagen phase.  For tow weeks, hair reaches its final growth point and then moves into the third stage the telogen stage.  After many months of resting, the hair strands then fall out and are replaced by new hairs. 

As we age though, the phases tend to speed up and thus the cycle gets shorter and shorter.  When this happens, the breakdown of melanin occurs more quickly.  The faster hair falls out therefore, the faster the pigment cells breakdown.  As this hastened cycle continues the cells simply begin to stop working as they once did.

Genetics obviously plays a big role in when and how fast you will turn grey.  If you look around at your mother and father, as well as your aunts and uncles and see a sea of grey, well then you are probably destined to join them.  Most people in fact notice their first grey hairs between the ages of 30 and 35, however, we’ve all known the prematurely greying high school kid suffering from his or her genetic fate.  With hair coloring now so widely available though, we rarely see younger individuals sporting their grey locks.

Aside from these genetic factors though, researchers have now found a connection between stress and grey hair.  Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital researchers have discovered in recent study that individuals suffering from chronic stress lasting two years or more tend to go grey earlier than usual.  Early greying is caused by the entire premature aging that chronic stress puts on the body.

We have all known how bad chronic stress is for your health, but here is just one more reason to take a breath and relax a little.  Faster paced lifestyles, lack of sleep, poor diet and added stress have all contributed to early greying.  According to the main researcher of the study, Tyler Cymet, people are actually going grey five years earlier on average than they did in the 1970s.  This alone should give us pause.

Both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Indian Ayurvedic medicine have long known that grey hairs were related to stressful living.  Both see premature greying as a sign of imbalance in the body and treat it with a combination of herbal remedies and relaxation techniques. 

So if you feel like you’ve spotted a few more greys than usual, try not to get too worked up about it.  The best thing for you might simply be to hit a meditation or yoga class, breathe a few deep breaths, and try to simply relax.  Low stress living could be the answer to warding off those greys and the expensive coloring sessions at the salon.