Stress and Strain can change your hair
Recent research suggests stress and strain can change your hair colour permanently. The team found that going grey early is linked to the fight or flight response.
When I was released from hospital after my induction into the mental health system my Manager introduced me to material on the effects of our stress response in the modern world.
Unfortunately, I never preserved enough to digest the material, or put it to use.
The result being me finding myself back in hospital two years later.
Stress affects us in ways we often may not think of. And interestingly, stress affects our hair too.
The research team I mentioned at the beginning of this post, made the hair colour change/stress discovery by studying the unconscious network that regulates our survival mechanism.
They investigated the network of nerves that branch out into each hair follicle.
They discovered that stress makes these nerves to release nerepinephrine – a natural hormone.
Hair follicles contain a set amount stem cells able to become pigment producing cells colouring the hair when it grows.
However, nerepinephrine causes more cells than usual to become pigment producing.
This in turn causes the body’s supply of hair colour to run out faster than it should!
In just a few days, all the pigment producing cells were lost. Once gone, pigment cannot be regenerated again. In other words, the damage is permanent.
So when next you see someone appearing to be ageing before their time you know why.
I observed Tony Blair appeared to have aged more than I would have expected in the second term of office.
I observed the same of Barrack Obama. In his case, I saw pictures that showed a vast difference in a space of just 3 years.
The stresses of high office in my opinion must have contributed to this.
Continual stress without sufficient time to recover causes many changes to the body.
I once heard a Pastor reflect that “a bow that is continually bent ceases to shoot straight”.
Effectively, that is what acute stress does to our hair.
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