Are gray hair and stress related?
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Legend has it that Marie Antoinette of Austria, the queen consort of France, after being condemned to die at the guillotine, woke up with her hair completely white the morning after learning of her sentence. Was it the stress of learning of her condemnation that caused her hair to turn gray, or is this story simply part of popular culture but far from being true?
More recently, we can recall the story of Eric Moody, the heroic pilot of British Airways Flight 9, who failed all the engines but managed to glide the aircraft, land and save the lives of all the passengers. A year after this feat, he was surprised to report that all his hair had turned gray.
Do these stories prove that stress changes the pigmentation of our hair or are they just coincidences? Is gray hair related to age or just to life experiences? If you read on you will know the answer.
"Gray hair and guns win battles."
-Anonymous-
What is gray hair? Gray hair occurs because our hair follicles, where our hair grows, stop producing a substance known as melanin. This is the substance responsible for coloring our hair, for "dyeing" it to its natural color. On the other hand, the degeneration of the melatonin manufacturing process begins at around 30-40 years of age in whites and 10 years later in blacks.
This means that progressive graying of the hair is indeed associated with age. However, the exceptional cases, the cases in which in a short period of time all our hair is discolored, such as those presented in the introduction, are influenced by something else. This something else is the exceptional situation, stress, which, starting from our mind, influences our whole body. Starting with the heart, as it alters its constants.
For Eric Moody, our intrepid pilot, a year is a very short period of time, so stress is a fundamental factor to consider. However, we must be cautious in drawing conclusions: the various studies carried out to try to prove this have not yielded conclusive results.
This is because subjecting other people to this degree of stress, in which their lives are at stake, is unethical, this process being replaced by stressors that produce a much less acute reaction than a death sentence or the danger of a plane crash.
However, studies have focused on more chronic stressors, which at the same time are more common for us, and no conclusive results have been found for them.
Marie Antoinette syndromeThere is a type of alopecia areata that is known precisely under the name of "Marie Antoinette syndrome", since what happened to the consort is not considered a sudden graying of the hair, but an abundant loss of hair, which led to the change of color.
The sensation of the loss of color that occurs in this case is caused because the darker hairs are the ones that fall out first, so if there was already some gray hair before, these become more visible. However, this type of alopecia does not occur in a single day, but takes several weeks to develop.
Stress is considered a trigger for this process, but for it to occur it must be combined with a genetic predisposition. Even so, the prevalence of this syndrome is only around 0.2% of the population, so it is difficult to know of cases outside dermatological consultations.
Stress, age and gray hairBearing in mind all of the above, it can be concluded that stress also influences our gray hair if the stressful situation is of such a high level that it is evaluated as dangerous for our life, not making clear its relationship with stress if the stressors are more similar to those we encounter in our daily life: less acute and more chronic.
Even so, taking life with philosophy, being happy with what we have and enjoying to the maximum within our possibilities, is always good for our physical health, our mental health and, of course, that of our gray hair.
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