Is Gray Hair Related To Stress?
Legend has it that Marie Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France, after being sentenced to die at the guillotine, woke up with her hair completely white the morning after she learned of the sentence. Was it the stress of knowing her conviction that left her with gray hair, or is this story part of popular folklore and has no basis in the real world?
More recently, we also got to know the story of Eric Moody, the heroic British Airways airline pilot. Even with the failure of all the plane’s engines, the pilot managed to glide with the aircraft, land and save the lives of all passengers. A year after this feat, he reported in surprise that all his hair had turned gray.
Would these stories demonstrate that stress changes the pigmentation of our hair or are they just coincidences? Is gray hair related to age or just life experiences? Read on for the answer!
What is gray hair?
Hair turns gray because our hair follicles, where our hair grows, no longer manufacture a substance known as melanin. This is the substance in charge of giving color to our hair, of dyeing it its natural color. On the other hand, the degeneration of the melanin manufacturing process starts around 30 or 40 years of age in the white population and 10 years later in the black population.
This means that the progressive graying of hair is associated with age. Exceptional cases, however, are those in which, in a short period of time, the hair is discolored all at once, such as those presented in the introduction. These cases are influenced by something else. That something else is the exceptional situation, stress, which from our mind has effects on our entire body, starting with the heart, as it alters the heartbeat.
For Eric Moody, our brave pilot, a year is a very short period of time, so stress is a key factor to consider in his story. The conclusions, however, must be cautious: the different studies done to try to demonstrate this relationship have not produced conclusive results.
This was because subjecting people to this degree of stress that life throws at us at times for research purposes is unethical, having replaced this process with stressors that produce a much less acute relationship than a death sentence or the danger of a plane crash. Even so, studies that ended up focusing on more chronic stressors, which are the most common for us, did not find well-established relationships.
Marie Antoinette Syndrome
There is a condition called alopecia areata which is characterized by a sudden hair loss that starts with one or more hairless areas that can meet. This disease was known by the name of “Marie Antoinette Syndrome”, since what happened to the monarch was not considered precisely a sudden graying of the hair, but an abundant loss of it, which caused a change in color.
The sensation of loss of color that occurs in this case is caused because the darkest hair is the one that falls out first, so if there were some gray hairs before, they are more visible. This type of alopecia does not occur in a single day, it takes several weeks to develop.
Stress is considered a trigger of this process, but for it to occur there must be a combination of stress and a genetic predisposition. Even so, the prevalence of this syndrome is only about 0.2% of the population, and it is a case that should be treated with dermatological consultations.
Stress, age and gray hair
Taking into account all of the above, it can be concluded that stress also influences our hair if the stressful situation is of such a high level that it is evaluated as dangerous for our lives, not making clear the relationship that exists, or if it exists, with stress if stressors are more like what we find in our everyday life: less acute and more chronic.
Still, living life with the philosophy of being happy with what we have and making the most of it within our possibilities will always be good for our physical health, our mental health and, consequently, for taking care of our hair, gray or not.
