Is stress turning my hair grey?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
When we start to go grey depends a lot on genetics.
Your first grey hairs usually appear anywhere between your twenties and fifties. For men, grey hairs normally start at the temples and sideburns. Women tend to start greying on the hairline, especially at the front.
The most rapid greying usually happens between ages 50 and 60. But does anything we do speed up the process? And is there anything we can do to slow it down?
You’ve probably heard that plucking, dyeing and stress can make your hair go grey – and that redheads don’t. Here’s what the science says.
What gives hair its colour?
Each strand of hair is produced by a hair follicle, a tunnel-like opening in your skin. Follicles contain two different kinds of stem cells:
- keratinocytes, which produce keratin, the protein that makes and regenerates hair strands
- melanocytes, which produce melanin, the pigment that colours your hair and skin.
There are two main types of melanin that determine hair colour. Eumelanin is a black-brown pigment and pheomelanin is a red-yellow pigment.
The amount of the different pigments determines hair colour. Black and brown hair has mostly eumelanin, red hair has the most pheomelanin, and blonde hair has just a small amount of both.
So what makes our hair turn grey?
As we age, it’s normal for cells to become less active. In the hair follicle, this means stem cells produce less melanin – turning our hair grey – and less keratin, causing hair thinning and loss.
As less melanin is produced, there is less pigment to give the hair its colour. Grey hair has very little melanin, while white hair has none left.
Unpigmented hair looks grey, white or silver because light reflects off the keratin, which is pale yellow.
Grey hair is thicker, coarser and stiffer than hair with pigment. This is because the shape of the hair follicle becomes irregular as the stem cells change with age.
Interestingly, grey hair also grows faster than pigmented hair, but it uses more energy in the process.
Can stress turn our hair grey?
Yes, stress can cause your hair to turn grey. This happens when oxidative stress damages hair follicles and stem cells and stops them producing melanin.
Oxidative stress is an imbalance of too many damaging free radical chemicals and not enough protective antioxidant chemicals in the body. It can be caused by psychological or emotional stress as well as autoimmune diseases.
Environmental factors such as exposure to UV and pollution, as well as smoking and some drugs, can also play a role.
Melanocytes are more susceptible to damage than keratinocytes because of the complex steps in melanin production. This explains why ageing and stress usually cause hair greying before hair loss.
Scientists have been able to link less pigmented sections of a hair strand to stressful events in a person’s life. In younger people, whose stems cells still produced melanin, colour returned to the hair after the stressful event passed.
4 popular ideas about grey hair – and what science says
1. Does plucking a grey hair make more grow back in its place?
No. When you pluck a hair, you might notice a small bulb at the end that was attached to your scalp. This is the root. It grows from the hair follicle.
Plucking a hair pulls the root out of the follicle. But the follicle itself is the opening in your skin and can’t be plucked out. Each hair follicle can only grow a single hair.
It’s possible frequent plucking could make your hair grey earlier, if the cells that produce melanin are damaged or exhausted from too much regrowth.
2. Can my hair can turn grey overnight?
Legend says Marie Antoinette’s hair went completely white the night before the French queen faced the guillotine – but this is a myth.
Melanin in hair strands is chemically stable, meaning it can’t transform instantly.
Acute psychological stress does rapidly deplete melanocyte stem cells in mice. But the effect doesn’t show up immediately. Instead, grey hair becomes visible as the strand grows – at a rate of about 1 cm per month.
Not all hair is in the growing phase at any one time, meaning it can’t all go grey at the same time.
3. Will dyeing make my hair go grey faster?
This depends on the dye.
Temporary and semi-permanent dyes should not cause early greying because they just coat the hair strand without changing its structure. But permanent products cause a chemical reaction with the hair, using an oxidising agent such as hydrogen peroxide.
Accumulation of hydrogen peroxide and other hair dye chemicals in the hair follicle can damage melanocytes and keratinocytes, which can cause greying and hair loss.
4. Is it true redheads don’t go grey?
People with red hair also lose melanin as they age, but differently to those with black or brown hair.
This is because the red-yellow and black-brown pigments are chemically different.
Producing the brown-black pigment eumelanin is more complex and takes more energy, making it more susceptible to damage.
Producing the red-yellow pigment (pheomelanin) causes less oxidative stress, and is more simple. This means it is easier for stem cells to continue to produce pheomelanin, even as they reduce their activity with ageing.
With ageing, red hair tends to fade into strawberry blonde and silvery-white. Grey colour is due to less eumelanin activity, so is more common in those with black and brown hair.
Your genetics determine when you’ll start going grey. But you may be able to avoid premature greying by staying healthy, reducing stress and avoiding smoking, too much alcohol and UV exposure.
Eating a healthy diet may also help because vitamin B12, copper, iron, calcium and zinc all influence melanin production and hair pigmentation.
Theresa Larkin, Associate Professor of Medical Sciences, University of Wollongong
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).
We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.
But what about the moments we’d rather forget?
First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.
One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.
Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”
That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.
For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…
Two Steps To Forgetting
The first step:
You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.
To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.
The
secondmissing step:This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.
To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.
Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.
So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.
The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.
Important reminder
The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.
If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.
Share This Post
The Exercise That Protects Your Brain
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The Neuroscientist In The Gym
This is Dr. Wendy Suzuki. She’s a neuroscientist, and an expert in the neurobiology of memory, as well as neuroplasticity, and the role of exercise in neuroprotection.
We’ve sneakily semi-featured her before when we shared her Big Think talk:
Brain Benefits In Three Months… Through Walking?
Today we’re going to expand on that a little!
A Quick Recap
To share the absolute key points of that already fairly streamlined rundown:
- Exercise boosts levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin (and, which wasn’t mentioned there, noradrenaline)
- These are responsible for motivation, happiness, and focus (amongst other things)
- Persistent exercise boosts certain regions of the brain in particular, most notably the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampi*
- These are responsible for planning and memory (amongst other things)
Dr. Suzuki advocates for stepping up your exercise routine if you can, with more exercise generally being better than less (unless you have some special medical reason why that’s not the case for you).
*often referred to in the singular as the hippocampus, but you have one on each side of your brain (unless a serious accident/incident destroyed one, but you’ll know if that applies to you, unless you lost both, in which case you will not remember about it).
What kind(s) of workout?
While a varied workout is best for overall health, for these brain benefits specifically, what’s most important is that it raises your heart rate.
This is why in her Big Think talk we shared before, she talks about the benefits of taking a brisk walk daily. See also:
If that’s not your thing, though (and/or is for whatever reason an inaccessible form of exercise for you), there is almost certainly some kind of High Intensity Interval Training that is a possibility for you. That might sound intimidating, but if you have a bit of floor and can exercise for one minute at a time, then HIIT is an option for you:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Dr. Suzuki herself is an ardent fan of “intenSati” which blends cardio workouts with yoga for holistic mind-and-body fitness. In fact, she loves it so much that she became a certified exercise instructor:
How much is enough?
It’s natural to want to know the minimum we can do to get results, but Dr. Suzuki would like us to bear in mind that when it comes to our time spent exercising, it’s not so much an expense of time as an investment in time:
❝Exercise is something that when you spend time on it, it will buy you time when you start to work❞
Read more: A Neuroscientist Experimented on Her Students and Found a Powerful Way to Improve Brain Function
Ok, but we really want to know how much!
Dr. Suzuki recommends at least three to four 30-minute exercise sessions per week.
Note: this adds up to less than the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, but high-intensity exercise counts for twice the minutes for these purposes, e.g. 1 minute of high-intensity exercise is worth 2 minutes of moderate exercise.
How soon will we see benefits?
Benefits start immediately, but stack up cumulatively with continued long-term exercise:
❝My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours. ❞
…which is a great start, but what’s more exciting is…
❝The more you’re working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important?
Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging. ❞
In other words, while improving your heart rate through regular exercise will help prevent neurodegeneration by the usual mechanism of reducing neuroinflammation… It’ll also build the parts of your brain most susceptible to decline, meaning that when/if decline sets in, it’ll take a lot longer to get to a critical level of degradation, because it had more to start with.
Read more:
Inspir Modern Senior Living | Dr. Wendy Suzuki Boosts Brain Health with Exercise
Want more from Dr. Suzuki?
You might enjoy her TED talk:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
Prefer text? TED.com has a transcript for you
Prefer lots of text? You might like her book, which we haven’t reviewed yet but will soon:
Enjoy!
Share This Post
- Exercise boosts levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin (and, which wasn’t mentioned there, noradrenaline)
Metabolic Health Roadmap – by Brenda Wollenberg
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The term “roadmap” is often used in informative books, but in this case, Wollenberg (a nutritionist with decades of experience) really does deliver what can very reasonably be described as a roadmap:
She provides chapters in the form of legs of a journey [to better metabolic health], and those legs are broadly divided into an “information center” to deliver new information, a “rest stop” for reflection, “roadwork” to guide the reader through implementing the information we just learned, in a practical fashion, and finally “traveller assistance” to give additional support / resources, as well as any potential troubleshooting, etc.
The information and guidance within are all based on very good science; a lot is what you will have read already about blood sugar management (generally the lynchpin of metabolic health in general), but there’s also a lot about leveraging epigenetics for our benefit, rather than being sabotaged by such.
There’s a little guidance that falls outside of nutrition (sleep, exercise, etc), but for the most part, Wollenberg stays within her own field of expertise, nutrition.
The style is idiosyncratic; it’s very clear that her goal is providing the promised roadmap, and not living up to any editor’s wish or publisher’s hope of living up to industry standard norms of book formatting. However, this pays off, because her delivery is clear and helpful while remaining personable and yet still bringing just as much actual science, and this makes for a very pleasant and informative read.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your metabolic health, as well as get held-by-the-hand through your health-improvement journey by a charming guide, this is very much the book for you!
Click here to check out the Metabolic Health Roadmap, and start taking steps!
Share This Post
Related Posts
Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Safe Efective Sleep Aids For Seniors
Choosing a safe, effective sleep aid can be difficult, especially as we get older. Take for example this research review, which practically says, when it comes to drugs, “Nope nope nope nope nope, definitely not, we don’t know, wow no, useful in one (1) circumstance only, definitely not, fine if you must”:
Review of Safety and Efficacy of Sleep Medicines in Older Adults
Let’s break it down…
What’s not so great
Tranquilizers aren’t very healthy ways to get to sleep, and are generally only well-used as a last resort. The most common of these are benzodiazepines, which is the general family of drugs with names usually ending in –azepam and –azolam.
Their downsides are many, but perhaps their biggest is their tendency to induce tolerance, dependence, and addiction.
Non-benzo hypnotics aren’t fabulous either. Z-drugs such as zolpidem tartrate (popularly known by the brand name Ambien, amongst others), comes with warnings that it shouldn’t be prescribed if you have sleep apnea (i.e., one of the most common causes of insomnia), and should be used only with caution in patients who have depression or are elderly, as it may cause protracted daytime sedation and/or ataxia.
See also: Benzodiazepine and z-drug withdrawal
(and here’s a user-friendly US-based resource for benzodiazepine addiction specifically)
Antihistamines are commonly sold as over-the-counter sleep aids, because they can cause drowsiness, but a) they often don’t b) they may reduce your immune response that you may actually need for something. They’re still a lot safer than tranquilizers, though.
What about cannabis products?
We wrote about some of the myths and realities of cannabis use yesterday, but it does have some medical uses beyond pain relief, and use as a sleep aid is one of them—but there’s another caveat.
How it works: CBD, and especially THC, reduces REM sleep, causing you to spend longer in deep sleep. Deep sleep is more restorative and restful. And, if part of your sleep problem was nightmares, they can only occur during REM sleep, so you’ll be skipping those, too. However, REM sleep is also necessary for good brain health, and missing too much of it will result in cognitive impairment.
Opting for a CBD product that doesn’t contain THC may improve sleep with less (in fact, no known) risk of long-term impairment.
See: Cannabis, Cannabinoids, and Sleep: a Review of the Literature
Melatonin: a powerful helper with a good safety profile
We did a main feature on this recently, so we won’t take up too much space here, but suffice it to say: melatonin is our body’s own natural sleep hormone, and our body is good at scrubbing it when we see white/blue light (so, look at such if you feel groggy upon awakening, and it should clear up quickly), so that and its very short elimination half-life again make it quite safe.
Unlike tranquilizers, we don’t develop a tolerance to it, let alone dependence or addiction, and unlike cannabis, it doesn’t produce long-term adverse effects (after all, our brains are supposed to have melatonin in them every night). You can read our previous main feature (including a link to get melatonin, if you want) here:
Melatonin: A Safe Natural Sleep Supplement
Herbal options: which really work?
Valerian? Probably not, but it seems safe to try. Data on this is very inconsistent, and many studies supporting it had poor methodology. Shinjyo et al. also hypothesized that the inconsistency may be due to the highly variable quality of the supplements, and lack of regulation, as they are provided “based on traditional use only”.
Chamomile? Given the fame of chamomile tea as a soothing, relaxing bedtime drink, there’s surprisingly little research out there for this specifically (as opposed to other medicinal features of chamomile, of which there are plenty).
But here’s one study that found it helped significantly:
The effects of chamomile extract on sleep quality among elderly people: A clinical trial
Unlike valerian, which is often sold as tablets, chamomile is most often sold as a herbal preparation for making chamomile tea, so the quality is probably quite consistent. You can also easily grow your own in most places!
Technological interventions
We may not have sci-fi style regeneration alcoves just yet, but white noise machines, or better yet, pink noise machines, help:
White Noise Is Good; Pink Noise Is Better
Note: the noise machine can be a literal physical device purchased to do that (most often sold as for babies, but babies aren’t the only ones who need to sleep!), but it can also just be your phone playing an appropriate audio file (there are apps available) or YouTube video.
We reviewed some sleep apps; you might like those too:
The Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down
Enjoy, and rest well!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Simply The Pits: These Underarm Myths!
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Are We Taking A Risk To Smell Fresh As A Daisy?
Yesterday, we asked you for your health-related view of underarm deodorants.
So, what does the science say?
They can cause (or increase risk of) cancer: True or False?
False, so far as we know. Obviously it’s very hard to prove a negative, but there is no credible evidence that deodorants cause cancer.
The belief that they do comes from old in vitro studies applying the deodorant directly to the cells in question, like this one with canine kidney tissues in petri dishes:
Antiperspirant Induced DNA Damage in Canine Cells by Comet Assay
Which means that if you’re not a dog and/or if you don’t spray it directly onto your internal organs, this study’s data doesn’t apply to you.
In contrast, more modern systematic safety reviews have found…
❝Neither is there clear evidence to show use of aluminum-containing underarm antiperspirants or cosmetics increases the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease or breast cancer.
Metallic aluminum, its oxides, and common aluminum salts have not been shown to be either genotoxic or carcinogenic.❞
(however, one safety risk it did find is that we should avoid eating it excessively while pregnant or breastfeeding)
Alternatives like deodorant rocks have fewer chemicals and thus are safer: True or False?
True and False, respectively. That is, they do have fewer chemicals, but cannot in scientific terms be qualifiably, let alone quantifiably, described as safer than a product that was already found to be safe.
Deodorant rocks are usually alum crystals, by the way; that is to say, aluminum salts of various kinds. So if it was aluminum you were hoping to avoid, it’s still there.
However, if you’re trying to cut down on extra chemicals, then yes, you will get very few in deodorant rocks, compared to the very many in spray-on or roll-on deodorants!
Soap and water is a safe, simple, and sufficient alternative: True or False?
True or False, depending on what you want as a result!
- If you care that your deodorant also functions as an antiperspirant, then no, soap and water will certainly not have an antiperspirant effect.
- If you care only about washing off bacteria and eliminating odor for the next little while, then yes, soap and water will work just fine.
Bonus myths:
There is no difference between men’s and women’s deodorants, apart from the marketing: True or False?
False! While to judge by the marketing, the only difference is that one smells of “evening lily” and the other smells of “chainsaw barbecue” or something, the real difference is…
- The “men’s” kind is designed to get past armpit hair and reach the skin without clogging the hair up.
- The “women’s” kind is designed to apply a light coating to the skin that helps avoid chafing and irritation.
In other words… If you are a woman with armpit hair or a man without, you might want to ignore the marketing and choose according to your grooming preferences.
Hopefully you can still find a fragrance that suits!
Shaving (or otherwise depilating) armpits is better for hygiene: True or False?
True or False, depending on what you consider “hygiene”.
Consistent with popular belief, shaving means there is less surface area for bacteria to live. And empirically speaking, that means a reduction in body odor:
However, shaving typically causes microabrasions, and while there’s no longer hair for the bacteria to enjoy, they now have access to the inside of your skin, something they didn’t have before. This can cause much more unpleasant problems in the long-run, for example:
❝Hidradenitis suppurativa is a chronic and debilitating skin disease, whose lesions can range from inflammatory nodules to abscesses and fistulas in the armpits, groin, perineum, inframammary region❞
Read more: Hidradenitis suppurativa: Basic considerations for its approach: A narrative review
And more: Hidradenitis suppurativa: Epidemiology, clinical presentation, and pathogenesis
If this seems a bit “damned if you do; damned if you don’t”, this writer’s preferred way of dodging both is to use electric clippers (the buzzy kind, as used for cutting short hair) to trim hers down low, and thus leave just a little soft fuzz.
What you do with yours is obviously up to you; our job here is just to give the information for everyone to make informed decisions whatever you choose 🙂
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
Nutrivore – by Dr. Sarah Ballantyne
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The core idea of this book is that foods can be assigned a numerical value according to their total nutritional value, and that this number can be used to guide a person’s diet such that we will eat, in aggregate, a diet that is more nutritious. So far, so simple.
What Dr. Ballantyne also does, besides explaining and illustrating this system (there are chapters explaining the calculation system, and appendices with values), is also going over what to consider important and what we can let slide, and what things we might need more of to address a wide assortment of potential health concerns. And yes, this is definitely a “positive diet” approach, i.e. it focuses on what to add in, not what to cut out.
The premise of the “positive diet” approach is simple, by the way: if we get a full set of good nutrients, we will be satisfied and not crave unhealthy food.
She also offers a lot of helpful “rules of thumb”, and provides a variety of cheat-sheets and suchlike to make things as easy as possible.
There’s also a recipes section! Though, it’s not huge and it’s probably not necessary, but it’s just one more “she’s thinking of everything” element.
Bottom line: if you’d like a single-volume “Bible of” nutrition-made-easy, this is a very usable tome.
Click here to check out Nutrivore, and start filling up your diet!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: