“The Dangers of Microstress: How It Can Accelerate Aging and Harm Your Well-Being”

There is stress and stress. That in small but frequent daily doses can even be more deadly than single and more glaring attacks. Word of a scientist.

It is said that stress does not necessarily have to manifest itself in a violent and massive form to disturb our lives. It often creeps into our daily life without us realizing it, like a silent worm that digs slowly until it wears out our existence. If you happen to arrive exhausted at the end of the day for no particular reason, to have recurring feelings of anxiety and sadness even in the absence of triggering events, to feel down in the dumps and constantly tired, you could be affected too.

“Microstress” is a particularly insidious form of stress, difficult to identify and characterized by brief but frequent moments of daily tension, which accumulate and hinder us in a more or less evident way: often we don’t even realize it. Hence the importance of recognizing and neutralizing it.

The alarm bells of microstress

The phenomenon is produced by “micro stressors” to which we are exposed on a daily basis and which concern us small problems – from arrears on work to difficulties in balancing the accounts of the family economy – apparently marginalbut which, accumulating over time, produce serious psychological consequences, destroying our well-being.

As far as the physical consequences are concerned, in fact, microstress produces effects similar to those of chronic stress: sleep disturbances, tiredness, lack of energy, weight gain, high blood pressure, increased vulnerability to the risk of heart disease and stroke, anxiety and depression. AND, according to the latest scientific studies, a clear acceleration of the aging process.

In fact, new research has come to the conclusion that reducing the level of daily stress helps fight biological aging. A team of scientists led by Professor Vadim Gladyshev, of Harvard Medical School, together with colleagues from Duke University, has detected and measured changes in biological age in humans and mice in response to various stressful situations.

As the researchers themselves explain in an article in the journal Cell Metabolismthe data “revealed the dynamic nature of biological age: stress can trigger a rapid increase in the aging process, which, however, can be reversed”. In other words, “the ability to recover from stress may be a major determinant of longevity.”