Search for tag: "stressed"

Shades of Grey. Gotcha. When you clicked, maybe you thought I would be talking about what goes on in a very popular book series. Nope, not even. I am going to talk about whether your kid really can turn your hair gray.

We've heard our mothers say that someone stressed them out so much it turned their hair gray, or that an acute stress turned their hair white overnight. There are some references to it in the "Talmud," the Jewish holy book, and supposedly Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France, had her hair turned white overnight between the time that she was sentenced to the guillotine to the next morning when she met with the guillotine. Of course, that's very unlikely, and maybe being a queen during the French Revolution was so stressful that her hair turned white over several months and she covered it with a wig. And when she took it off at her final performance, her hair was white.

First, a little discussion on the anatomy of the hair follicle. The hair is produced under the skin in a hair follicle that's lined with pigment-making cells called melanocytes. Melano means dark or dark-colored and cytes means cells. Melanocytes are in our skin and make pigment either naturally, given our genetics, or when we tan. For those of us who are freckled, we have patches of melanocytes that make more pigment.

In the hair follicle, the melanocytes arise from stem cells that replenish the number of melanocytes. As these stem cells divide, some become melanocytes and some stay as stem cells. This is a strategy for cells that are renewed all over our body. As we age, we run out of stem cells, so we don't make so many new specialized cells like melanocytes. That means no more color to the hair as we age. At least that's the theory. Genes and diseases, like autoimmune diseases, can determine when and if you go gray.

So back to the stress theory. Some clever researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute just reported some interesting studies in mice in the journal "Nature." So, first, they thought maybe going gray was the loss of the melanocytes from an immune problem. It's known that some people with immune problems go gray. So they injected mice with capsaicin, the stuff in chili peppers, which is known to cause an immune stress response in mice. They did this in mice without immune cells, and the mice went gray. So it wasn't the immune system in this case.

The second was to stress out the mice in another way. They were exposed to short-term pain or stressful living conditions in their cages, and they went gray. But was this due to cortisol, which our adrenal gland and mice's adrenal glands make when they get stressed out? Or was it something else? So they took out the adrenal gland of the mice, and they still went gray. By the way, the human race owes the mouse race a serious debt of gratitude for all that they go through for medical research.

So maybe it was the sympathetic nervous system. Each hair follicle has nerves around it. Your hair stands up when you're scared. And when the mice were stressed acutely, their nerves were flooded with norepinephrine. When that happened, all the melanocyte stem cells got programmed to make melanocytes. So there were no more stem cells left to make melanocytes in the future. Now, this didn't happen overnight, but a relatively short period of time. And then the mice didn't have any more stem cells. They didn't have any more melanocytes, and they went gray. So this is a plausible reason for the old wives' tale that acute or chronic stress can turn you gray.

So what do you do about this? Well, having gray hair is a sign of wisdom. You let the gray hairs figure it out. Maybe people who've been through a lot of stress and survived it have a visible cultural signal of their resilience -- their gray hair. Of course, we could suggest that you avoid all stress, but that's pretty hard to do and impossible if you have any kids or any kind of extended network of people you love.

So you can love your gray. For American women over 50, we don't do that so much. It's been suggested that at some time 90% of women over 50 dye their hair. When you finally decide to go gray, you can dye your hair white, but that would be a shock. You could color your hair but put gray highlights and then let it grow out. You could color your hair gray with colored highlights and let it grow out. Best of all, you shouldn't even listen to me because I'm clueless. Talk to your colorist about what's the best way to go gray gracefully, but don't stress out about it.

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Dr. Jones: It is okay to drink to relieve stress? I would say, probably not on a regular basis. Now, I have often had days, personally, when my day was just awful, and it was stressful, and I am thinking in the clinic, "Oh I just want to go home and have a drink." In fact, those are specifically the days I don't drink. Those are the days when I need to be on top of my game to handle what's going on at home. So, if I'm already stressed, and I'm going home to a social situation, I want to be on the top of my game. I don't want to be affected by alcohol in my relationships with my husband, or my kids, or my friends, so I specifically would say learn other techniques to help deal with your stress.

When you get home, instead of opening that bottle, do you have time to go for a little walk? Exercise is a great stress reliever, and you don't have to run and get sweaty. Just go outside, look at your neighbor's garden, just walk up and down your neighborhood for half an hour if you've got the time. Maybe only 20 minutes. Take a deep breath. When you get home, sit down, and if you've got lots of kids, go in the bathroom and shut the door. Sit in the bathtub for a little bit. Sit on the potty if you don't have time for a bath, or you don't have a bathtub. But you know, it turns out for most families the bathroom is private time, so go in there, shut the door, and take a deep breath.

Count your blessings. You're home now. And take a deep breath because you do want to be at the top of your game when you get home after a busy day. If home is the source of your stress, therefore, and you can't get away because you're at home full time, that's where you need your girlfriends, you need your walking, you need your bathtub, or you need your clinician to help you deal with the stress at home. So, I would say the people who probably shouldn't drink are the people who are stressed.

Having said all that, this is probably more than you wanted to hear, if the stress reliever is a social situation; so, you had a stressful day and you and your buddies go out for a drink and it's really the social situation which is decreasing the stress. You're with someone who you can gripe with and you can laugh with. Having a drink in that social situation, as long as you're not driving home, is probably a fine thing because the stress reliever is the social situation. But if you're going home alone, going home to children, or you're at home alone or with family, and you're drinking to relieve stress, not in a social situation, I'd say it's a bad idea.

It is definitely a habit that women have to use alcohol to relieve stress. It's pretty effective actually. Alcohol is a downer, so alcohol is a sedative. So if you're all wound up, and your hearts beating, and you're stressed out, alcohol can definitely make those symptoms of stress go down. The problem is alcohol interferes with your ability to make good decisions, and that's a problem, particularly if you're stressed. Number two, alcohol interferes with your sleep. It may make you sleepy originally, but it inhibits REM sleep, so often people wake up at 3:00 or 2:00 at night, and they can't get back to sleep, or often they wake up with their heart pounding.

So, it's a little counter intuitive to say, yes, temporarily it relieves stress, but you don't always think as clearly after you've been drinking, and you don't sleep as well. And both of those are going to impact how well you deal with stress tomorrow. So, it can be a habit. It's a habit worth breaking. And it's habit worth substituting with more both social acceptable and personally healthy ways of dealing with stress.

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