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Mini: Can Stress Turn Your Hair Gray? · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we do
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  what we do. I'm your host Abraham, and I'm your host Shane.
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  And this is a why we do what we do? Mini, not a
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  full episode, just a quick jaunt down the road of inquiry. Yeah,
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  you know, sometimes we just have questions and we have to get those questions
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  answered. And now we have working knowledge about this thing, so we can
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  go to parties and have nice trivia. Exactly I said road of inquiry.
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  Maybe cul de sac is a more appropriate way to describe the journey that we're
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  going on today. This is quick. Yeah, Like instead of an ocean
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  of information, we're going into an inlet yeah at best, Yeah, I
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  right, coy ponds, maybe a canal, yeah yeah, a puddle of
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  inquiry. And today we're asking the question does stress turn our hair gray?
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  This is something that I've sort of wondered up and wanted to look into the
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  research and see what's there. It's something I have personal stake in. My
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  hair is definitely turning gray. Fortunately, from the quality of the video,
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  if you're seeing this on video, you can't really tell that, but Shane's
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  beard gives it away. Yeah, my beard, and I'm wearing a hat
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  right now. And I have taken pictures of my hair over the last like
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  couple of years, and it has gotten gray rapidly. Yeah, it is
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  really kind of bizarre how quick my hair is going gray. It's very much
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  so like the crash Test Dummy song fun. Once there was a kid who
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  got into an accident and couldn't go to school, but when he came,
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  when he finally came back, his hair went from black into bright white.
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  I don't know if y'all remember that that moral. I don't, but that's
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  really fun. I like it. You don't remember that song? No?
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  No, I think I might recognize it if I like listen to it,
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  But it does not ring any bells right now. You don't need to hear
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  it. It's fine, okay, all right? So does stress turn our
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  hair? Well? First, I think there's an important discussion to be had
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  about what stress is. This is probably a larger discussion that may warrant a
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  full topic, maybe another many who knows, but just just to define it
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  really quick. The World Health Organization WHO yes, exactly define stress as a
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  state of worry or mental tension caused by difficult situations. But worrying and difficult
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  situations are arbitrary and language based. But we do know that non human animals
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  demonstrate no use of language. We already kind of see that to degree humans
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  do. But non human animals can get stressed, and we do know that
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  they can get stressed through different kind of behavioral science. Yeah, so sort
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  of more broadly, we can characterize stress as contexts that we are highly motivated
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  to escape. And you could also sort of add to that, just as
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  a little more detail, that these are contexts in which there are often many
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  threats that bad things will happen. Now, those threats can be tangible,
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  such as standing on the edge of a cliff you can easily see the possible
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  danger there, or it can be pursued through a history of association, and
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  an example of that might be someone who is threatening you with harmful action.
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  Now, the latter doesn't mean too much to non languaging organisms, although tone
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  like loud and aggressive tones can carry the meaning for organisms like yelling at an
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  animal, loud warning sounds from other animals. Those are different examples of like
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  what might produce some kind of like stressors in the environment. Actually super interesting
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  too. I don't know, if you've gotten to this and this is probably
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  like an episode on stress that lots to do, you can actually measure stress
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  in blood. There's like some indicator in blood that they use to measure like
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  levels of stress, and I can't remember what it is, but we'll have
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  to talk about that at some point in time. Stress Blood could be a
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  band named stress Blood. Yeah, it probably is somewhere. So if you
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  are in the band's stress Blood, please email us. Well, we'll share
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  your demo. Indeed, I actually just do a search on band camp and
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  see if what comes up when I type in stress Blood. I'm going to
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  do that right now while we go through this episode. Great. So,
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  the age old wisdom is that constant exposure, even and acute exposure to stress
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  can turn our hair gray. Usually this is prolonged sort of, this is
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  over time, and this sort of constant ongoing stress, and an example commonly
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  cited is like having kids. But this can include these acute, high intensity,
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  one time events sort of shocking your hair into a gray or white sort
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  of color, if you will. That's to be clear, I'm not saying
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  that's science sort of fact right now. I'm saying that's sort of the conventional
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  wisdom about this. Yeah, there's a story that I think of here.
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  There's a castle in the Czech Republic called Castle Huska, which is supposed to
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  be like the Haunted Castle. There's a portal to Hell in the middle of
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  it, and there's an old story about they lowered a servant down into the
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  hole to see what was going on, and when they brought him back up,
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  his hair had turned from like a dark color to a bright white because
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  of all the acute stress he experienced in that several minutes that he was down
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  in the hole. So it's kind of an ongoing discussion, like when these
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  big, shocking one time events, they immediately change your hair, But we
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  have to ask the question if there's any truth to it, and until recently
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  many scientists didn't really think so. Now that's not to say that stress isn't
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  harmless. The deleteriousness of stress has been well known for a long time,
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  for a very very long time, just it wasn't thought to be actually responsible
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  for graying hair. So we know there was other effects, like it impacts
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  your heart and like the you know, just how your body moves and how
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  your brain process and stuff. But we didn't really know if it impacted hair,
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  but now we have some information. Yes, So we'll talk more about
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  what we know about stressedness relation to grain hair after we get to hear some
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  ads for maybe hair dye. Okay, we're back. So the spoiler or
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  the big giveaway, the big reveal is apparently stressed can actually cause hair to
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  turn gray. Now, although genetics and age contribute to the gradual grain of
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  one's hair, as we sort of get old in our body, no longer
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  pretty is the pigment that would keep our hair a particular color, stress can
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  speed up that process considerably. Yes, so at twenty twenty study by Jang
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  at All and fifteen other at alls in this one. So there's a lot
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  of at all. So I think any of those authors on that we're not
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  expecting to be part of that title, they would have had it. But
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  they showed an intense acute stress and mice cause their hair to rapidly gray.
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  I thought that was really interesting. Yeah. Now, hair that has already
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  grown does not seem to turn gray once it's grown, it seems to sort
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  of form in its color. But our hair grows fairly rapidly, and the
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  hair that's being produced at the follicle will start to turn gray, and then
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  it'll just continue producing gray hair. So essentially it'll be brown and then it'll
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  gray out as it gets longer, or if it's cut then it'll go from
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  having partial color and partially gray to being just gray. When the colored part
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  gets cut away or if it naturally falls out, for example, then as
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  that follicle reproduces, the future hair will all be gray. What they discovered
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  is that stress caused a significant release of the neurotransmitter nor adrenaline or nora epinephrine.
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  I said that on the first try, How cool is that you did?
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  That was great, which rapidly wiped out pigment producing stem cells called melanocytes
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  in the hair follicles. So those, as you said, those are the
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  stem cells, and those are sort of the little factories, if you will,
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  that are producing pigments melanin specifically, and there's actually multiple types of melanin
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  that are responsible for the variety of hair color that you might see. So
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  you have eumu lanin and fiamal lanin are the types of melanin, and so
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  those are essentially responsible for if you sort of balance the levels of those or
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  the depending on how much there is of each one. It sort of ranges
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  from the black brown color to sort of a red brown color. But there's
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  also a mutation on a certain receptor, which is melanocortin one or MC one
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  R that will result in the red hair. So there's that sort of mutation
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  that can happen. So those two types of melanin are sort of responsible for
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  the variety of hair colors that we see across people. We always knew those
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  red hairs were a result of a mutation. Oh poor redheader of folks.
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  They get so much flat, and I don't understand why. It's true,
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  it's the whole thing. Now. Essentially, the stress killed the economy in
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  ourselves, and so the pigment factories closed and everyone had to go home.
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  That's what it was. The factory closed down. Now it's just a ghost
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  town. So your gray hairs are just ghost towns. But the hair factory
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  stayed open, the actual machinery stayed open, and they just couldn't produce any
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  color any longer. So your hair is still growing, it just can't do
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  the thing that it used to do. Yeah, that's sort of the analogy
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  version of this is that the economy tanked. Wow, the hair was going
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  to keep going. It just wasn't gonna be colorful any longer. But right
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  as a counter to this, all is not lost. So that first study
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  we referenced was in twenty twenty there was a second study in twenty twenty one
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  following up. Because that first study obviously was with mice. The second study
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  was actually looking at humans and found that a reduction in stress actually caused some
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  of these melleno sites to become active again and they started producing pigment. And
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  what they found was in their study, one person as an example, who
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  went on vacation returned and five of their previously gray hairs had returned to the
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  normal color. So what they essentially suggested was that the signs of aging that
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  are or stress that are prevalent in the grain of our hair can actually be
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  somewhat reverse. Now, over time, that pigment is going to continue to
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  just shut down slowly, and like you're going to eventually grow go gray.
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  As our hair follicles just get it's harder and harder for them to produce that
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  pigment. But if we're young enough and we could be producing that pigment if
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  we can have a less stressful life. The evidence seems to suggest that we
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  might get some of the color back in our hair. I love that.
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  So basically what this is is like a vacation is a bailout for the factory.
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  There you go. I like that. That's that's That's exactly it.
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  The vacation is the government bailout. It's the factory because the workers get to
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  work, yeah for a while, until they retire. Yeah, until they
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  retire, which is, you know, just a couple of years down the
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  road, hopefully. So the evidence suggests that stress can in fact cause our
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  hair to become gray as it starts wiping out the pigment producing stem cells.
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  But we can recover some of that if we get enough of a government bailout
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  for the factories of our hair cells. I love it perfect Well, then
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  I think we've accomplished well we set out to accomplish. This mini is out.
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  See you you've been listening to Why we Do what We Do. You
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  can learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot com.
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  Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.