It’s about two years since the Covid-19 pandemic emerged, but many of us feel as though decades have passed — and that we have aged much faster, physically and mentally, because of it.
New research suggests that these fears are true: the chronic stress of feeling anxious and isolated may well have accelerated the ageing speed of millions of Britons. The good news is that we can all learn to protect ourselves from further damage by changing some habits of thought and lifestyle.
Many of us clearly feel that we are buckling under Covid’s pressures. The Mental Health Foundation’s continuing pandemic survey of more than 4,000 UK adults found that last year about 33 per cent of us complained that we weren’t coping well with the stress. This year that figure is nearly 50 per cent.
Now a Yale University study is reporting that chronic fear-related stress can speed up the rate at which our genes deteriorate, making our body clocks run down faster.
The research in the journal Translational Psychiatry this month took blood samples from 444 people aged between 19 and 50 and studied them for telltale genetic markers of ageing speed. The participants also answered questions designed to reveal their levels of stress and their psychological coping habits.
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Over the past decade scientists have developed “epigenetic clocks” that measure people’s biological age by pinpoint-tracking chemical changes in their DNA that occur over time, but which happen at different rates in different people. Epigenetic clocks seem to be better predictors of lifespan and health than chronological age. They count changes in chemical switches that sit on the periphery of our genes (hence epigenes) and control their actions.
As we grow old these gene switches go awry — and as a consequence our bodies and brains deteriorate (aka ageing). The changes accumulate steadily enough to enable scientists to monitor them using blood analysis and reliably assess our biological age — which may be significantly older or younger than our chronological age.
Using a specialist epigenetic clock called GrimAge, the Yale researchers found that people who scored highly on chronic-stress questionnaires showed accelerated genetic ageing speeds. Physical examinations confirmed their premature decrepitude; for example, they had increased insulin resistance — a precursor to developing type 2 diabetes.
Thus science has confirmed what a lot of us feel. Mercifully, however, it seems that this isn’t inevitable. We don’t all have to turn into omi-crones overnight. The Yale study found that not everyone who reported high levels of stress suffered from accelerated ageing.
People who scored highly on two measures of psychological resilience, called emotion regulation and self-control, were more able to shrug off stress, less likely to age fast and less prone to physical damage such as insulin resistance.
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In other words, the more psychologically resilient we are, the more likely we are to live a longer and healthier life, no matter what stresses the world inflicts on us. So how do we get some of this resilience and what other science-backed strategies can we adopt to stop tough times ageing us?
Change your thinking
“The skills of emotion regulation and self-control can be learnt or taught,” says Rajita Sinha, the Yale professor of psychiatry and neuroscience who co-authored the epigenetic-clock study. “Mindfulness-based practice [in particular doing sitting meditating, or yoga exercises] can certainly help people to learn to regulate their emotions by becoming more conscious of them happening.”
Dr Nihara Krause, a consultant clinical psychologist based in London, says that many people mistake resilience skills for being mentally tough.
“Resilience is about adapting in the face of trauma, adversity or stress; being able to bounce forward when facing adversity,” she says. “But emotion regulation isn’t about being gritty like John Wayne. It’s about learning new behaviours, being able to rethink your emotions in a situation and then developing new ways of responding.
“Self-regulation is a higher-brain function that involves problem-solving skills — recognising what your emotions are and dealing with them. For example, you may be spending too much time playing online gaming. You may get over this by learning to appreciate when you’ve spent enough time on it, that you’re tired and need to do other things, that you’ll only start losing instead of winning.”
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Krause emphasises, however, that practising such skills is harder in times of crisis. “In the social stress of a pandemic we can get locked into a state of anticipating the next threat. It leaves people feeling exhausted and helpless. We can get to that burnt-out feeling where we don’t really care about our safety any more . . . that mask, that social distancing, that handwashing — why bother?
“We need to be taking breaks from our stresses, to get a sense of feeling calm, safe and OK. We need to focus on personal recovery, on planning ahead on what we want to do to thrive once we’re out of this pandemic. It might seem a long way off, but it’s all part of believing our lives will get better — and we need to believe that, in order for them to get better.”
Less inflammatory
Why should emotional stress wreak such life-shortening physical havoc? Blame chronic inflammation, says Ilaria Bellantuono, a professor of musculoskeletal ageing at the University of Sheffield.
“If you have chronically high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, this will damage your immune system,” she says. The dysfunctional immune system then triggers chronic reactions that cause widespread cellular damage throughout the body that may drive many ageing-related diseases.
“Exercise can reduce inflammation and accumulation of damaged cells. Eating healthier foods, such as the Mediterranean diet, will also do the same because, like exercise, it can reduce cortisol levels,” Bellantuono says. “If for some odd reason you wanted to accelerate your body’s ageing, you would probably want to eat more, exercise less, drink more and smoke more.”
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Numerous surveys show that millions of Britons did much of the latter scenario during lockdown.
Further evidence of the benefits of reducing inflammation comes from another type of ageing clock, called iAge, which measures levels of chronic inflammation. Developers tested it by collecting the blood of 19 people who had lived to 99 or more. On average, they had an “inflammation age” 40 years lower than their chronological age, the journal Nature Aging reported in July.
Real-life connection
One of the worst forms of stress is social isolation. “Studies show that loneliness has devastating effects on ageing,” Sinha says. “Covid caused people to become disconnected from their communities. The psychological benefits of social connection were suddenly taken away.”
Indeed, the Mental Health Foundation’s pandemic survey shows how loneliness leapt from afflicting 10 per cent of people in March 2020 to 26 per cent in February 2021. Loneliness rates have not since returned to pre-lockdown levels, even when restrictions were lifted over the summer.
Sinha warns that digital connections are no substitute for real-life contact. Indeed, they can worsen stress if people rely on them. “Connecting with others through social media and telephones ties up our minds and can itself cause distraction and distress,” she says. “Instead we need to be connecting with people in our own communities and our own contexts.
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“Emotional resilience can help because in times of crisis it requires effort to find social links and support. Stress can make just people shut off instead,” she says.
OFH (overworking from home)
Overwork really may drive you to an early grave, according to a University of Michigan study of 250 junior doctors working 64-hour weeks published in the journal Biological Psychiatry in 2019.
The study examined another physical marker of ageing — telomeres. These are bits of DNA material at the end of chromosomes that protect them from damage, rather like the ends of shoelaces.
Our telomeres shorten over time. This allows our chromosomes to deteriorate and we then accumulate age-related genetic damage. The Michigan study found that during their first year in hospitals the hard-pressed junior doctors’ telomeres aged six times faster than those of a comparative group of arts undergraduates.
In May a study in the journal Environment International showed that people working more than 54 hours a week are at significant risk of dying from overwork, particularly from strokes and heart attacks.
Britain is particularly at risk. Study evidence from the business support company NordVPN Teams this year shows that people working from home in the UK because of the pandemic have increased their average hours from nine a day to eleven, bringing their weekly total to a lethal 55 (and that’s not counting the weekend stuff that people pretend they’re not doing).
All the more reason, perhaps, to stick instead with mindfulness, emotional self-regulation, social connection, exercise and healthy eating.
