While stress certainly isn't easy to manage at any age, it can become more difficult to cope as you get older for a number of reasons. First, your body can't physically handle stress the same way it did when you were younger.
Your Body Responds Differently
Physically speaking, our fitness levels drop, lung capacity decreases, and many people just tend to live a more sedentary lifestyle as we age. Because of those changes, the body can't handle that natural stress response as adequately as it could when you were younger.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), people in the 18-33 age group suffer the highest levels of stress in the U.S.
Mental health conditions, such as depression, or a building sense of frustration, injustice, and anxiety can make some people feel stressed more easily than others. Previous experiences may affect how a person reacts to stressors. Common major life events that can trigger stress include: job issues or retirement.
If you are stressed, you might feel: Irritable, angry, impatient or wound up. Over-burdened or overwhelmed. Anxious, nervous or afraid.
This long-term ongoing stress can increase the risk for hypertension, heart attack, or stroke. Repeated acute stress and persistent chronic stress may also contribute to inflammation in the circulatory system, particularly in the coronary arteries, and this is one pathway that is thought to tie stress to heart attack.
Those aged 18-33 years old suffer the highest levels of stress in the nation, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). In a gauge measuring stress, the millennial generation scored a 5.4 (on a scale of 1 to 10), compared to the national average of 4.9.
Gallup Results and Corroborating Research
Among those age 30 to 49, 65% were stressed, 52% worried and 25% angry. Respondents age 50 and above were the least stressed (44%), the least worried (38%) and the least angry (16%).
A study shows that life seems a little brighter after the age of 50. Older adults in their mid to late 50s are generally happier and less stressed and anxious than younger adults in their 20s, researchers say.
Anxiety becomes more common with older age and is most common among middle-aged adults. This may be due to a number of factors, including changes in the brain and nervous system as we age, and being more likely to experience stressful life events that can trigger anxiety.
But new science has found that you can actually turn back the clock and reverse the powerful early onset aging effects of stress on your body and health. The secret? Eat right, exercise, meditate, sleep more, and surround yourself with loved ones.
Stress causes a surge of hormones in your body. These stress hormones are released to enable you to deal with pressures or threats – the so-called "fight or flight" response. Once the pressure or threat has passed, your stress hormone levels will usually return to normal.
Happiness combats stress
The happiest participants had 23 percent lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than the least happy, and another indicator of stress—the level of a blood-clotting protein that increases after stress—was 12 times lower. Happiness also seems to carry benefits even when stress is inevitable.
Some researchers have found that older people are happier because they have fewer life stressors and more cognitive control (Breheny et al. 2014; Warr 2015), leaving them freer to do things that they normally would not do.
Aches and pains. Chest pain or a feeling like your heart is racing. Exhaustion or trouble sleeping. Headaches, dizziness or shaking.
As an adaptive response to stress, there is a change in the serum level of various hormones including CRH, cortisol, catecholamines and thyroid hormone. These changes may be required for the fight or flight response of the individual to stress.
Many factors affect longevity, and the Yale research indicates that chronic stress can shorten one's lifespan. Stress was already known to exacerbate physical health problems, such as increased risk for heart attack or diabetes.
Being under heavy stress shortens their life expectancy by 2.8 years. These results are based on a study in which researchers from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare calculated the effects of multiple risk factors, including lifestyle-related ones, to the life expectancy of men and women.
Chronic worrying can also be a major symptom of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), a common anxiety disorder that involves tension, nervousness, and a general feeling of unease that colors your whole life. If you're plagued by exaggerated worry and tension, there are steps you can take to turn off anxious thoughts.
This is called extrinsic aging. As a result, premature aging can set in long before it was expected. In other words, your biological clock is more advanced than your chronological clock. Controllable factors such as stress, smoking and sun exposure can all play a role in expediting extrinsic aging.
Anxiety disorders affect nearly 4% of older adults worldwide. However, many more cases go undiagnosed due to misconceptions about mental illness. Severe anxiety isn't an inevitable part of aging. With the right treatment, you can find relief from your symptoms and return to a normal and productive life.
Age, Life Cycle and Evaluations of Personal Life
Fully 71% of those under age 50 expect their lives to be better in 10 years than they are today, as do 46% of those ages 50-64. By contrast, only about a fifth of adults ages 75 and older (19%) expect their lives to be better in the future than they are today.
New research suggests that untreated stress can speed-up the aging process by shortening each DNA strand's length. This can also occur with depression, social isolation, and anxiety attacks—all of which have become more prevalent in the recent year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.