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9 Weird Things That Stress Can Do To Your Body
Gray hair, the urge to pee, a sharpened sense of smell, and many more
If you’ve ever experienced a tension headache after a long week at work, then you’ve had a glimpse of the physical effects of stress on your body. But beyond that headache, along with the classic racing heart and strained muscles, stress can cause some lesser-known, even peculiar, symptoms.
The stress doesn’t have to be major to do it: Frederick Chen, MD, chief of family medicine at Harborview Medical Center and professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, says even small stressors — aggravating emails, subtweets — have an effect.
“The small stresses of everyday life can cause a daily, low-level stress that activates stress hormones in the body, which ultimately affects how people feel,” he says. “The interesting thing is that we don’t always know why people respond in the way they do.”
Often, a long-term build up of these minor stresses — when the body doesn’t go back to “normal” — causes people to experience weird symptoms. “Acute stress tends not to have an effect on health,” says Sharon Bergquist, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. “It’s the activation of chronic stress, when people don’t go back to their baseline of rest and recovery, that tends to affect people.”
Here are some of the most unusual things stress can cause in the body:
Hair loss and prematurely graying hair
Yufang Lin, MD, an integrative medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic, says stress can cause a temporary condition called telogen effluvium, which stops hair follicles from growing. This can lead hair strands to fall out more easily over time, often when someone is washing or brushing their hair. “Usually, the hair will start growing back once the stressful period ends,” Lin says.
Chronic stress can also cause people to lose pigment in their hair, resulting in premature graying, according to Chen. “You see this often with our elected officials over time — you can see that the level of work and constantly being ‘on’ has an effect on people,” he says.
