How Stress Shows Up in Your Hair, Skin, and Body

Most people picture stress as something that happens in the head. The body tells a different story. Back in 2014, the American Institute of Stress reported that more than three-quarters of Americans notice physical symptoms when they're under pressure, and the list runs well past a racing heart: weight gain, thinning hair, and skin that looks worse for wear all turn up on it. A 2017 Gallup poll put the figure at roughly eight in ten Americans feeling stressed, which means a large slice of the country is wrestling with worry while their appearance quietly pays part of the bill. Looks tend to be the last thing anyone frets about in the moment, but those outward signs are the body flagging that something needs to change.

Anxiety is one of the ways the mind answers stress, and the American Psychiatric Association notes that when stress piles up high enough, it can tip into a full anxiety disorder. The brain isn't the only organ keeping score. Research by Fhionna R. Moore, Ph.D., found that men carrying higher levels of stress hormones were rated less attractive by women, not over anything to do with their features but because elevated cortisol reads as a marker of poorer health. Biologist Markus Rantala documented the same pattern running the other direction: men pick up on stress in women, and tend to find stressed women less appealing than their calmer counterparts.

Skin takes an early and visible hit. Dermatologist David Bank, M.D., explains that stress stirs up irritants and can even hasten wrinkles, since a flood of cortisol starves the skin of the nutrients and oxygen it depends on. Dr. Howard Murad points in the same direction, linking stress to breakouts and patches of hyperpigmentation. Hair gets dragged into it too. Healthy hair, according to Women's Health, really comes down to taking care of your health overall. Speaking to the magazine, Damian Santiago, co-owner of Mizu New York Salon, said that after enough years in the chair he can usually tell which clients are carrying a heavy load, and that thinning, shedding, and lackluster hair tend to follow. Daniel K. Hall-Flavin, M.D., backs the connection between stress and hair loss.

The weight question is murkier. A clean link between obesity and anxiety disorders hasn't been nailed down, but a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) describes how stressed people reach for comfort food specifically to quiet the chronic stress-response network and the anxiety riding along with it. The authors offer that habit as one driver behind the country's obesity numbers. Read alongside the 2017 Gallup figures, it suggests a lot of Americans have put on weight they didn't want thanks to stress alone.

Even your teeth are in on it. The Academy of General Dentistry has tied dental health to stress, with the AGD's Dr. Nick Russo explaining that stress dampens the immune system, the same system that fights off the bacteria behind periodontal disease, leaving the gums more open to infection. Researchers at the State University of New York in Buffalo, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina have confirmed the pattern.

Stress is a normal response to a tense situation, and in small doses there's nothing wrong with it. Let it run unchecked and it starts chipping away at your health and, along the way, how you look. Learning to manage it is less about vanity than about keeping the whole system, body and mind, from fraying at the edges.