Stressing out about stressing out.

October 6, 2009 3:27 PM

Is there any evidence to suggest that a single, isolated stressful event can shorten one's lifespan, even by a little? For example, if I'm generally calm but I get in a particularly heated argument with someone, is there any scenario under which I'd be able to truthfully say that I shortened my lifespan as a result of the stress associated with this argument? Short of having a heart attack in the process, of course.
posted by iamisaid to health & fitness (8 comments total)

In a young healthy person a single isolated stressful event (SISE) will be absorbed by the body with very little ill effect. Accumulated stress will wear a healthy person down and make the body less able to rebound.
An unhealthy body will be less able to recover from a SISE, and a body unhealthy from the types of things that stress can exacerbate can fail catastrophically from a SISE.
posted by OHenryPacey at 3:36 PM on October 6

I don't see how to measure it. How does one know how long you would have lived without the event? THen, only if you die before that can you say that an event, maybe not any particular event, shortened your life. But, there are studies how stress affects blood pressure and heart rate and elevated levels are associated with an earlier demise.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 3:37 PM on October 6

is there any scenario under which I'd be able to truthfully say that I shortened my lifespan as a result of the stress associated with this argument?

You could say that any time spent in the argument itself was a waste of those minutes of your life which you will not ever be able to get back. Therefore your life is shorter as a result of it.

Not a medical answer, but it might be still applicable.
posted by quin at 3:39 PM on October 6

Highly doubtful. If a stressful event or encounter could appreciably--and in any way measurably--shorten one’s lifespan, then this would already be a damage recognized by law, and would come up often during accident/tort lawsuits.

I suspect that a very stressful event could, arguably, make a person live longer ...by causing them to become more wary and careful.

An interesting question, btw.
posted by applemeat at 3:53 PM on October 6 [1 favorite]

How could that ever be evaluated? Any retrospective study would be full of recall bias.
posted by gramcracker at 3:57 PM on October 6

Sort of. What you want to look at is a field of study called "life course epidemiology." Broadly speaking, this approach looks at the long-term health effects of exposures in early childhood, including stressful life events. Its a young field, so there are still a lot of debates about how to measure these things and what the evidence actually shows. However, early results indicate that pre-natal and very early childhood stressors (for example, maternal undernutrition) may increase risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease and stroke later in life. But measuring the impact of individual stressful events later in life will be exceedingly difficult.

Some references for you:

- Stress, Health, and the Life Course

- Life Course Epidemiology.

- A Life Course Approach to Chronic Disease Epidemiology.

- Life Course Epidemiology of Depression.
posted by googly at 4:24 PM on October 6 [2 favorites]

Your question seems to assume that people have a preordained period of life which can be decisively subtracted from by similarly discrete amounts. This may or may not be the case (I think it probably isn't), but either way, it doesn't seem provable or falsifiable.
posted by clockzero at 5:44 PM on October 6

Your question seems to assume that people have a preordained period of life which can be decisively subtracted from by similarly discrete amounts. This may or may not be the case (I think it probably isn't), but either way, it doesn't seem provable or falsifiable.

As currently phrased it does, but as a larger epidemiological problem its not much of an issue. We can't prove that a single individual lost (or gained) life-years because of a particular event or behavior, because we don't know how long they would have lived absent that event or behavior. But on a population level we can estimate how certain risks impact life expectancy. So, for example, we can't say whether smoking will reduce the life expectancy of any given individual; but we can say that, on average, heavy smoking reduces life expectancy by about 10 years.
posted by googly at 7:19 AM on October 7