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When you think of the most common problems faced by old people in terms of health, you might bring up the fact that they often have weak or brittle bones. This is true, but this isn’t a problem exclusive to old people.
In fact, stress can age your bones no matter how old you are, giving you some of the same problems that might be experienced by senior citizens, doing irreversible damage to all kinds of joints and bones.
The main culprit to blame here is cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that gets released when you’re stressed out. It’s meant to help you in the event of a short-term stressful situation, and it can do that.
However, long-term stress never lets cortisol production return to normal, meaning that your cortisol levels will rise and remain at unhealthy levels, bringing lots of negative health effects along with it.
The reason cortisol damages your bones over time is that it stops certain processes in your body that are meant to build up bone structure, using it for extra energy instead. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue if you were to have some short term stress, but with chronic stress, you lose key elements in your body that are there to fill up any small holes that might develop in your bones.
If left unchecked, this leads to a condition known as osteoporosis. With osteoporosis, your bones literally become porous, meaning filled with holes. The reason this is so dangerous is that this means your bones are now far more fragile, and it would take a lot less force for you to sustain a serious injury.
With less density, your bones will be more likely to fracture in the event of something minor, and will be much harder to mend afterwards. With osteoporosis, simply tripping can lead to a broken pelvis or leg, costing a lot of money to fix and seriously affecting your mobility for many years to come.
This serious condition can appear in younger people from stress alone, and with so many years ahead of them, that’s a condition that they can’t afford to have. Consider regularly exercising and getting enough calcium so that your bones are more likely to stay strong.
This won’t fix the root problem, stress, but it can help lessen the effects of it. At the end of the day, you really need to figure out what’s causing you stress and address that before you develop a condition like this. s