Stress does turn hair gray, and it’s reversible

My hair started graying pretty much as soon as I graduated from college. It makes a lot of sense now. Around the same time, I:<p>- bought a house (in 2007, yeesh)<p>- got married<p>- started my first job (which at the time felt like drinking out of a fire hose)<p>Shortly after, my wife and I went through the stress of trying and failing to get pregnant. Then infertility treatments for several months. Then my wife had surgery. Infertility treatments no longer an option, we turned to adoption. 6 weeks later (seriously), we brought home our first child.<p>After that, it was like kids fell into our laps every couple of years. After the second child, I struggled with a pretty severe addiction that nearly claimed my marriage. Since then we&#x27;ve adopted two more. We now have kids aged 12, 9, 6 and 4.<p>Has it been all stress all the time? Not at all. I feel incredibly blessed to be living this life. But the hair (mostly on the sides) hasn&#x27;t gone back to its normal color either, so I guess either it&#x27;s genetic or there&#x27;s an undercurrent of stress I&#x27;ve just become accustomed to.<p>Edit: formatting

Maybe it was a coincidence but at my last job I was so insanely stressed and burnt out. My manager was terrible, treated me like an idiot, and my ideas were stifled day in and day out.<p>I woke up one day and seemingly overnight my beard had a grey patch - almost white, in fact. It fell out in the week after.<p>Almost a year and a half later, after leaving that job, I took the pandemic to really focus on my stress levels and be happier (I am). The grey patch is starting to fade away and some color is beginning to return. Certainly not the stark white that was there before, and definitely not grey either.<p>Idk if I believe it, maybe something else was happening. But it sure seemed stress related at the time.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m &lt; 30 and my family doesn&#x27;t have a history of grey hair - quite the opposite. Forgot to mention this

Stress is terrible.<p>Work overloaded me and caused so much stress that I had stress-induced alopecia. My beard fell out in patches, and I had random patches of hair fall out on the back of my head, almost like perfect circles. Besides that, I couldn&#x27;t really enjoy myself anymore, and I would often spend my non-work time vegetating.<p>Then there&#x27;s the teeth grinding and all the damage that comes with that.<p>The hair came back, but the damage done to my teeth is not reversible.<p>These are just the physical damages, the damages to mental health are either still on the mend or scarred.

The important bit -<p>&gt;&gt; Reducing stress in your life is a good goal, but it won&#x27;t necessarily turn your hair to a normal color.<p>&gt;&gt; &quot;Based on our mathematical modeling, we think hair needs to reach a threshold before it turns gray,&quot; Picard says. &quot;In middle age, when the hair is near that threshold because of biological age and other factors, stress will push it over the threshold and it transitions to gray.<p>&gt;&gt; &quot;But we don&#x27;t think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who&#x27;s been gray for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the gray threshold.&quot;

I just quit my startup job a couple months ago and like magic I can barely see my gray hairs anymore. Whereas when I worked there it seemed like every month the gray got worse. I&#x27;m 36.<p>We may not have risk of falling off a roof or getting shot so I don&#x27;t want to overstate anything but the stress some of us have from our careers is definitely not helping our health. Combine that with generally sitting in our chair all day and it gets worse.<p>My new job is also a startup but I&#x27;m a founder this time and have more latitude to take a mental health break or block out time mid-day to do a workout. Everyone is different but I think quantifiably... based on my gray hair (to come back full circle to the article)... the lack of a steady paycheck is much LESS stressful than the job at a more established company where I got paid well but was pretty much on call 24x7.

My beard got a nice gray patch during 2018.. near the end of that year I ate 5g psilocybin and over the next 3 months all my gray bread hairs disappeared, and still until today I haven&#x27;t had a single gray hair in my beard again. Can anyone explain that? Early thirties, no health issues, overall normal body.

I was always curious as to whether this is the mechanism by which silverback gorillas get their silver hair. Being in charge must be stressful.

Indeed. One of my friends had quite a few patches of gray hair (he was only about 28 at the time), but found that the patches turned their natural color again in a few years after moving to a smaller company and becoming more health-conscious, diet-wise.

Very small n, but nonetheless entertaining:<p>&gt; “There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.

Strange because I started turning grey in high school, my hair was &quot;dishwater blond&quot;. My grandmother on my father&#x27;s side said she too started turning grey in school and died her hair most of her life to cover it.<p>Fast forward a bit, my daughter started getting grey hair around 18 years old. We had assumed when she was young it wouldn&#x27;t happen because she had jet black hair, and that color most likely came from mom&#x27;s family line.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that stress can also contribute, now I wonder how much of my grey is stress induced vs genetics! These days I&#x27;m almost 98% grey with limited hair loss, my father is 70% grey with substantial hair loss, and my mom is 100% grey with a full head of hair.

I thought this was well-known. I went to MIT for undergrad in the late 1990s, and have 3 friends who got white patches in their hair in their late teens&#x2F;early 20s that went away within a few months of graduation.

Yeah. It can happen to kids as young as high school age. I have seen so many Chinese students preparing for their college entrance exams had their hairs turned grey. I&#x27;m actually surprised it&#x27;s reversible, because none of them I knew ever recovered from the grey hair years later.

I see this in my own beard hairs. I&#x27;ll have a dark hair with a grey root, but then I&#x27;ll also have a grey hair with a dark root. I didn&#x27;t do any research into it, but I always felt like I saw more of the latter when I&#x27;d been getting lots of sleep.<p>Other hairy questions I&#x27;ve been curious about: What&#x27;s the deal with that one long dark hair on my shoulder, and why is there one in about the same place on each shoulder? Why does it feel so good to pluck out some hairs, but other ones give a lot of resistance and hurt? Why do some hairs grow in pairs? Is body hair effective at baffling mosquitos?

Hmm this might explain why I pluck the odd grey hair, only to find that it is only grey at the oldest end, and the newer hair is back to normal colour.<p>So the hair <i>stopped</i> being grey halfway through growing... Less stress?

Has anyone found good, long-term methods for stress management?<p>I know I am stressed and I see the evidence - restless sleep, elevated WBC, worsening anxiety.<p>I, unfortunately, haven&#x27;t found a good routine way to manage stress.

I&#x27;ve just misread &quot;and It’s IRReversible&quot; and immediately felt more stress because of that X-(

The health effects of stress are pretty insane, I actually had to stop hacker ranking the other day because I noticed my blood pressure would shoot up by about 10 points.<p>No faang offer is worth dropping dead

Did anyone have success with PABA?<p>From Wikipedia:<p>&gt; Despite the lack of any recognized syndromes of PABA deficiency in humans, except for those who lack the colonic bacteria that generate PABA, many claims of benefit are made by commercial suppliers of PABA as a nutritional supplement. The benefit is claimed for (...) and premature grey hair.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;4-Aminobenzoic_acid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;4-Aminobenzoic_acid</a>

Wondering how is this related to vitiligo [a condition in which the pigment is lost from areas of the skin, causing whitish patches, often with no clear cause.]

I had a gorgeous curly black hair… that turned gray in a couple of years when my startup derailed. I tried to hide the problems to my family, friends and relatives… but the color of my hair was a very strong signal. A couples of years later I started to suffer of some medical conditions related to the long periods of stressing events in the startup. Stress can destroy your health. Take it seriously.

So what does it mean when the hair on the top of your head is still fine but your beard is turning gray. Does that mean I&#x27;m half-stressed?

So it turns out that generations of parents blaming their children for all their grey hairs were actually right? Someone out there is having a vindicating &quot;I told you so&quot; moment.

In my late thirties I noticed flecks of grey in my hair when I was getting haircuts. It was like that for a few years then went away again and has yet to return (clocked in at fifty last year).<p>I don&#x27;t recall life being especially stressful at that time. I went through an unbelievable amount of stress in the middle five years of my forties which didn&#x27;t cause a recurrence.<p>I do have these thick grey hairs in my beard though, that stand out among the thinner, wiry brown ones. Not sure what that is about.

To reduce the stress a bit and make you smile, here&#x27;s a P. G. Wodehouse quote:<p>&quot;There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.&quot;

I kind of like my gray hairs.<p>I first noticed them (and assumed they were from stress) the summer after high school -- back then, it was a single, stark-white hair that popped up. I was certainly stressed in undergrad and then grad school, but I didn&#x27;t feel horribly so while going through it, though I do have more than one now. :)<p>I understand the vanity aspect of dying them away, but that never resonated with me -- it seems like one of the few dignified parts of aging.

Anecdata, but I&#x27;ve witnessed re-melanizing of formerly gray follicles.<p>My wife tried intermittent fasting after reading some health claims about it. (i.e. autophagy). In the beginning I was skeptical.<p>After a month or so of intermittent fasts, her hairdresser noticed an obvious line of salt and pepper hair that was growing in brown at the roots.<p>I now believe the health claims of fasting have merit, and I hope future research can quantify the degree of benefits.

Looking at stress management from a nutritional lens - get more magnesium.<p>Avoidance of all stress isn&#x27;t practical, so give your body the nutrients it needs to cope.

It has been a while when i came across few remedies for grey hair and hair loss [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vedix.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;articles&#x2F;premature-greying-of-hair-causes-and-treatment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vedix.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;articles&#x2F;premature-greying-of-hair-c...</a>] i dont know if this is reversible but yes, some of them really helps in slowing down the graying

A japanese guy once told me that he worked in a lab and accidentially caused an explosion, not really injuring him but giving him quite a shock. He claimed that when he woke up the next day much of his hair &#x2F; beard had turned grey. Although he appeared to be an honest guy, I never believed the story.<p>Is there any way that this could actually have happened the way he told it?

I&#x27;d love to know more about how they were able to sample individual hairs over a period of time even with things like the subject going on holiday between samplings. Do they mark the individual hairs somehow?

See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marie_Antoinette_syndrome?wprov=sfti1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Marie_Antoinette_syndrome?wpro...</a>

over the past few years, my stress levels have been climbing, never to the point of &quot;turning my hair grey&quot;.<p>but then, the pandemic hit + more work related stress and now my beard has a ton of grey hair. also, finding more and more grey hair in my head daily.<p>i always thought it was just... you know, getting older but it literally started appearing all of sudden.<p>it&#x27;s nice to know it&#x27;s not &quot;just&quot; an age thing.

Does this mean that people with an anxiety disorder (more stress) are more likely to have grey hair?

Do never, ever let a job or manager affect your stress levels. If you can, seek greener pastures, but more importantly, do not let it affect you. Same for relationship issues. The hair is only one of the affected areas. God knows how bad this is some internal body parts if it leads to binge eating or coping solutions like drinking etc. Not to mention the mind.

Wonder if baldness is the same?

funny I&#x27;m more stressed these days than in my late teen&#x2F;early 20s but I&#x27;ve actually lost grey hair in the past 10 years. I was in a more polluted city and did not exercise

My hair started turning gray after COVID infection, I’m 34.

supposedly, if you&#x27;ve had high fever, you can also see it as a streak from your finger and toenails (the part that was growing then).

Well that explains why I get random white hair on some occasions and seems to go away I was thinking I was getting really old but I am already old and was expecting my hair to turn white.

About two years ago I woke up to find 40% of my facial hair gone. It was due to alopecia areata, and I was going through a very stressful period. It mostly grew back but completely white (Funnily I&#x27;m left with a narrow black section in the moustache area, so if I don&#x27;t shave I look like Hitler).<p>Anyway in the last month or so some coloured hair has started to come back, hopefully it continues.

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