It’s Official: That Stressful Coworker Or Relative Is Ageing You Faster

“Hasslers,” or people who repeatedly “create problems or make life more difficult” for you, can literally age you, a new study published in PNAS found. 

Stating that relationships like these are “not rare,” the researchers added that they are “disproportionately experienced by individuals facing greater social and health vulnerabilities, and consequential for ageing”. 

And the more of these sorts of relationships, the worse the health outcomes seem to be. 

How do “hasslers” affect our health? 

This research showed that for every “hassler” in a person’s life, biological ageing sped up by 1.5%, or nine months.

The authors think this could happen because negative interactions chronically strain the body’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which helps to regulate stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

And, they posit, the chronic stress of talking to “hasslers” leads to lasting inflammation, which is linked to ageing if it lasts when the body doesn’t need it.

This could, they say, be an example of allostatic load; a form of “wear and tear” that happens when we try repeatedly to adapt to ongoing stress.

That might be why people with more “hasslers” fared worse, on average, on measures like self-reported health, psychiatric symptoms, epigenetic inflammation scores, and waist-to-hip ratio.