The cellular energy cost of chronic stress

How chronic stress increases cellular energy use

In 2023, Martin Picard's laboratory at Columbia University continuously exposed cultured skin cells to cortisol, the stress hormone. Their energy expenditure rose by an average of 60%. Their telomeres, the end regions of chromosomes, shortened, and their lifespan in culture decreased.

Picard studies the connection between psychological stress and mitochondria, the cell structures involved in energy production. His interpretation is that cells spend more energy under stress, leaving fewer resources for growth, maintenance, and repair. He discussed these findings in an interview with Modern Healthspan on October 11, 2026. Columbia University's Eternal Search page.

Another study from the laboratory shows that some changes associated with stress can reverse. In 2021, the group documented individual gray hairs regaining pigment in some healthy people. The researchers used alternating light and dark segments along a hair to track when its follicle lost and regained the ability to produce pigment. In one of 14 participants, hairs resumed pigmented growth after a vacation, during the month with the lowest self-reported stress that year.

That coincidence does not establish what caused pigmentation to return. The study also does not show that rest restores hair color in most people or reverses aging throughout the body. The cell experiments found increased energy costs and accelerated aging under prolonged cortisol exposure in culture. The hair observations provide a basis for studying which stress-associated changes subside after recovery, but the limits of that reversibility remain to be established.

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