By Maureen Salamon – Harvard Health –
A surprising set of forces can prompt your body to grow older before its time.
If we’re naming things that speed up looking and feeling older, factors such as sun exposure, stress, or smoking may come to mind. But here’s something you might not have considered: worrying about aging may actually leave its mark on the body in a similar way.
Anxiety about the aging process – especially fears about declining health – may lead to changes in how genes function, contributing to accelerated aging, according to a study involving 726 midlife women published in the February 2026 issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology. Women who felt more anxious about getting older tended to show faster epigenetic aging – meaning their bodies looked older at a cellular level, based on how their genes switched on and off.
