Yes, the stress of Covid can turn your hair grey

...and even make it fall out. But here’s what you can do to tackle it

WHEN we finally emerge from this lockdown and meet up with friends, don’t be surprised if some of them have gone grey. I don’t mean their faces (though it has been a long winter), but their hair colour, and not simply because they’ve not been able to get their highlights done! We’ve all been under a lot of stress, thanks to Covid, and one of the things that stress can do is make your hair go grey, as well as fall out.

I remember, years ago, reading a book about Marie Antoinette which claimed the shock of capture and imprisonment during the French Revolution was so great her hair went white overnight. At the time I thought that must be wild exaggeration, but new research suggests it really could happen. Not quite overnight, but certainly within weeks.

So what’s going on? It may surprise you to learn there is no such thing as grey hair. When you start to go ‘grey’, as I am slowly, what’s actually happening is that your normal-coloured hairs are being replaced by more and more translucent or white hairs.

It’s the mixture of white and coloured hairs that creates the illusion of grey.

And the reason you start sprouting more white hairs is because the cells in your hair follicles that produce the colour pigment, melanin, are dying off.

The age at which this starts is largely down to your genes (I’m pleased to say my 91-year-old mother still has a good head of darkish hair, which she assures me is entirely natural), but lifestyle and stress also play their part.

THANkS to research from Harvard University we now know not only why increased stress triggers premature greyness, but also how quickly this can happen. The studies were carried out in mice, but it seems likely the mechanism is the same in humans.

When we’re stressed or scared our body produces adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. These make our hearts beat faster and cause our blood pressure to rise, so we can escape from danger.

The Harvard scientists initially thought that loss of hair colour might be caused by high levels of cortisol. But when they stressed the mice, after first suppressing their ability to produce cortisol, their fur still turned grey.

It turned out it’s noradrenaline that’s damaging the pigment-regenerating cells in hair follicles.

And as Dr Ya-Chieh Hsu, an associate professor of stem cell biology who led the study explained, the impact on the mouse fur colour was both fast and powerful.

‘When we started to study this, I expected stress was bad for the body — but the impact of stress was beyond what I imagined.’

She said that after just a few days, all of the pigment-regenerating cells were lost. ‘Once they’re gone, you can’t regenerate pigment any more.’

Although the damage to these cells is normally permanent, scientists in Japan have recently found a way to regenerate hair cells by growing them in a special culture.

That research, however, is at a very early stage, so I’m afraid if you don’t fancy going grey there’s currently no alternative to hair dye.

But even worse than turning grey, excessive stress can also make your hair fall out.

We all have around 100,000 hair follicles. At any given moment some are producing new hairs, while others are resting. Chronic stress suppresses the growth phase, so you’re shedding hairs faster than growing new ones.

Hair may come out in patches and in extreme cases, you may lose hair not just from your head, but other areas, including your eyebrows and even your genital area.

A very recent finding, reported this week in the journal The Lancet, is that a quarter of patients with long Covid experience hair loss, with women being more at risk than men.

No one knows why, but it’s likely that the hair loss is the result of the ongoing stress caused by Covid (the patients had previously been hospitalised with the infection).

Hair loss which occurs as a result of stress is normally reversible — once the cause of the stress has passed, your hair should regrow, though it can take many months.

As for tackling stress, I find one of the ways that works for me is to do plenty of outdoor exercise.

And I’m hardly the only one. A couple of years ago, I made a film with researchers from the University of Edinburgh, where we asked volunteers to spend an extra couple of hours a week, outdoors, somewhere green.

This is based on growing research that shows being outside in green spaces helps distract us from our thoughts and reduces stress.

After just three weeks we saw big improvements in the volunteers’ cortisol levels, as well as a 30 per cent drop in their perceived stress.

The fact that our experiment was carried out in Scotland in the middle of winter didn’t seem to dull their enthusiasm.

One guy told me he sat on a park bench, during a hailstorm, and found it surprisingly soothing!