How Social Anxiety Is Killing Your Cells and Why the Internet Can Help

Just over 19 percent of US adults experienced an anxiety disorder at some point last year (that figure jumps to nearly a quarter when looking at US women in particular) and over 12 percent of people suffer from social anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. So needless to say, quite a few present readers are about to get some bad news: it’s not just your retinue or lack thereof that’s feeling the consequences of sub-functional mental health. No matter how well you’ve co-opted your mental illness and colored it as an endearing eccentricity, if you’re still chronically distressed, impaired or both, then there’s a very high likelihood that nearly every cell in your body is losing the will to go on.   What does it look like when a cell reacts to your mood or anxiety disorders? While exact mechanisms are unclear, there’s an observable drop in two enzymes key for keeping your cells beautiful and long-replicating: one is essentially an antioxidant and the other serves to persuade your telomeres (those caps on the ends of chromosomes that degrade with each cell division, beckoning the inexorable march towards natural cell death) to not degrade so quickly. In 2015, one of the largest studies relating cell aging to mental disorders found that for among 1,200 participants, those suffering from anxiety disorders had consistently shorter telomere lengths than their non-anxious counterparts.1 For those learning about telomeres for the first time: If your chromosomes we...
Source: Psych Central - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Aging Anxiety Neuroscience Social Networking Technology Treatment Brain Social Anxiety telomeres Source Type: news