The Biological Cost of Chronic Stress and Trauma

Aren't you tired of being told to just stress less? The reason that advice rarely lands isn't that it's hard to act on, it's that stress has become so embedded in modern life that most of us have stopped recognizing it. It shows up quietly: a heart that beats a little faster than it should, a stomach that feels tied in a knot, a jaw you clench without realising. These are the signs that your body is bracing for a threat.

But the same protective response can turn against you when the pressure never goes away.

Over months and years, unresolved stress ages your immune system — in some cases by up to 15 years. But how exactly does that happen and, more importantly, can it be reversed?

The stress response was never designed to last

To understand why, it helps to go back to basics. The stress response evolved to keep us alive in moments of genuine danger. When we perceive a threat, the body mobilizes everything for immediate survival: cardiovascular output increases, muscles prime for action, and crucially, non-essential systems are suppressed. Reproduction. Digestion. Immune surveillance. Fighting off cancer. Fighting off infection. All of it gets deprioritized because when you're running from a predator, long-term survival is beside the point.

For a few minutes, short bursts of stress are actually beneficial. The problem begins when the system gets stuck in that state chronically.

Here's the critical distinction modern life forces us to confront: most of the stress we experience today is not a physical threat. It lives in the mind, with things like financial pressure, relationship tension, and an upcoming deadline that feels impossible. Our nervous system cannot tell the difference between a lion and a difficult email. If the perceived threat persists, the suppression of immune, reproductive, and digestive function persists with it, and over months and years, that suppression turns into biological damage.

Why some people are hit harder than others

Two people can face the identical stressor and age at completely different rates. What separates them is not the event itself, but the meaning it carries, and especially, whether it is touching something unresolved from the past.

CEO of GlycanAge, Nikolina Lauc, experienced this firsthand by tracking her own biological age over a decade, only to see it spike not from work stress she had long learned to manage, but from a personal trigger rooted in early childhood. Her story is worth reading in full.

This is the mechanism that psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is helping us understand. Our psychology, nervous system, endocrine system, and immune function are not separate systems. Rather, they are one interconnected whole system, constantly working to maintain balance. When a deep emotional trigger is activated, the body doesn't distinguish cleanly between past and present. The fight-or-flight response fires as though the threat is real and immediate, even when it happened decades ago and exists now only as a felt sense.

There is also a compounding factor: the natural human tendency when faced with stress, trauma, or emotional pain is not to feel it, but rather to suppress it. We minimize, rationalize, stay busy, push through. For many people, this suppression is so practiced that it doesn't even feel like a choice. Psychotherapy helps precisely by doing the opposite, by guiding people to identify, name, and work through what they've been carrying. And when it works, the biological effects can be measurable.

The high achiever paradox

Some of the most interesting cases we encounter are the ones that do not make immediate sense.

Busy professionals with genuinely healthy lifestyles: good nutrition, regular exercise, structured routines. On paper, everything points toward a low biological age. Yet their biological age results tend to come back significantly higher than their actual age.

When we look more carefully, there seems to be a pattern. Many are high-achieving, driven personalities, constantly traveling, always thinking about the next goal, struggling to genuinely unwind. Professionally successful, yet quite lonely, without a solid community around them. The grind culture they've built their identity around is, biologically speaking, a chronic stress state, which is also accelerating their aging. Sound familiar? Read more about the manager's profile.

How deeply this affects our health

When we look at what chronic stress actually does to life expectancy, the picture is quite sobering.

Research across mental health diagnoses estimates an average of around 14.7 years of life lost: bipolar disorder accounts for nearly 13, schizophrenia for over 14, major depression for 12 to 21 years, depending on the population, and ADHD for an estimated 8 to 13. This is consistent with what our PTSD study found, with patients showing glycan-based biological ages up to 15 years older than their chronological age.

Even aside from the mental health diagnosis, the gap between biological age and chronological age carries direct mortality risk. Glycan-based biological age predicts all-cause mortality independently of every conventional risk factor: BMI, blood pressure, smoking, and LDL cholesterol. A one-year increase corresponds to a 7% rise in mortality in men and 2% in women.

The same is true for relations. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest longitudinal studies of human life ever conducted, found that the quality of a person's relationships was the strongest predictor of both quality of life and longevity, above wealth, fitness, and genetics.

What recovery looks like: GlycanAge success stories

The picture above is serious, but it is not fixed. What glycan research has shown consistently is that the biological age reflected in the glycans can improve. And some of the most significant improvements we have documented have had nothing to do with lifestyle in the conventional sense.

One GlycanAge client had everything in order: strength training, regular cardio, recreational sports, consistent supplementation, pharmacotherapy, and psychotherapy maintained since his first test. His conventional markers were improving. And yet his biological age peaked at 75 when his chronological age was 42. Later, he disclosed a long-standing diagnosis of anxiety-depressive disorder. Then, approximately six months after his last test, his biological age dropped to 45. What had changed? He got divorced. For most people we see, relationship breakdown is associated with a spike in biological aging. But for this client, the marriage had been the source of years of grinding unhappiness. Even his dog, who was chronically anxious throughout the marriage, became much calmer after the divorce.

Another client came to us with results she could not account for. Nothing in her lifestyle had changed, and yet her biological age had dropped noticeably since her last test. When our specialist asked whether anything had shifted personally or professionally, she mentioned, almost incidentally, that she had left her corporate career to start her own business. The way she talked about it said everything: there was a spark in her voice and eyes that hadn't been there before. Her biological age had fallen from 35 to 21, a 16-year gap below her chronological age, without a single conventional health intervention.

The goal isn't less stress, it's better processing

None of this is an argument for eliminating stress and challenges from life. Short-term stress is biologically beneficial, and it can be used to build resilience to better manage stress. The goal is not to live without any difficulties, but rather to develop a more honest relationship with the emotional load we carry, allowing us to process it, rather than perpetually suppress it.

Making the invisible more measurable

If you are curious about what your immune system may be reflecting about the stress and emotional load you carry, explore how GlycanAge measures the biological impact of stress and recovery, and what your glycan-based biological age can reveal about your long-term health.

We are here to support you

For the rest of the month, use code RECOVER25 to get 25% off your GlycanAge test to measure the effect of chronic stress and recovery.

GlycanAge does not diagnose trauma, depression, anxiety or stress.

It measures immune molecules involved in regulating inflammation (IgG glycans) to assess how your immune aging is responding, adapting, and recovering over time. Especially during or after meaningful lifestyle, emotional, therapeutic, relational, or recovery changes.

References

Barkley, R.A. & Fischer, M. Hyperactive child syndrome and estimated life expectancy at young adult follow-up. Journal of Attention Disorders, 23(9), 907–923 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054718816164

Erlangsen, A. et al. Loss of life expectancy in major depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 282, 512–519 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.12.196

Hayes, J.F. et al. Life expectancy and years of potential life lost in bipolar disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry, 221(3), 580–587 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2021.63

Hjorthøj, C. et al. Years of potential life lost and life expectancy in schizophrenia. Lancet Psychiatry, 4(4), 295–301 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(17)30078-0

Lund, R. et al. Stressful social relations and mortality: a prospective cohort study. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 68(8), 720–727 (2014). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24811775/

Mijakovac, A., Butz, E., Vučković, F. et al. The Immunoglobulin G Glycome: A Modifiable Biomarker and Functional Effector of Aging, Disease, and Mortality. medRxiv (2026) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.21.26351390v1

Moreno-Villanueva, M., Morath, J., Vanhooren, V. et al. N-glycosylation profiling of plasma provides evidence for accelerated physiological aging in post-traumatic stress disorder. Translational Psychiatry, 3, e320 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2013.93

Solmi, M. et al. Causes of death in people with mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. EClinicalMedicine, 56 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2022.101762

Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster, 2023.