Is this generation of young people the most stressed since the mass poverty and bloodshed of the 20th Century? That’s effectively the argument being made by some psychologist and demographers.

The Palestinians and Israelis and Ukrainians would say so. The working poor in the US are feeling it. In safe havens such as Australia and New Zealand, relative stress is high for its young people.

The housing crisis. The climate crisis. The psychic damage done by a pandemic that is still to be reckoned with. The growing unease about AI. The urgency of building an arsenal – here and abroad – for future wars that are deemed inevitable.

US researchers have turned to an annoying adage: ‘You’re only as old as you feel.’

It’s commonly voiced as a pep-talk for ageing folk. And there are plenty of studies showing it to be true. The more beaten down by life, the older you tend to look.

“If these young people are already experiencing historically high levels of stress for their age, and that stress is affecting how old they feel, it will be important for us to pay close attention to the markers we use to assess stress-related physical and mental health for this generation,” Shevaun Neupert, corresponding author of a new study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University (NCSU), said.

Well, maybe

The most helpful thing about Neupert’s research is that it teases apart the question of what precisely causes young people to visibly age.

Her study finds younger adults look and feel older on stressful days. But this happens only on days when they feel they have relatively less control over their lives.

The findings come as Gen Zers (those born between 1997 and 2013) are reportedly worried they’re ageing faster than Millennials, the generation that preceded them. The new research wasn’t prompted by the Gen-Z crisis.

Instead, Neupert was responding to a paucity of literature exploring perceptions of ageing in younger adults. The idea was to find how these perceptions are linked to physical and emotional wellbeing.

Professor Neupert said in a statement: “There’s substantial research that tells us stress makes older adults feel their age, or even feel older than they actually are. And the literature tells us that when seniors feel older than they actually are, that is associated with a host of negative health outcomes.”

However, she said there was “little research examining this issue in younger adults”. Meaning, people in their teens, 20s and 30s.

Having a deeper understanding of this phenomenon across all age groups “could help us develop interventions that protect our mental and physical wellbeing”.

Researchers collected data from 107 younger adults between the ages of 18 and 36 (the mean age was around 20).

The findings

The key finding was that “on days when study participants reported experiencing higher levels of stress than they normally did, they also reported looking and feeling older”.

Professor Neupert said it was “worth noting that both the levels of stress and the levels of control were relative”.

In other words, a person could report having relatively low levels of stress – “but if the level of stress was higher than they normally reported, researchers saw the effect”. That is, the participants felt and saw themselves as looking older.

Also, people could report feeling they still had significant levels of control over their lives – but if it was less control than they normally reported, researchers again saw the effect.

This tells us that “the phenomenon of stress making people feel older is not limited to older adults”.