How Does Stress Affect How We Age?

Presented by Notre Dame Research

For over 10 years, the Notre Dame Study of Health and Well-being at the University of Notre Dame has studied stress and its impact on health and aging. Through the project, the Adult Development and Aging Lab has collected immense amounts of data on an estimated 1,500 people and their experience with routine, daily stressors. Now, with four years of new funding from the National Institute on Aging, the research team will analyze how everyday stress and someone’s ability to regulate their response can benefit or impede health nearly a decade later as well as provide direction for stress prevention and intervention strategies.

This research, led by Cindy Bergeman, associate vice president for research and professor of psychology, will utilize information on 300 research participants from previous phases of the study. In those phases, the participants were asked to fill out paper and pencil questionnaires each year, to complete data bursts – from answering daily questions for eight straight weeks, five different times across a 10-year period – and to participate in some in-person interviews and health assessments about their daily life, their stresses and uplifts, and their resiliency resources.