For Thea Singer, stress isn’t an abstract concept. Three years ago, shortly before the manuscript for her book was due to her publisher, her elderly mother’s health deteriorated. Suffering from severe emphysema, she clung to life through a ventilator, as Singer coordinated her care. Around the same time, Singer’s daughter entered her pre-teens, and their usually serene relationship became challenging. “It was an incredibly, incredibly stressful time,” she says.

Yet fortuitously for the Boston-based science writer, the book she was working round-the-clock to report and write aimed to mitigate these very types of stressors—along with larger issues Americans grapple with, from financial woes to terrorist threats. Specifically, Singer was exploring cutting-edge research into how stress ages us.

This fall, the product of her work hit shelves. In Stress Less: The New Science That Shows Women How to Rejuvenate the Body and the Mind, Singer has compiled perhaps the most comprehensive look at the impact of stress on women and men’s bodies, down to our DNA. Her research reveals in unsettling detail how the more we let stress “get to us,” the shorter we may live. “Stress is basically a biological clock,” Singer told The Daily Beast.

Read more at: The New Science of Reverse Aging

by Danielle Friedman Info

Danielle Friedman is a homepage editor and reporter for The Daily Beast. Previously, she spent five years working as a nonfiction book editor for Hudson Street Press and Plume, two imprints of Penguin Group. She’s a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.