Stressed cells burn 62% more energy

Columbia researchers kept human cells under chronic stress hormone for 250 days and measured the bill. The cells burned about 62 percent more energy, and aged faster for it. The number is real, and it is smaller than the internet thinks.

You have probably been told that stress is exhausting. It is usually said the way people say that Mondays are hard: true enough, not really a claim about anything.

A lab at Columbia decided to put a number on it.

The experiment

Martin Picard's group took skin cells from healthy donors and grew them in dishes. Half were left alone. The other half were bathed in a synthetic stress hormone, a glucocorticoid, continuously, for the whole of their lives. Not a bad afternoon. Not a hard week. Every hour of every day, for up to 250 days, until the cells stopped dividing and died.

Then they measured how much energy each dish consumed.

The stressed cells burned about 62 percent more energy than the calm ones, doing the same job, in the same conditions, going nowhere.

Where the energy went

This is the part that sounds like a metaphor and is not.

The stressed cells built more mitochondria. They made extra copies of mitochondrial DNA. They shifted their metabolism away from quick, cheap glycolysis toward oxidative phosphorylation, the slower and more thorough way of extracting energy. They ran, in Picard's description, a larger spare energetic capacity, as if anticipating a threat that had not arrived yet.

They were preparing. Continuously. For nothing.

Biologists call this allostasis: the body spending resources in advance to stay stable in the face of expected demand. It is an excellent system for a week of danger. The trouble is what happens when the week does not end.

What it cost them

The stressed cells did not just spend more. They wore out sooner.

Their telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides, eroded faster. Their epigenetic clocks, the chemical marks on DNA that biologists use to estimate biological age, ran ahead. Their mitochondrial DNA became unstable. They reached the end of their replicative lifespan earlier than the calm cells did.

Higher energy expenditure, faster aging, shorter life. In a dish, with nothing else going on, from stress hormone alone.

The part the internet leaves out

Sixty-two percent is a striking number and it is about to be misused, so here is the boundary.

That measurement is cellular. It is not your metabolic rate. If chronic stress raised whole-body energy expenditure by 62 percent, a stressed person would be burning roughly the calories of a daily marathon while sitting still, and we would have noticed. Nothing in human calorimetry looks like that.

Picard is careful about this himself. Asked whether it scales to people, his answer is that yes, stress increases energy costs in the human body, "but we don't quite know by how much."

That is the honest state of the science, and it is more interesting than the exaggeration. We have a precise number for a cell and an open question for a person.

Why it is worth knowing anyway

Because of what it does to one particular sentence.

People carrying chronic stress, grief, anxiety or depression are tired in a way that sleep does not fix, and they are routinely told, by others and then by themselves, that this is a motivation problem. That they are being lazy. That they should push through.

The cell work does not prove a number for humans. What it does establish is a mechanism: a system under sustained threat signalling spends real, measurable, physical energy holding itself together, and that spending has consequences. The exhaustion is not a story someone is telling themselves about their day. It is the metabolic cost of vigilance, and it is being paid whether or not anyone believes in it.

Knowing that will not make the tiredness go away. It does change what the tiredness means, and for a lot of people that is the difference between resting and feeling guilty about resting.

What to do with it

Nothing dramatic. The finding is about cost, not cure. But it argues for taking recovery as seriously as effort, since the bill accrues quietly whether or not the stress ever produces a visible crisis, and for treating chronic vigilance as a thing worth working on directly rather than a personality trait to be tolerated.

If your body is running a 24-hour preparedness operation for a threat that never comes, the useful question is not how to push harder through the fatigue. It is what is keeping the alarm on.

Source: Bobba-Alves et al., "Cellular allostatic load is linked to increased energy expenditure and accelerated biological aging", *Psychoneuroendocrinology*, 2023. Picard's own summary is at tseenergy.substack.com.

*Mura is supportive, not a substitute for professional care. Persistent exhaustion has many causes, including thyroid problems, anemia and sleep apnea, and is worth taking to a doctor rather than assuming it is stress.*

This article is for general information and is not a substitute for professional care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please contact your local emergency services or a crisis line. See crisis lines.