My hypothesis is that both stress and depression vastly speed up aging, hair being the least of the problems. It is good to see research about this subject.
I'm constantly stressed. Therapy and weightlifting help but don't solve it. I always find something to be stressed about. For years, I was stressed in school, then graduated and started being stressed about being lonely. For the last year, I always thought about how lonely I am, so my therapist suggested me to get a pet. I got a cat. Now I don't feel lonely, but every time I'm not home, I just worry that something bad will happen to the cat. I always worry that he is sick, or jumped somewhere and injured himself. Or that there is a fire in my house and my cat is grilling.
I experience a lot of what OP describes but obviously am not OP. It's tough though, who wants to take the anti-anxiety medication that we don't really understand every day for the rest of their life? Just for you to eventually not need it? Why would I all of a sudden not need it? Doesn't even make sense.
My doctor always tries to get me to take it but it just seems like a bandaid. Granted, I don't claim to be able to fix it myself either, but the last thing I want to do is mess with my brain chemistry more, especially since I'm starkly aware of the arrogance of humanity (i.e. nobody really knows what is actually going on).
EDIT: I feel like baby(user comment below) might be on to something. I constantly am in fear of something bad happening and stress about that far more than I stress about things that have already happened. But I do experience both.
imo, some people are clearly in situations where continuous medication is worth the trade-offs...
For milder cases, medication can disrupt negative feedback mechanisms. eg Adderall didn't cure my ADHD but a few months at a high dose gave me momentum to build organizational habits and understand what "normal" meant. Now I just take the occasional low dose in response when life gets hectic to stay on top of what matters.
I do like CBD, it doesn't seem to help me as much as it helps average person, but it's still a little helpful. Yet, I have this anxiety against weed too and even if it contains 0% THC, simply smelling weed increases my heart rate and triggers anxiety. Which is weird, because I used to (last 5 years) not be able to smoke weed (THC) at all because of severe anxiety but nowadays I can tolerate a puff or two in parties to chill, yet in my spare time 0% THC weed with CBD can still induce anxiety. Most of the time I'm ok, but occasionally it triggers me. Anxiety is weird. It feels like living with a skittish animal with zero intellectual capacity in my brain.
it helps to put risks into perspective. cats may not know everything that's dangerous in a home, but they're pretty clever and resilient. they're very unlikely to die in a accident at home.
basically, there's 2 not insignificant accidental causes of cat death:
(1) getting run over or attacked by other animals (dogs, other cats, coyotes, etc.) so keep them inside, and
(2) eating something that's severely poisonous [1] (mild poisons usually just upset their stomachs) so keep those things out of reach.
accidental fires are very rare and you don't need to worry about them (unless, for example, you leave candles or fireplaces lit when not at home).
this goes for life in general too. most of us know not to worry about lightning strikes, but most dangers we worry about are even less likely, like dying in a plane (or helicopter) crash or via terrorist attack. it's way more likely to die in a car accident, by heart attack, or due to cancer, and most of us don't incessantly worry about those things either.
I’ve heard that stress can cause a lot of issues in one’s body. Grey hair, diabetes, even cancer?
What should I do? Should I drop everything to live a stress-free life in Thailand? Should I do meditation everyday? What are the ways for someone to live a stress-free life :)?
> Should I drop everything to live a stress-free life in Thailand?
That sounds like it would be a really stressful thing to do...
You probably have a number of good ways to reflect on your priorities, but its very difficult for someone else to tell you how to reflect on those. Most people can only speak to what worked for them, which depends on where they were before, etc.
IMO to start:
Wake up way earlier than you have to. (This changed me into a morning person.) When you have 1-2 hours where you can just sit there calmly, drinking coffee, and not be rushed, you feel ten times better. Many mornings me and my wife wake up and just sit by the fire (that we restart to heat our home) and make coffee. Sometimes she will write, or we will both read, or talk, etc, but often we just sit together for a while and relax. Later on, you can work on being ~productive~ in the a.m. too if you please.
Invite ritual into your life. Spend a time making your home a place you would want to be. A house is a place for having coffee, having conversation, having memories and symbols that give you feeling or inspiration (pictures, objects), how much of their designs do that? How much yours?
Great advice. I find having a dependable routine helps me live a stress free life. When I am travelling, and that routine is disrupted, I feel uncomfortable and more stressed.
I theorize that a big component of many people's relaxing on vacation is because they have fewer objects to tend to and care about. It's temporal minimalism.
IMO "Things that will change your life for $100 on amazon" lists are dumb and most people's lives would be improved by the opposite - renting a dumpster!
How early do you go to bed? If I woke up 1.5 hours before I need to (6:50 AM, to get kids ready for school), that would mean I'd be getting up at 5:20. Do you seriously start heading to bed at 8:30pm? That doesn't seem realistic to me at all.
Last year for a while I was doing that (going to bed 8:30 to 9). My house is mostly heated by wood stove so last year I started waking up early to restart the fire and it just stuck.
This year I'm getting up a little later (maybe average 6:30, to be out the door by 8:30), mostly because I am writing more at night this winter, and its not as cold. I think in the summer I'll switch to writing in the morning more and go back to waking up 5:30-6.
Years ago, I would go to bed at 12-2am. I always used to say most of my best work was done between 10pm-2am. I much prefer it this new way, though past me would have a hard time believing it!
How much of this is just the natural consequences of aging? Humans' sleep patterns do tend to shift as you age - teens and 20s naturally want to go to bed and get up later, and elderly folks go to bed early and wake up early. What you're experiencing might just be due to your naturally changing circadian rhythms.
That's possible, but it seems unlikely, as it was a conscious decision made in one day when I moved/necessitated by heating. If it was aging, I would expect it to at least be gradual, or unconscious, or something.
I'll second this finding. I'm not getting younger, sure... but I can still go to a party convention and average 3hrs sleep a night for 5 days, or "decide" to play Beat Saber until 2AM.
The reality is that if it's important, you'll make time to go to bed earlier. It takes a while for the body to hit restful sleep so early (and using blackout curtains / dawn clocks have been pivotal). For me it was wanting to start working out in a particular morning class... I immediately shifted from midnight to 9:30-10 to give myself the extra time in the morning.
Last year I made the switch and used those unspoilt morning hours to finish a 100k word first draft of a novel, which is a first (heh) for me. 10/10 would not go back to selling my brain's most fertile hours to The Man.
I chuckled to myself. Yes, we absolutely start going to bed around then. The flip side: you don't wake up until $TIME? Do you seriously go to bed so late that you wake up at $TIME+8? What does not sound realistic to me are those who go to sleep at 1am and wake up at 8am; that is crazy. Personally, I am crazy productive from around 6am to 10am. Then I get slower throughout the day.
This is all individual though. Some people (me) will not switch to be a morning person no matter what you do. I've tried numerous times.
I'd say the only way out is to be aware of whether you have too much stressful stuff on your plate, and either not add more, or proactively remove. Say "no" to more things. Say "yes" a lot less. Manage your commitments. Without this awareness people take on too much stuff, which can only end in tears for everyone involved for several simple reasons:
- If you continue biting off more than you can chew, eventually you will fail to deliver on your obligations, and you'll be too stressed to do your best work
- If you never say "no", you pretty much don't respect yourself, and therefore other people will not respect you. I feel like this affects women more, because they try to be more agreeable and avoid confrontation at all costs. As they say "if you let people walk over you, eventually they will complain you're not flat enough". That is very, very true. I wish I learned this lesson much earlier than I did. My wife still hasn't learned it though.
- As a manager: if you're worried about your career progression, the way to achieve that is by taking a few significant chunks of responsibility, and delivering them with high quality and in at a predictable cadence, NOT taking on a million different things and delivering half baked shit way after it's needed by your team. In the former case you've succeeded and delivered, in the latter case you've failed, and worse, you've made your boss and your team appear like a bunch of idiots. _And_ on top of that your hair is now falling out because you're stressed AF.
A lot of it is outlook. The lens you use to view the world affects the way it impresses itself upon you. I still get stressed out from time to time, but no where near as much as my peers. I just flow along with changes and the like. A saying that has affected me greatly:
If you can't do something about something, don't worry about it. If you can, then do, and don't worry about.
I'm sure others will chime in with lots of good ways to manage stress. Therapy, working out, meditation, drugs, etc. Working out is def good in my experience. But I get the most bang from my buck by just plain not worrying. Deadlines and money can make that hard, but I just take the next step, over communicate, and let someone else stress out.
Stress free as a desirable goal? I'm not sure, a lot of the ends worth having mean going through stress. We are always more happy pursuing a goal than getting stress free, so I'm sure once we became stress free we would find a new way of being stressed.
All the trite platitudes seem to be the only real route to living a stress free life and involving oneself in society. For example: “don’t sweat the small stuff, and remember it’s all small stuff”. For me, I just remind myself everyday that eventually the sun is going to melt the earth, which is pretty wild, and nothing I do is really important. And I’m okay with that. I still work hard and have fun, but I really just practice not being attached to things. I was a very stressed out kid/young adult, and I can’t remember a single time that being stressed helped anything. So I remind myself of that. And I ski and have dogs.
The most important thing I realized to have is: a great boss that has your back. The most stress I had in my life was because of idiot bosses putting senseless pressure on me
Some people handle stress in positive ways - for example, I find I work much better under some degree of stress (e.g. deadlines) - without stress, I would just procrastinate indefinitely. Under emotional stress, I typically go hard in the gym.
Other people seem to breakdown under stress though, and I can't imagine that's healthy.
You probably wouldn't want to live a stress-free life: stress is often also a source of great meaning in people's lives. Stress doesn't necessarily cause bad effects (threat response), it also causes good things (challenge response).
And the rats in these studies are usually essentially tortured (which is definitely something to avoid).
I can recommend to listen to a few talk by Robert Sapolsky who dedicated the majority of his life researching that kind of questions.
To summarize a bit (and likely leaving out a lot of important details), do stress reducing activity if you can find one that you genuinely enjoy. Meditation is great if you enjoy it, but if you hate it every minute it going to just increase your stress. Same with finding a physical activity. Studies on stress show great results if and only if the subject enjoy and do it volunteerly because they want to do it.
The second way to reduce stress is to have control over things in life, but with a major caveat. A bit cliche, but have a feeling of control for things you can control, do not try control that which you can't, and have the wisdom to know the difference. Its a complicated balance.
The third way is to be respected. Studies show that judges, conductors and similar professions have significant lower stress and live longer. Being part of a community and receiving genuine respect is great in order to reduce stress. Don't need to be ones professional life, as family or hobby can achieve similar results.
It starts with what kind of person are you? Do you get anxious easily? Do you eat healthy? Do you exercise? Do you get 7-8 hrs sleep nightly?
Diet, exercise and sleep act as a huge de-stressor.
There's a quote I like that goes something like:
It's not reality that we suffer from, but our perception of reality.
I find that helpful. We all had "actually it wasn't that bad" moments which basically mean "I suffered for no good reason". You can train yourself to anticipate these moments in advance. Imagine that this thing your stressed about fails miserably and the worst possible consequences unfold. What then? What will you do?
What if you miss the deadline and the project fails and your boss gets mad and you're fired. What will you do? Will you land on your feet eventually? Maybe you'll actually enjoy some free time and then find a better job or work full time on that thing you keep postponing?
What if your relationship deteriorates and your s/o ends up leaves you? Will you land on your feet eventually? Would you manage to find happiness again?
I think that realizing that I'll be alright even in the extreme case, is very reassuring and actually frees me to be more focused on the job at hand and do it better, because I don't need to waste brain-cycles on stressing on what might otherwise feels like a live-or-die situation. Your relationships will be much better if you know deep down that you don't need that specific person to be happy, but that rather its your choice.
Btw, if you feel that you actually wont be ok in some scenario that your stress is warranted! But then you should probably aim to fix that unhealthy attachment because you are probably wrong...
> What are the ways for someone to live a stress-free life :)
Can't tell if the smile means your question is tongue-in-cheek, but assuming it isn't, you likely don't want a stress free life.
Stress, when it is the result of a situation that is tractable, is a helpful signal to help inform one's plan of action. A completely stress free life would arguably be one empty of purpose and direction.
It's stress of the pathological and insurmountable variety - whether internally or externally generated - that is damaging. Find ways to identity and address the causes of that. If those causes can't realistically be removed, consider things like meditation to manage the stress.
As for Thailand, it sounds hot and humid, which to me personally feels stressful, but to each their own ;)
How can we live stress free lives in an inherently stress driven work environment and life. We are constantly impressed by others more accomplished and drive ourselves to try to attempt to reach their success. This is hard, plus we have social and money issues that drive us to worry. All of these are not easy to solve, and lead to a lot of daily stress.
> We are constantly impressed by others more accomplished and drive ourselves to try to attempt to reach their success.
Not sure if this can be applied to your specific life situation but in my case after I had reached 30 years of age I realized that "chasing everyone else" is simply not worth the hassle, and, worst off, that it changed me into a person I didn't like, a "fake" me, so to speak. Mind you, I'm still stressed about money and bills and paying rent/mortgage like almost everyone else, not sure if there's a way of eliminating that, but for me at least it came as a huge stress reliever the fact that I didn't have to "chase" everybody else anymore.
If it matters I came to that "realization" that chasing others is futile after I had read a compendium of Stoic writers (there is another HN-er mentioning Marcus Aurelius, and for good reasons), but I'm sure there are also other writers/thinkers that have written about this.
After my first son, I noticed an explosion of gray hairs. I went 39 years of my life with a few strands of gray on the top of my hair. Two years since my first arrived? Grays all over. And I mean, ALL over (in places I wasn't prepared for...)
Well, it didn't all fall out, but the forehead kept getting farther and farther back and I recall seeing an image of the top of my head and thinking "god that's awful" and have been shaving it off ever since. I could let what's there grow but... it's bad.
I think it's really important to learn how to laugh. Laugh every today. Laugh at dumb things. Don't get cardiovascular disease or creases in your face or go bald because you're too proud to have a sense of humor.
I used to be an easily stressed person. I do get stressed even now but am acutely aware of it affecting the body and mind. I feel that a lot of people don't even know that they are stressed. It used to take many minutes of sitting still for my mind to relax. At that point some of my muscles would automatically relax. Only at that instant would I even become aware of it being tight the whole day.
In my dad's side of the family, we seem to have an interesting inherited trait. We don't really have any balding, but the men (including me) go grey very early in life. I'm turning 40 in a couple of days but my beard has turned almost completely grey by now and I have a lot of grey in my hair. My eyebrows are holding on though.
My dad and his brothers were all mostly grey by the end of their 30's as well.
Interestingly, when my dad got cancer in his mid 50's and started undergoing radiation treatment, the hair on his chin started growing back brown. By the time he passed away about 2 years after, that part of his beard was his original hair color from when he was young.
One hypothesis is that perhaps due to the damage being done from the radiation to healthy tissue encouraged stem cells to migrate back to that area and had the effect of regenerating the melanocytes in the follicles in the area.
Same. I come from a long line of prematurely gray haired folks. I'm 42 and my hair and beard are almost entirely white. I definitely have a problem with stress, though given the number of family members (distant and otherwise) that have the same coloring I suspect there's more to it than just that.
It is not direct heavy constant stress that causes the damage to the stem cell, but the heightened reaction in Fight or Flight scenarios. This was all in the study. Being under constant stress, which is measured via cortisol did NOT cause the stem cell damage.
I look young for my age, at 44 I look far younger than my silver haired 43 year old brother. People say I am "chill" and "zen" but I bathe in stressful situations as an entrepreneur and independent consultant all day, everyday. I just don't get excited in high stress moments. I'm the guy in center of the storm when everyone is freaking out. It is certainly both part of my nature and learned, as I have worked on improving that over the years.
You can learn to not freak out, and even if it doesn't keep your hair dark and luxurious like mine, you will be better in lots of scenarios.
There are a few comments about how to decrease stress. From personal experience, asking "How can I be less stressed?" is like asking "How can I be happy?" There's not really a great answer... but you can look at the things that would make you _unhappy_ and avoid them. So here's "How can I become MORE stressed?"
1. Buy as much nice stuff as you can – it's okay if you go into debt because it'll persuade you to work harder!
2. Since you're so busy, accept that you don't have time to exercise. You can get around to it in the future (once you're rich!)
3. Stay up as late as you can. After all, you can sleep when you're dead. Caffeine is your friend.
4. Be too lazy to make todo lists or mark anything on your calendar.
5. At least once per week, compare yourself to everyone else. It's the only way to judge how you're doing.
6. Do everything yourself. You don't need to hire that tax accountant. You don't need to ask for help.
7. Sell your time to [Company Name Here]. Yeah, they're hard to work for, but they might make you rich.
When in a TV series, the protagonist has eg. a heart problem, and the doctor says "avoid stress": I get super aggravated just listening to such conversations vicariously. It becomes another burden, a non-elective task of actively working on reducing stress factors that appear in your life by default.
>4. Be too lazy to make todo lists or mark anything on your calendar.
Ah yes, the ever simple act of 'being' any adjective identity assignment. As someone who had large parts of his hair bleach over night via a superoxidative immune system reaction following extreme stress, lemme translate how you come across here:
"Employ free will sorcery to magically shrink your amygdalea, deshrink your hippocampus, transcend depression by magically snapping your finger in one grand act of permanent auto-hypnosis. Don't order food for yourself even if ordering food is often the only thing standing between you either eating something or proceeding to remain in low calorie intake induced parapsychosis which can always potentially lead you to some suicide attempt despite technically having the option of doing so and hence getting food into you to stave off the existential low level hormonal anxiety of not having eaten right for days simply due to lacking the mental spoons to cook food, just ignore the fact that the psychophenomenological experience of the exertion of physical exercise feels vastly different when attempted in an anhedonic, stressed out, anxious & depressed state. Also, ignore the fact that even when you've cut out caffeine of your life for months at a time, it never made a positive difference, as while on the one hand, the high caffeine doses you take represent one of the causes of your long waking periods, on the other hand, high doses of caffeine represent one of the few things which occasionally manage to peirce through the complete slump."
I'm down to my absolutely last money, I have no health insurance, every day I read in the newspapers how the government will cut back on social security next and cut future bonuses to companies who don't deserve them, and I feel stressed out as hell, dude. A good quarter of my head has already turned snow white, and I haven't even reached the first quarter of my 30s. If you'd try to shove this load of bullshit advice on me in real life, I probably couldn't even muster the energy to begin expressing just how much I despise this kind of 'advice'. You know what I'd find fucking destressing? People like you, who assert that they speak from 'personal experience', yet don't actually name a single example of said personal experience, would stop trying to play Internet mental health professional and went back to using their armchairs to read books, or even better, went out to socialize more, to build a better capacity for empathy.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadMy doctor always tries to get me to take it but it just seems like a bandaid. Granted, I don't claim to be able to fix it myself either, but the last thing I want to do is mess with my brain chemistry more, especially since I'm starkly aware of the arrogance of humanity (i.e. nobody really knows what is actually going on).
EDIT: I feel like baby(user comment below) might be on to something. I constantly am in fear of something bad happening and stress about that far more than I stress about things that have already happened. But I do experience both.
For milder cases, medication can disrupt negative feedback mechanisms. eg Adderall didn't cure my ADHD but a few months at a high dose gave me momentum to build organizational habits and understand what "normal" meant. Now I just take the occasional low dose in response when life gets hectic to stay on top of what matters.
It talks about stoicism, and how accepting what is happening is the path to tranquility, and happiness.
It seems like stress is mostly about fear of something that hasn’t happened (and perhaps never will) and lack of acceptance of bad things happening.
A strong dose of CBD before bed seems to help the forthcoming days. I'm much calmer.
basically, there's 2 not insignificant accidental causes of cat death:
(1) getting run over or attacked by other animals (dogs, other cats, coyotes, etc.) so keep them inside, and
(2) eating something that's severely poisonous [1] (mild poisons usually just upset their stomachs) so keep those things out of reach.
accidental fires are very rare and you don't need to worry about them (unless, for example, you leave candles or fireplaces lit when not at home).
this goes for life in general too. most of us know not to worry about lightning strikes, but most dangers we worry about are even less likely, like dying in a plane (or helicopter) crash or via terrorist attack. it's way more likely to die in a car accident, by heart attack, or due to cancer, and most of us don't incessantly worry about those things either.
[1] https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control
What should I do? Should I drop everything to live a stress-free life in Thailand? Should I do meditation everyday? What are the ways for someone to live a stress-free life :)?
That sounds like it would be a really stressful thing to do...
You probably have a number of good ways to reflect on your priorities, but its very difficult for someone else to tell you how to reflect on those. Most people can only speak to what worked for them, which depends on where they were before, etc.
IMO to start:
Wake up way earlier than you have to. (This changed me into a morning person.) When you have 1-2 hours where you can just sit there calmly, drinking coffee, and not be rushed, you feel ten times better. Many mornings me and my wife wake up and just sit by the fire (that we restart to heat our home) and make coffee. Sometimes she will write, or we will both read, or talk, etc, but often we just sit together for a while and relax. Later on, you can work on being ~productive~ in the a.m. too if you please.
Invite ritual into your life. Spend a time making your home a place you would want to be. A house is a place for having coffee, having conversation, having memories and symbols that give you feeling or inspiration (pictures, objects), how much of their designs do that? How much yours?
I used to start my day stressing. In hindsight, that wasn't healthy.
IMO "Things that will change your life for $100 on amazon" lists are dumb and most people's lives would be improved by the opposite - renting a dumpster!
This year I'm getting up a little later (maybe average 6:30, to be out the door by 8:30), mostly because I am writing more at night this winter, and its not as cold. I think in the summer I'll switch to writing in the morning more and go back to waking up 5:30-6.
Years ago, I would go to bed at 12-2am. I always used to say most of my best work was done between 10pm-2am. I much prefer it this new way, though past me would have a hard time believing it!
The reality is that if it's important, you'll make time to go to bed earlier. It takes a while for the body to hit restful sleep so early (and using blackout curtains / dawn clocks have been pivotal). For me it was wanting to start working out in a particular morning class... I immediately shifted from midnight to 9:30-10 to give myself the extra time in the morning.
Last year I made the switch and used those unspoilt morning hours to finish a 100k word first draft of a novel, which is a first (heh) for me. 10/10 would not go back to selling my brain's most fertile hours to The Man.
I'd say the only way out is to be aware of whether you have too much stressful stuff on your plate, and either not add more, or proactively remove. Say "no" to more things. Say "yes" a lot less. Manage your commitments. Without this awareness people take on too much stuff, which can only end in tears for everyone involved for several simple reasons:
- If you continue biting off more than you can chew, eventually you will fail to deliver on your obligations, and you'll be too stressed to do your best work
- If you never say "no", you pretty much don't respect yourself, and therefore other people will not respect you. I feel like this affects women more, because they try to be more agreeable and avoid confrontation at all costs. As they say "if you let people walk over you, eventually they will complain you're not flat enough". That is very, very true. I wish I learned this lesson much earlier than I did. My wife still hasn't learned it though.
- As a manager: if you're worried about your career progression, the way to achieve that is by taking a few significant chunks of responsibility, and delivering them with high quality and in at a predictable cadence, NOT taking on a million different things and delivering half baked shit way after it's needed by your team. In the former case you've succeeded and delivered, in the latter case you've failed, and worse, you've made your boss and your team appear like a bunch of idiots. _And_ on top of that your hair is now falling out because you're stressed AF.
If you can't do something about something, don't worry about it. If you can, then do, and don't worry about.
I'm sure others will chime in with lots of good ways to manage stress. Therapy, working out, meditation, drugs, etc. Working out is def good in my experience. But I get the most bang from my buck by just plain not worrying. Deadlines and money can make that hard, but I just take the next step, over communicate, and let someone else stress out.
Meditate
Eat healthy
Get enough sleep
Spend time in nature
Avoid long commutes
Avoid social media and the news
Some people handle stress in positive ways - for example, I find I work much better under some degree of stress (e.g. deadlines) - without stress, I would just procrastinate indefinitely. Under emotional stress, I typically go hard in the gym.
Other people seem to breakdown under stress though, and I can't imagine that's healthy.
And the rats in these studies are usually essentially tortured (which is definitely something to avoid).
I highly recommend everyone look at the book "The Upside of Stress", the Ted Talk is here: https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress...
To summarize a bit (and likely leaving out a lot of important details), do stress reducing activity if you can find one that you genuinely enjoy. Meditation is great if you enjoy it, but if you hate it every minute it going to just increase your stress. Same with finding a physical activity. Studies on stress show great results if and only if the subject enjoy and do it volunteerly because they want to do it.
The second way to reduce stress is to have control over things in life, but with a major caveat. A bit cliche, but have a feeling of control for things you can control, do not try control that which you can't, and have the wisdom to know the difference. Its a complicated balance.
The third way is to be respected. Studies show that judges, conductors and similar professions have significant lower stress and live longer. Being part of a community and receiving genuine respect is great in order to reduce stress. Don't need to be ones professional life, as family or hobby can achieve similar results.
I find that helpful. We all had "actually it wasn't that bad" moments which basically mean "I suffered for no good reason". You can train yourself to anticipate these moments in advance. Imagine that this thing your stressed about fails miserably and the worst possible consequences unfold. What then? What will you do? What if you miss the deadline and the project fails and your boss gets mad and you're fired. What will you do? Will you land on your feet eventually? Maybe you'll actually enjoy some free time and then find a better job or work full time on that thing you keep postponing? What if your relationship deteriorates and your s/o ends up leaves you? Will you land on your feet eventually? Would you manage to find happiness again?
I think that realizing that I'll be alright even in the extreme case, is very reassuring and actually frees me to be more focused on the job at hand and do it better, because I don't need to waste brain-cycles on stressing on what might otherwise feels like a live-or-die situation. Your relationships will be much better if you know deep down that you don't need that specific person to be happy, but that rather its your choice.
Btw, if you feel that you actually wont be ok in some scenario that your stress is warranted! But then you should probably aim to fix that unhealthy attachment because you are probably wrong...
Can't tell if the smile means your question is tongue-in-cheek, but assuming it isn't, you likely don't want a stress free life.
Stress, when it is the result of a situation that is tractable, is a helpful signal to help inform one's plan of action. A completely stress free life would arguably be one empty of purpose and direction.
It's stress of the pathological and insurmountable variety - whether internally or externally generated - that is damaging. Find ways to identity and address the causes of that. If those causes can't realistically be removed, consider things like meditation to manage the stress.
As for Thailand, it sounds hot and humid, which to me personally feels stressful, but to each their own ;)
Not sure if this can be applied to your specific life situation but in my case after I had reached 30 years of age I realized that "chasing everyone else" is simply not worth the hassle, and, worst off, that it changed me into a person I didn't like, a "fake" me, so to speak. Mind you, I'm still stressed about money and bills and paying rent/mortgage like almost everyone else, not sure if there's a way of eliminating that, but for me at least it came as a huge stress reliever the fact that I didn't have to "chase" everybody else anymore.
If it matters I came to that "realization" that chasing others is futile after I had read a compendium of Stoic writers (there is another HN-er mentioning Marcus Aurelius, and for good reasons), but I'm sure there are also other writers/thinkers that have written about this.
I need to work on this myself.
In my dad's side of the family, we seem to have an interesting inherited trait. We don't really have any balding, but the men (including me) go grey very early in life. I'm turning 40 in a couple of days but my beard has turned almost completely grey by now and I have a lot of grey in my hair. My eyebrows are holding on though.
My dad and his brothers were all mostly grey by the end of their 30's as well.
Interestingly, when my dad got cancer in his mid 50's and started undergoing radiation treatment, the hair on his chin started growing back brown. By the time he passed away about 2 years after, that part of his beard was his original hair color from when he was young.
One hypothesis is that perhaps due to the damage being done from the radiation to healthy tissue encouraged stem cells to migrate back to that area and had the effect of regenerating the melanocytes in the follicles in the area.
I look young for my age, at 44 I look far younger than my silver haired 43 year old brother. People say I am "chill" and "zen" but I bathe in stressful situations as an entrepreneur and independent consultant all day, everyday. I just don't get excited in high stress moments. I'm the guy in center of the storm when everyone is freaking out. It is certainly both part of my nature and learned, as I have worked on improving that over the years.
You can learn to not freak out, and even if it doesn't keep your hair dark and luxurious like mine, you will be better in lots of scenarios.
1. Buy as much nice stuff as you can – it's okay if you go into debt because it'll persuade you to work harder!
2. Since you're so busy, accept that you don't have time to exercise. You can get around to it in the future (once you're rich!)
3. Stay up as late as you can. After all, you can sleep when you're dead. Caffeine is your friend.
4. Be too lazy to make todo lists or mark anything on your calendar.
5. At least once per week, compare yourself to everyone else. It's the only way to judge how you're doing.
6. Do everything yourself. You don't need to hire that tax accountant. You don't need to ask for help.
7. Sell your time to [Company Name Here]. Yeah, they're hard to work for, but they might make you rich.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
Ah yes, the ever simple act of 'being' any adjective identity assignment. As someone who had large parts of his hair bleach over night via a superoxidative immune system reaction following extreme stress, lemme translate how you come across here:
"Employ free will sorcery to magically shrink your amygdalea, deshrink your hippocampus, transcend depression by magically snapping your finger in one grand act of permanent auto-hypnosis. Don't order food for yourself even if ordering food is often the only thing standing between you either eating something or proceeding to remain in low calorie intake induced parapsychosis which can always potentially lead you to some suicide attempt despite technically having the option of doing so and hence getting food into you to stave off the existential low level hormonal anxiety of not having eaten right for days simply due to lacking the mental spoons to cook food, just ignore the fact that the psychophenomenological experience of the exertion of physical exercise feels vastly different when attempted in an anhedonic, stressed out, anxious & depressed state. Also, ignore the fact that even when you've cut out caffeine of your life for months at a time, it never made a positive difference, as while on the one hand, the high caffeine doses you take represent one of the causes of your long waking periods, on the other hand, high doses of caffeine represent one of the few things which occasionally manage to peirce through the complete slump."
I'm down to my absolutely last money, I have no health insurance, every day I read in the newspapers how the government will cut back on social security next and cut future bonuses to companies who don't deserve them, and I feel stressed out as hell, dude. A good quarter of my head has already turned snow white, and I haven't even reached the first quarter of my 30s. If you'd try to shove this load of bullshit advice on me in real life, I probably couldn't even muster the energy to begin expressing just how much I despise this kind of 'advice'. You know what I'd find fucking destressing? People like you, who assert that they speak from 'personal experience', yet don't actually name a single example of said personal experience, would stop trying to play Internet mental health professional and went back to using their armchairs to read books, or even better, went out to socialize more, to build a better capacity for empathy.