My hair started graying pretty much as soon as I graduated from college. It makes a lot of sense now. Around the same time, I:
- bought a house (in 2007, yeesh)
- got married
- started my first job (which at the time felt like drinking out of a fire hose)
Shortly after, my wife and I went through the stress of trying and failing to get pregnant. Then infertility treatments for several months. Then my wife had surgery. Infertility treatments no longer an option, we turned to adoption. 6 weeks later (seriously), we brought home our first child.
After that, it was like kids fell into our laps every couple of years. After the second child, I struggled with a pretty severe addiction that nearly claimed my marriage. Since then we've adopted two more. We now have kids aged 12, 9, 6 and 4.
Has it been all stress all the time? Not at all. I feel incredibly blessed to be living this life. But the hair (mostly on the sides) hasn't gone back to its normal color either, so I guess either it's genetic or there's an undercurrent of stress I've just become accustomed to.
That is incredibly brave of you to share that and overcome all that. I had a similar time of buying our first house, starting a new job, having a baby and then losing a parent all within a space of 3-4 months just before the pandemic lockdown started. I lost a lot of my hair instead and now have a bald spot. Also lot of junk food and alcohol. Somehow I would have liked to keep my hair even if it turned gray :)
I had a really rough 2019 & 2020 - not including the pandemic. Multiple health issues in myself and my family + financial issues + the pandemic.
I am 45. Comparing pictures my hair at 43 vs 45 is unbelievable. Almost no white hairs in 2018. Today, half my hair is white.
I had so much stress that I had to create a sleeping video playlist on Plex to drown out the nightmares and get a full night sleep.
Now most of my problems are resolved - I'd really like my black hair back. I'm skeptical that it'll return to normal naturally. Do men color their hair with products? I look ridiculous - 15 years older than I really am.
I have been dying my hair since starting to go gray in my late teens. I like the Just For Men products.. go a bit lighter and leave it on longer to get more of the gray. It works ok -- lasts about a month. My wife prefers the dyed hair with a touch of gray and not all gray.
Thanks for the kind words. The most important thing I've learned is to just take the next step. If I can figure out whatever that next step should be, then I can focus on just that and the rest doesn't stress me so much.
> Infertility treatments no longer an option, we turned to adoption. 6 weeks later (seriously), we brought home our first child.
Holy SHIT. I thought 9 months was a little short to get used to the idea of having a kid and becoming a parent, I would have had a damn BREAKDOWN if I only had 6 weeks!
Your description isn't all that different than how it actually played out, unfortunately. I usually tell new parents that the first one is by far the hardest if you value your own freedom in any way. And then of course, if you fail to come to terms with that (as I did) then the second child can definitely push you over the edge.
It wasn't until I was pretty much threatened with losing everything that I decided to change--I wish it hadn't happened that way, but I'm glad I made the choice I did.
It’s talked about in small circles, but not broadly. Anecdotally, my wife and one of her friends are the only people I know who quickly conceived and had a child without issue over 30.
My very close friend and his wife gave up after years of treatments. My sister and her husband are coming up on years of unsuccessful treatments. Several of my wife’s close friends either required treatments, have lost one or more pregnancies, and/or have yet to succeed with treatments.
It’s more than enough to make you feel like there is something serious going on. There was an article recently about aggressive drops in male fertility, which might shed light.
In my mind, the other big piece is readiness / pressure. I don’t think it’s everything, but I do think there must be a huge mental component to conception. The people who are more financially stable and on the same page seem to have the easiest time.
>The people who are more financially stable and on the same page seem to have the easiest time.
In my experience it's been the opposite. The people I know who are financially secure seem to struggle more to have kids. They'll go to doctors and fertility clinics and such.
On the other hand, the people I know who are not very financially secure at all have had no problems having children. Much of the time they aren't even trying, it just happens.
It seems almost like the people who feel the most pressured about having kids, the ones who are trying and stressed out about it are the ones who struggle at it.
==The people who are more financially stable and on the same page seem to have the easiest time. ==
How does this square with people getting unsuccessful treatments? Wouldn't you have to be pretty financially stable and "on the same page" to afford fertility treatments?
Fair point. I should’ve said relatively financially stable (which often translates to feeling poor with a certain crowd - often a point of disagreement between husband and wife) versus abundantly rich.
Funny enough, thinking more, the abundantly rich couples who easily had kids spend the least time together, as the husbands work jobs that dominate their lives.
> It’s more than enough to make you feel like there is something serious going on.
A lot of people are putting off having children until much later in their lives, in part due to how expensive raising a child is now. For a majority of people, fertility isn't exactly constant from puberty to old age/menopause.
One more 2nd/3rd order societal problem that the "invisible hand of the market" cannot possibly fix, those who'd want/need to buy that option cannot afford it at that point in their lives.
For us this was true until we'd experienced it and started talking about it publicly. It turns out we have a lot of friends and acquaintances who were willing to open up with us once they knew they weren't alone. Like in many other struggles, having a common bond with others makes it easier to bear.
Check out the book Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the root of most chronic disease(0). TL;DR: Insulin resistance. There’s some great discussion about men’s and women’s fertility in there.
We adopted domestically via a local agency. Our first 3 were adopted at birth, and our youngest was in and out of foster care for 5 months before his mother decided to make an adoption plan. This route is more costly than going through foster care (which can be more or less free), but much less than what some of our friends ended up paying to adopt internationally.
I would personally advise anyone adopting in the US to investigate what kind of special needs support (whether it be through Title IV-E or other programs) is available. MANY of these children have latent (if not immediate) mental health issues stemming from substance abuse (especially alcohol) that isn't always apparent at birth.
Our 12 year old struggles immensely with any kind of abstract way of thinking (including most mathematics), and our 9 year old only learned to read last year really. Neither are classified as special needs, but they really should be. The psychiatric and therapeutic care they require can be expensive, even just for reaching a diagnosis.
By the time we adopted our younger two we became a bit wiser and had them evaluated at birth. They're both classified as special needs under Title IV-E, which grants them free medical care (including things like speech/cognitive/occupational therapy and corrective surgeries, all of which we've used multiple times).
What I experienced with the people I know, who adopted:
the most easy for you would be - if the child is as young as possible. Preferably shortly after being born.
There are of course many older children waiting for a real home - but in general they all bring their mental baggage with - so this can be really, really challenging.
There's a special place in my heart for people who choose to adopt older kids. It's not so much mental baggage as it is damage resulting from years of abuse and/or neglect along different axes of the child's life. There's real loss and trauma involved, and there's no way to erase it. The best you can do is help them cope and not take it personally when they lash out at you for what was done to them.
These same traumas exist in some degree even with our children adopted as infants. They each have undergone a sense of loss (to varying degrees, for sure) and have spent time questioning the events that led their birth parents to put them up for adoption.
There's also a lot of loss after the fact because the typically birth mother does not live a very stable life. Our 4 children only have 1 surviving birth mother between them at this point (we think). One has had to deal with the loss of a birth sibling. These kids have a front-row seat to the reality that life is full of pain. We put a lot of effort into teaching them that there is also an abundance of love available to them.
I agree very much. My parents worked as foster parents and I know some people working professional in the area.
(mental baggage was a euphemism)
There is so much going on, people from normal upbringing cannot imagine (and usually do not want to imagine).
Even the children who were not abused in one way or another, how can they develope a stable mind, when they have no stable surroundings?
Dragged around back and forth from instable "parents" to foster parents to various institutions and back. And out again. And then maybe adopted one day.
I would never blame the childs. (I find it also hard to blame their parents, as they usually had a childhood like this, or went down into drugs for one reason or another - always easy to judge from the outside - and they do get judged. Usually at a time when they simply needed help and not judgment - but they don't get help, but their children taken away)
So ... like I said, it can be very, very challenging to adopt a older child. I did not wanted to scare anyone away from it. If anyone feels like this is the right thing for them - do it!
Just don't expect it will be easy.
edit: note, that my experience may be a bit biased through the foster home situation, which is especially hard, because often the parents of the kids often wanted to have their kids back - so this pool is probably the hardest.
But personally I would just want to see the child and see how we feel about it, if there is a emotional connection with the child.
Older children can also be easier, by beeing already very independent. You also might end up being the hotel for a distant teenager. But that also happens with "normal" kids. You never know.
You bought a house at the same time as getting your first job!? That's a hell of a lot riding on that first job working out. Obviously you figured things out, but in retrospect was that a good or bad idea?
Bad idea, but only because of the market timing. My wife had been out of school 4 years already otherwise we probably would have rented for a bit first. The fertility treatments, surgery and adoptions were all more financially back-breaking than even buying a house in a bad market, though. We didn’t really have savings to speak of until 3 years ago (10 years later).
Maybe it was a coincidence but at my last job I was so insanely stressed and burnt out. My manager was terrible, treated me like an idiot, and my ideas were stifled day in and day out.
I woke up one day and seemingly overnight my beard had a grey patch - almost white, in fact. It fell out in the week after.
Almost a year and a half later, after leaving that job, I took the pandemic to really focus on my stress levels and be happier (I am). The grey patch is starting to fade away and some color is beginning to return. Certainly not the stark white that was there before, and definitely not grey either.
Idk if I believe it, maybe something else was happening. But it sure seemed stress related at the time.
EDIT: I'm < 30 and my family doesn't have a history of grey hair - quite the opposite. Forgot to mention this
> almost white, in fact. It fell out in the week after.
Had a co-worker whose partner died in her late 20s. He told me the grief / stress / depression caused the same thing (edit: not his beard, but the top of his head).
He even showed me photos himself having gone gray and having lost chunks of hair. It was stunning. And it all came back over the course of 10 years (he looked like a thick-maned William H Macy).
Had the first kid and got quite fast lot's of grey hairs. I was really stressed with having enough time to do my work properly and to handle the daycare deliveries/pickups. The kid got older and needed less of my constant attention, and greying stopped for several years.
Then had the second kid and entered again into this constant not having enough time for anything mode. In the last 2 years I've been getting tons of grey hair, again. This time while I am much older, I can cope with the stress and constant tiredness even worse.
I was 27, My mom died recently, I had a new job that was insanely stressful, I was a landlord at the time in a duplex and barely knew what I was doing (lived in for 1 year), learning how to live on my own stress, my long term girlfriend cheated on me, and this was (the one) to me at the time. Everything culminated into me being so ridiculously stressed out. I stopped doing cardio, I started powerlifting and gained a ton of muscle and fat. Started Binge drinking again on weekends. One day I woke up with A bald patch and a White patch on my beard.
It's been 1.5 years and I'm still recovering from the trauma. My white patch is mostly gone, still a few stragglers, and my bald patch filled in completely. I started to lose fat, eat healthier, calm down my drinking again, reduce my lifting, increase cardio. I had a bad month with work from home and stopped taking care of my health again, had a bunch of random greys come back in a few concentrated spots. Treated myself better and they started going away again... Some of the hairs were half white-half brown (Brown at the stem). I know you read the science that once it goes white you're done, but it's 100% not true for everyone.
Same here. I started getting gray hairs in the beginning of last year. Then the company switched to fully remote and I no longer have them.
I am still stressed from time to time, but nothing like I was when I had to commute, worry about how I look, whether I make it on time, what I am going to eat, where, will I get space at the cafe, will I get the seat at hot desking space, how do I up my small talk game, oh no another awkward silence in the lift, then trying to focus on code while hearing sudden laughs piercing my ears as the lads from marketing are discussing how their evening went and who they "scored". It's was a nightmare.
At home, I can even put noise cancelling headphones, for that extra pure silent bliss.
That does not surprise. I have worked on security for human rights activities and journalists most of my life and went grey at 30. I look so old. I used to do a training thing were people profiled me and they would guess that I was 38-40 when I was 31
The videographer who shot my online course had patch of white hair. I asked him what it is, he said it turned up in the 2 unbelievable stressful weeks after he started his company.
I had few grey hair during my college days, after I joined as programmer, I have a patch of grey on my right frontal lobe. But I was not thinking stress is the cause, instead I believed in my own lie that all vitamins is getting sucked by the brain, and the thinking part of the brain is in the front. :D lol.
I used to think that thinking power is super cool, and I'm realising very recently that it is a sign of stress.
breakup grief gave me gray hairs everywhere head to toe (not 100% but any kind of location was affected)
I don't know what to make about it, if that's only some epigenetic fuckup on hair cells .. no biggie it's just visual but if it's a sign of similar disorder on all cells then that's bad.
I’m 29, no gray hair before. I just got out of a 6 year very serious relationship about two months ago, I started noticing grey on my head that was not there before about two weeks/month ago.
I agree with this comment. Sleep is ridiculously underestimated in our society due to the fact that it's perceived as a waste of time, while you could do something else more "productive" or "fun" - binge watching, learning, studying, working on that thing that you really wanted to finish, etc. etc. It's absolutely not the case. The first thing to go is the memory. Then step by step things add up. It's not fun.
Sleep doesn't come naturally to everyone. I can lay in bed all night long, but the brain likes to wake me up at 5 am and suddenly remind me of all my problems, Todo lists and stuff I should or shouldn't have said.
When I first discovered talk around "mindfullness" I at first cynically dismissed it as new age pap - but many of hte techniques for calming and focus do work. They don't work overnight - it takes practice and effort, but I have found it worth it.
Meditation/introspection in general is a good thing and something we don't value, especially in the days of constant notification bombardment from all our devices. That's why I'm really enjoying the new focus features Apple is building into all of their platforms with the recent betas. It's pretty presumptuous to assume everyone should be at our beck and call (and vice versa). Time to return to more asynchronous communication and reset expectations as a society!
Naps! Seriously, if you're lying in bed and can't sleep .... you're not sleepy. Get up, do something. (Listen to your body)
Hell, I can go a few days on 2 hours sleep, then sleep like, 8 hours or 12 hours. Or I'll sleep 5 hours (from 5pm to 10pm) then sleep maybe from 4am to 7am ...
There's plenty of chores to do, or a bit of DIY or watching tv...
Get a diary. Write the stuff in there. Next time you wake up, tell your brain, thank you for reminding me, but we already wrote this down - look. And read it aloud. Eventually your brain will get it and stop waking you up (you should read The Chimp Paradox -- about how your brain works)
I got an advice from a renowned psychiatrist to avoid naps at all cost. He was the fan of sleep fuel theory, where if you nap during the day, you'll lose sleep fuel and won't be able to have fully restorative sleep at night.
It is important to pick a time in the morning and always wake up at that time no matter what. After a few weeks you'll get your sleep pattern right and won't need any naps etc.
You can try doing things, but in the end your stressor will still be there and until you reduce your dependency and the importance of your stressor, you won't solve anything.
I mean, for me, cardio makes the biggest difference on my stress levels. Lifting alone made me more stressed out and in pain. I made a mistake listening to the powerlifter/bodybuilder crowd. The amount of stress it creates on your body is insane, not in a good way.
Work overloaded me and caused so much stress that I had stress-induced alopecia. My beard fell out in patches, and I had random patches of hair fall out on the back of my head, almost like perfect circles. Besides that, I couldn't really enjoy myself anymore, and I would often spend my non-work time vegetating.
Then there's the teeth grinding and all the damage that comes with that.
The hair came back, but the damage done to my teeth is not reversible.
These are just the physical damages, the damages to mental health are either still on the mend or scarred.
I’m sorry you went through that. Someone on this site recommended a book years ago - Learned Optimism. They said it would change your life.
I read the book and did the work (similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and can honestly say it changed my life. I went from catastrophizing just about everything to not worrying pretty much at all.
I can’t imagine going back to the stress levels I used to have.
Had severe jaw pain from grinding in my sleep and clenching last year. Largely because of the last administration, but also starting a stressful new job situation and general 2020 pandemic stress.
Apparently my dentist was seeing a ton of this.
Got a night guard and felt immediately better with some of it. On stressful days I still find myself clenching or biting my tongue but it's a lot less.
Your teeth can remineralize given the right conditions and some time. Obviously the aesthetic won't change much, but if you clean your teeth thoroughly 30 mins after a meal, reduce sugar intake, chew sugar free gum for saliva and helping with ph levels etc. it should help.
>> Reducing stress in your life is a good goal, but it won't necessarily turn your hair to a normal color.
>> "Based on our mathematical modeling, we think hair needs to reach a threshold before it turns gray," Picard says. "In middle age, when the hair is near that threshold because of biological age and other factors, stress will push it over the threshold and it transitions to gray.
>> "But we don't think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who's been gray for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the gray threshold."
The part I’d be interested in is knowing the age when it could begin. I’ve had crippling amounts of stress when I was younger. I’ve even experienced quite a bit of stress in the last couple years. I haven’t noticed a bunch of new gray hairs at either time.
I’m wondering if there will ever be any easy to tell differences that will indicate if someone can have gray hair through stress or are immune to this condition. Being put in a stressful condition doesn’t seem sufficient to tell because some people seem to not be affected by this or maybe the stress level isn’t sufficient. How’d to gauge what is stressful enough for one and not for another?
I just quit my startup job a couple months ago and like magic I can barely see my gray hairs anymore. Whereas when I worked there it seemed like every month the gray got worse. I'm 36.
We may not have risk of falling off a roof or getting shot so I don't want to overstate anything but the stress some of us have from our careers is definitely not helping our health. Combine that with generally sitting in our chair all day and it gets worse.
My new job is also a startup but I'm a founder this time and have more latitude to take a mental health break or block out time mid-day to do a workout. Everyone is different but I think quantifiably... based on my gray hair (to come back full circle to the article)... the lack of a steady paycheck is much LESS stressful than the job at a more established company where I got paid well but was pretty much on call 24x7.
My beard got a nice gray patch during 2018.. near the end of that year I ate 5g psilocybin and over the next 3 months all my gray bread hairs disappeared, and still until today I haven't had a single gray hair in my beard again. Can anyone explain that? Early thirties, no health issues, overall normal body.
It's more likely the five grams were dried psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which typically contain less than 1% of psychoactive compounds, so your experience would have involved more like 50mg of psilocybin/psilocin/baeocystin/others. Not trying to diminish the experience in any way -- five grams of magic mushrooms are very likely to lead to an amazing trip.
If this assumption is wrong and you in fact did take 5000mg of pure psilocybin, I'd appreciate hearing more detail on that experience.
Mental lightness. Not sweating certain stuff in the same way. Less unproductive dwelling. All things I experienced after a trip that would account for that.
Maybe no grey hair is how it is supposed to be and the grey patch of hair was caused by a health issue or stress? I mean, you are only in your early thirties, most people have no grey hair at that age.
I had a grey patch at 27, it went away. But it's not true that most people don't have grey hair at that age, most people actually do, just not enough to be super noticeable.
Indeed. One of my friends had quite a few patches of gray hair (he was only about 28 at the time), but found that the patches turned their natural color again in a few years after moving to a smaller company and becoming more health-conscious, diet-wise.
> “There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.
Strange because I started turning grey in high school, my hair was "dishwater blond". My grandmother on my father's side said she too started turning grey in school and died her hair most of her life to cover it.
Fast forward a bit, my daughter started getting grey hair around 18 years old. We had assumed when she was young it wouldn't happen because she had jet black hair, and that color most likely came from mom's family line.
It's interesting that stress can also contribute, now I wonder how much of my grey is stress induced vs genetics! These days I'm almost 98% grey with limited hair loss, my father is 70% grey with substantial hair loss, and my mom is 100% grey with a full head of hair.
I thought this was well-known. I went to MIT for undergrad in the late 1990s, and have 3 friends who got white patches in their hair in their late teens/early 20s that went away within a few months of graduation.
Yeah. It can happen to kids as young as high school age. I have seen so many Chinese students preparing for their college entrance exams had their hairs turned grey. I'm actually surprised it's reversible, because none of them I knew ever recovered from the grey hair years later.
I see this in my own beard hairs. I'll have a dark hair with a grey root, but then I'll also have a grey hair with a dark root. I didn't do any research into it, but I always felt like I saw more of the latter when I'd been getting lots of sleep.
Other hairy questions I've been curious about: What's the deal with that one long dark hair on my shoulder, and why is there one in about the same place on each shoulder? Why does it feel so good to pluck out some hairs, but other ones give a lot of resistance and hurt? Why do some hairs grow in pairs? Is body hair effective at baffling mosquitos?
Hmm this might explain why I pluck the odd grey hair, only to find that it is only grey at the oldest end, and the newer hair is back to normal colour.
So the hair stopped being grey halfway through growing... Less stress?
This happened in my (31yo) beard, which allowed me to watch it shift grey and back in a short time, and it absolutely coincided with ~3 months of work where I was killing myself, and went away when I took 2 steps back and resumed riding my bike outside a few times a week.
For me, it was accepting that my job isn’t my whole identity and finding a place to work that valued work/life balance and actually has a culture of not overworking. On the personal side, going to therapy, actively removing stressful and toxic people from my life, doing as much physical activity as possible (even walking helps me), and having a bottle of benzodiazepines on hand for worst case situations.
Was badly stressed preparing for the entrance exam for engineering schools. It was to the point I had heart palpitations for hours.
Two things made it disappear:
- Sport, even just running an hour a week stopped the palpitations
- Magnesium supplements
It's bearable for me because it won't last more than two years. Over the long-term, I would suggest trying to fix the problem from the inside (therapy? meditation? switching jobs?).
The basics do wonders. Healthy diet, meditation, regular exercise, plentiful sleep.
Other than that it’s specific to your situation and what you can change. For me my job was the source of most of it so I switched to a chill but better paid position and now my life is in much more of a balanced state. One stressor tends to spill and cause tension with every other part of my life.
For me having kids was the wake up call that I need to make a change or crumble under the pressure. Easy choice in the end.
I sleep listening to old TV shows with earbuds. It completely cured my sleeplessness.
I was having stress related nightmares and inability to sleep, and now I sleep 8hrs reliably.
I have a Plex playlist that I play on shuffle for 8hours. There's about 30 days of content so it keeps my dreams fresh. They are all old episodes of TV shows I loved when younger. I listen only - never watch.
It works because you hear a familiar and comforting voice as you sleep. Sometimes you dream about the show - which can be funny.
For daytime stress, I use the technique I learned in the marines. Deep slow breathing. Four deep slow breaths tricks your monkey brain into thinking everything is ok.
A lot of people will say exercise and nature, which is definitely a good prescription. If you've got a great job, then it's best to do those as a hobby, but if you don't have a great job and you don't have a tonne of responsibilities I'd recommend working in the bush or otherwise outdoors for a few months for low pay.
Having your actual job be outdoorsy can do wonders for mental health because you're pushed by work forces to do things that are good for you.
Obviously, if you're on HN, you probably won't be looking to do that kind of work long term because it won't be sufficiently mentally challenging or impactful, but it can be wonderful as a stress and mindset reset.
Long term without medication? Only adopting a chill life philosophy would work. And it does work for eliminating long term stress, but not short term (a few days) in my experience.
Good workout, often. Good diet (probably generally less eating, less carbs, light meal in the evening). Enough drinking, pure water is fine. That's a good start in any case
turning to philosophy has helped me immensely in managing stress. also, realizing you cannot satisfy everyone all the time, and sometimes trying to change certain conditions which you have no control over is futile.
The health effects of stress are pretty insane, I actually had to stop hacker ranking the other day because I noticed my blood pressure would shoot up by about 10 points.
You can practice until the nerves are gone. I've been doing Leetcode weekly competitions, after a while it's just another timed coding challenge.
I've noticed training cardio helps me handle anxiety better, both because I can better handle the physical effects when they arise, and the training itself removes anxiety I'm feeling at that moment.
It's not just that, it's the fact that you're preparing for a job interview which is already a stressful endeavor. When you add oh my God I need to learn all these new things, I need to solve these algro problems faster, it's just too much.
This is exactly why I opposed any sort of leaderboard idea at my previous job. Work can be stressful enough. Let's not make it any more than it needs to be.
> Despite the lack of any recognized syndromes of PABA deficiency in humans, except for those who lack the colonic bacteria that generate PABA, many claims of benefit are made by commercial suppliers of PABA as a nutritional supplement. The benefit is claimed for (...) and premature grey hair.
Wondering how is this related to vitiligo [a condition in which the pigment is lost from areas of the skin, causing whitish patches, often with no clear cause.]
I had a gorgeous curly black hair… that turned gray in a couple of years when my startup derailed.
I tried to hide the problems to my family, friends and relatives… but the color of my hair was a very strong signal.
A couples of years later I started to suffer of some medical conditions related to the long periods of stressing events in the startup.
Stress can destroy your health. Take it seriously.
So it turns out that generations of parents blaming their children for all their grey hairs were actually right? Someone out there is having a vindicating "I told you so" moment.
In my late thirties I noticed flecks of grey in my hair when I was getting haircuts. It was like that for a few years then went away again and has yet to return (clocked in at fifty last year).
I don't recall life being especially stressful at that time. I went through an unbelievable amount of stress in the middle five years of my forties which didn't cause a recurrence.
I do have these thick grey hairs in my beard though, that stand out among the thinner, wiry brown ones. Not sure what that is about.
I first noticed them (and assumed they were from stress) the summer after high school -- back then, it was a single, stark-white hair that popped up. I was certainly stressed in undergrad and then grad school, but I didn't feel horribly so while going through it, though I do have more than one now. :)
I understand the vanity aspect of dying them away, but that never resonated with me -- it seems like one of the few dignified parts of aging.
A japanese guy once told me that he worked in a lab and accidentially caused an explosion, not really injuring him but giving him quite a shock. He claimed that when he woke up the next day much of his hair / beard had turned grey. Although he appeared to be an honest guy, I never believed the story.
Is there any way that this could actually have happened the way he told it?
Yes, it can happen due to alpoecia areata which can be stress related. I had a beard hair turn white almost overnight. I am normally clean shaven but a large section of my facial hair fell out at once and almost immediately grow back white. I think it took a few days but seemed to happen overnight. Also alopecia can tend to attack just coloured hair, so if you're salt and pepper and lose all the coloured you can appear to go white overnight.
I'd love to know more about how they were able to sample individual hairs over a period of time even with things like the subject going on holiday between samplings. Do they mark the individual hairs somehow?
I have long dark hair. I can notice this myself. Some of my hairs are dark at the tip, then turn white, then turn dark again nearing the root. That surprised me the first time !
And yes I can count them : easy to spot the white loners in the dark crowd. (You don't need to mark them : they are their own timeline history, if you do not cut them)
Empirically I more or less came to the same conclusions than this study 5 years ago.
Do never, ever let a job or manager affect your stress levels. If you can, seek greener pastures, but more importantly, do not let it affect you. Same for relationship issues.
The hair is only one of the affected areas. God knows how bad this is some internal body parts if it leads to binge eating or coping solutions like drinking etc. Not to mention the mind.
Can you elaborate on how to not let a job affect you in this way?
Do you think stress is equally caused by external factors (boss, job) or internal factors (personality, etc.)? I would be afraid of quitting a great job over stress only to find out the problem was inside me the entire time.
Leave your LinkedIn as "looking for work", a email every day or two from someone who wants to hire you reminds you that you have other options and even if all this went sideways you'd land on your feet.
In this market if your company burnt to the ground you'd likely end up with a short vacation and a raise.
That of course happens but that isn't happening today, no reason to run yourself ragged in the current climate. Another stress tip I have is to live well within your means. I just refinanced my mortgage and I'm down to about $900 a month, taxes and insurance included. The local Walmart is offering $17.75 an hour so I'm in a position that so long as I have a job, any job, that's paying the local prevailing wage I can support my family.
Chronic stress might be bad. A little stress from time to time in life is not that strange. Aspiring to a stress free existence seems unwise unless you’re some particular kind of royalty.
funny I'm more stressed these days than in my late teen/early 20s but I've actually lost grey hair in the past 10 years. I was in a more polluted city and did not exercise
Well that explains why I get random white hair on some occasions and seems to go away I was thinking I was getting really old but I am already old and was expecting my hair to turn white.
About two years ago I woke up to find 40% of my facial hair gone. It was due to alopecia areata, and I was going through a very stressful period. It mostly grew back but completely white (Funnily I'm left with a narrow black section in the moustache area, so if I don't shave I look like Hitler).
Anyway in the last month or so some coloured hair has started to come back, hopefully it continues.
- bought a house (in 2007, yeesh)
- got married
- started my first job (which at the time felt like drinking out of a fire hose)
Shortly after, my wife and I went through the stress of trying and failing to get pregnant. Then infertility treatments for several months. Then my wife had surgery. Infertility treatments no longer an option, we turned to adoption. 6 weeks later (seriously), we brought home our first child.
After that, it was like kids fell into our laps every couple of years. After the second child, I struggled with a pretty severe addiction that nearly claimed my marriage. Since then we've adopted two more. We now have kids aged 12, 9, 6 and 4.
Has it been all stress all the time? Not at all. I feel incredibly blessed to be living this life. But the hair (mostly on the sides) hasn't gone back to its normal color either, so I guess either it's genetic or there's an undercurrent of stress I've just become accustomed to.
Edit: formatting