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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not completely sold on the relationship of stress and heart disease. I spend some time working in politics, and almost all principals worked 18h-days with less than 5h of sleep during the week. Yet life expectancy is higher than average.

There are obviously ots of competing factors at work: they have plenty of opportunities to eat healthy, and the discipline that makes them get up at 5am also makes them go for a run at 5:30. Then again two of my bosses had to retire after run-ins with the crystal meth law they themselves passed...

Considering the limits of willpower, I'd rank it Smoking/Exercise/Food/Sleep/Stress.

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higher than average for people with similar wealth, education and medical history, or higher than average nationwide, including people in poverty with poor health care and nutrition?

> bosses had to retire after run-ins with the crystal meth law they themselves passed...

Wait, what?

Sounds like his bosses were politicians who helped get stricter drug laws passed, then were caught using those drugs.

(Presumably to sustain the will power to work 18h days on 5h of sleep)

That is interesting. I wonder if there have been studies on occupation and heart disease. One contributing factor to the incidence of heart attacks in the tech field could be our propensity to sit still for many hours in a row to retain focus.

Maybe not for heart disease, but stress should be number one for health overall because it affects all the other things you mentioned: sleep, appetite, exercise, and smoking.

With the principals being able to work 18h days, I think their discipline plays a huge part, as you wrote, and maybe they're outliers who naturally cope with these demands better than the average person. I personally can't sustain 12h days for more than a month.

This is what is called a non-representative sample. To say the least...

Sheesh.

They're called "elected representatives" for a reason :)... I had actually seen a study showing the advantage in life expectancy for high-powered executives/lawyers/politicians. Only the tendency to work long hours was from my sample.

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