Stress does turn hair gray, and it’s reversible
cuimc.columbia.edu
cuimc.columbia.edu
- 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
I personally rather adopt than have my own kids so I'm just curious.
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.
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.
(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.
Probably more than you want haha.
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).
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.
It is one of those topics that have been deemed too taboo to talk about which is infortunate.
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.
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?
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.
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.
At least in my observations anyway.
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.
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!
Kudos to you my guy. Absolute unit.
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.
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
I used to think that thinking power is super cool, and I'm realising very recently that it is a sign of stress.
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.
So I am a firm believer of the theory.
My classmate, who was maybe a few years younger, was a lead/owner for his MSP.
Completely gray hair and beard.
He just looked so stressed, like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
In either case, I can imagine the stress of your work, when lifes directly depend on you to not screw up.
edit: just saw the info in your profile
Do you mind sharing any particular advice on how to do this?
Seriously, listen to your mind and your body. If it needs sleep, give it some. It it requires painting or dancing, do 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!
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)
Once I forced myself to be okay with "I'm taking an hour off right now", I started to re-learn how to relax.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>> 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."
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?
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.
If this assumption is wrong and you in fact did take 5000mg of pure psilocybin, I'd appreciate hearing more detail on that experience.
The experience was super intense and will probably never do it again. I don't recommend anyone take 5 grams for their first time at all.
> “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.
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.
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?
So the hair stopped being grey halfway through growing... Less stress?
I know I am stressed and I see the evidence - restless sleep, elevated WBC, worsening anxiety.
I, unfortunately, haven't found a good routine way to manage stress.
Separate your life and your work if work stresses you out. There should be a clear line where you are at home and decompress.
Read a bit into mindfulness. You don't have to do all the exercises. But it's important to become aware of your stress factors.
Oh, and the usual exercise and eating healthier. A good workout really relaxes you mentally.
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?).
And maybe exercise, as others said.
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 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.
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.
No faang offer is worth dropping dead
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.
From Wikipedia:
> 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.
Since PABA is produced in the digestive system, it's possible that stress impacts eating/digestion in some negative way?
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.
"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."
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.
My wife tried intermittent fasting after reading some health claims about it. (i.e. autophagy). In the beginning I was skeptical.
After a month or so of intermittent fasts, her hairdresser noticed an obvious line of salt and pepper hair that was growing in brown at the roots.
I now believe the health claims of fasting have merit, and I hope future research can quantify the degree of benefits.
Avoidance of all stress isn't practical, so give your body the nutrients it needs to cope.
Is there any way that this could actually have happened the way he told it?
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.
but then, the pandemic hit + more work related stress and now my beard has a ton of grey hair. also, finding more and more grey hair in my head daily.
i always thought it was just... you know, getting older but it literally started appearing all of sudden.
it's nice to know it's not "just" an age thing.
Also stressing for the right reasons is good (like going out of your comfort zone).
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.
In this market if your company burnt to the ground you'd likely end up with a short vacation and a raise.
One day the calls just stopped. They didn’t start again for 3 years.
The whole dot com crash was quite humbling.
Anyway in the last month or so some coloured hair has started to come back, hopefully it continues.