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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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).

I hope he’s doing better now.

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.

So I am a firm believer of the theory.

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.

Many years ago I was attending SonicWALL training, having worked for an MSP.

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.

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

Physical or IT security?

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

Haha, yes. It has certainly been challenging but for the most part totally worth it.

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.

Quieting the mind is really cool, but not easy. ;)

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.

> 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).

Do you mind sharing any particular advice on how to do this?

Naps!

Seriously, listen to your mind and your body. If it needs sleep, give it some. It it requires painting or dancing, do it!

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.

Learning how to not work. I realized that sitting down on the couch caused me anxiety as if I wasn't getting shit done.

Once I forced myself to be okay with "I'm taking an hour off right now", I started to re-learn how to relax.

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