The Kind of Stress That Doesn't Kill You, but Makes You Stronger

[MindMover]

More than a half century after Dr. Terman collected his data on work and occupational success, we looked into the long-term consequences on health and longevity. Would Paul's easygoing, free-flowing approach to his career as a bookstore manager be a benefit or a curse? Would John's dedication to physics lead to a stressful but long life like that of fellow physicist Norris Bradbury, or was Bradbury's very long life an anomaly -- an exception to the rule?

We gathered together our research assistants, filling our computer programs with a whole host of relevant information, including the personality indexes we had constructed and validated earlier. We recorded how much alcohol they drank, the participants' reports of their ambition, and even their parents' reports. Most importantly, we used the death certificates to see how long they lived.

The results were very clear: Those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. In fact, on average the most successful men lived five years longer than the least successful.

Especially convincing about this finding is that the men who were independently rated by Dr. Terman as most successful more than a half century ago were the ones least likely to die at any given age in the decades that followed. Some studies in this field of research might be inadvertently biased by the classifications or judgments used by the epidemiologists, but in this case, we did not have to do any job classifications or make any judgments -- we simply relied on those careful categorizations Terman and his associates had made decades ago.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-kind-of-stress-that-doesnt-kill-you-but-makes-you-stronger/255298/

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