Can This Be True?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’m not sure what my reaction is to this. It’s either: duh, I could’ve told you that very easily. 

Or: wow, see, I knew it!

See what you think.

I read an article in The Washington Post about “hasslers”. That’s how the article terms people who are hassling you. And the jist of it was basically, that there is medical research that shows the difficult people in your life might make you age faster.


That while positive relationships, this article says, make you happier and healthier, hasslers have the opposite effect. So it says this article. Because they increase chronic stress.

According to this article, negative relationships actually make your cells age more quickly.

Here’s a quote from the piece:  “Researchers found that for every additional hassler, participants regularly interacted, with their pace of aging increased by 1.5%. In other words instead of aging one biological year per calendar year, a person with at least one extra hassler would age around 1.015 years during the same time. It gets worse, the more hasslers you have.”


It also says (I’m shocked! shocked!) that women typically have more hasslers than men. Not even going to go there. And, that women tend to be disproportionately affected both positively and negatively.


See what I mean? I can’t decide whether this is obvious or groundbreaking.

Plus now I am even more annoyed with the one-time co-worker who I asked whether she’d like me to tell her what happened in a certain meeting.

Her reply was “I already know what happened in the meeting but I’m happy to hear your version of it if you’d like to tell me.”

Whoa.

Or another co-worker who was producing a story I was investigating, and I called her to say I was at the scene of the crime, but that there was no way to get ot he actual place without going on private property.

She told me, "Well, I’m looking at Google earth on my computer, and it looks to me like there’s a way in. Just go ahead, and then turn left.”

I said: "You are in your office looking at a computer, and I am in the real place! I’m right here. And there’s no way in. I can see  how it might once have been, but there’s no left turn anymore, it’s been changed.”

She said: "It shows it on the map."

And I said: "I am actually HERE."

And she said "Well, I guess you aren't really interested in this story."

So. AH. I am not going to do the math about this, but she lost me some time.

I’m trying to figure out how to ask you about this without having you throw your theoretical father-in-law or second cousin or boss under the bus. So I’ll just ask you this. Do you think this medical finding is shocking? Or obvious?

(And if you want to tell us the best hassly line you’ve ever heard from anyone, we’ll commiserate…)