It’s interesting to hear about the participant in the Terman study who was director of Los Alamos for so many years. He had a stressful job but still lived to be 90 years old. People tend to think that stress will shorten one’s life and certainly the physiology has shown what long term stress can do to one’s physical body. We studied that and read about that in our textbook. One quote that I found interesting in this regard was on page 237 which read, “Converging evidence from a number of studies suggest that the damaging sort of workplace stress arises from conflicts with other people rather than from the challenges and demands of the work itself.” I have also read that the stress of feeling one has little control over their life/work also leads to unhealthy stress. It turns out that following the adages that you should “relax”, “avoid stress”, “don’t worry” and “don’t work too hard” is not going to lead to a long and healthy life. The men who worked hard and fought to overcome challenges, and achieved high status even in demanding positions lived long. It turns out that having the perfect “match” between one’s inclination and one’s career wasn’t the main influence.
Again, we see the role of conscientiousness, in this case in one’s career, being one of the important factors to longevity. Attitude clearly makes a difference as well. It is not surprising to hear that based on results, the people most successful in their career were the least likely to die young. The chapter even stated that there is almost a linear relationship – the most successful lived the longest, moderately successful slightly less, and least successful died the earliest. It didn’t matter what the level of education or what your job was but having a positive attitude and having goals and working hard toward achieving those goals led to satisfaction in the long term and better longevity.