Several years ago, I had a client who had done some really impressive work transforming her personal and professional life. And just when she began to feel the fog lifting, her mother's life got complicated.
Assisting an aging parent can be hard in any circumstance (especially when you're doing it long-distance), but her mother was hell-bent on making the experience miserable. She was stubborn, insulting, and had an uncanny ability to deny reality when it got uncomfortable.
Every conversation left my client feeling frustrated, unseen, and emotionally drained. But she had made a commitment to help her mother through the crisis, no matter what it took. So the question became—how do you protect your peace when someone you care about consistently makes your life harder?
Most people have someone like this in their lives. Things aren't bad enough to cut them off completely, but you can feel in your body that there's a cost to spending time with them.
That tension you feel? It’s not just in your head. Researchers have a name for these people: “hasslers.” And research suggests they may be doing more than affecting your mood—they may be affecting your biology.
While supportive relationships are linked to longer, healthier lives, difficult relationships can act as chronic stressors. That means your body doesn’t treat these interactions as isolated moments; it treats them as ongoing threats. Stress hormones stay elevated, your nervous system stays on alert, and recovery takes longer.
In one study, researchers looked at how quickly people were aging at a cellular level—what’s called biological aging, which doesn’t always match your actual age. For every additional “hassler” someone regularly interacted with, their rate of aging increased. Not dramatically in a single moment—but incrementally and consistently over time. And as we know, small effects repeated over and over again add up, both for the good and the bad.
Here’s what my client realized: She didn’t need to eliminate the relationship, but she did need to change how she participated in it. She began setting clear boundaries:
- Which comments she would no longer engage with
- How long she would stay in conversations
- How often she would interact with her mother
And just as importantly, she created a reset plan for after interactions with her mom. A walk outside, a call to a supportive friend, time to ground herself and settle her nervous system.
The goal wasn’t to avoid stress entirely, because as long as she continued to interact with her mother, that wasn't under her control. The goal was to keep the stress from accumulating.
Here's your Ultimate You challenge.
Who are the hasslers in your life? We're not going to judge them or try to change them; we're going to proactively create a plan to limit their impact on your health and longevity.
Choose one small shift you can make the next time you interact with a hassler that protects your mental, emotional, and physical health:
- Set a boundary around what topics or behaviors you will no longer engage with
- Decide in advance how long you’ll stay in a conversation or in their presence
- Plan an exit strategy for when you feel your body getting activated
- Intentionally schedule something that helps you reset your nervous system afterward
And remember, not all hasslers are created equal. The way you handle a parent may look very different from how you handle a coworker. What works in your home might not work in a meeting or a public setting.
Take a moment to think ahead. Do you need a specific plan for a specific person? A general strategy for certain environments? The more intentional you are before the interaction, the less reactive you’ll be during it.
You don’t need to control every relationship in your life, but you do need to take responsibility for how much access people get to your time, your energy, and your nervous system.
Your health isn’t just shaped by your habits; it’s shaped by your environment and your patterns as well. The people you spend time with are part of that pattern—whether you’ve chosen it consciously or not.
The good news is that with intention and planning, you have more control than you might think—and the power to change the impact these patterns have on you.
In health and happiness,
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