Matthew McConaughey opens up about aging paradox: 'How do you do it gracefully but how do you deny it?'

Matthew McConaughey isn't afraid of being older — and wiser.

The actor and author, 53, shared his life philosophies in a recent interview with Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast, during which he spoke candidly about aging and how he handles stress in his life.

"It seems to me this aging thing, right, it's like, how do you do it gracefully but how do you deny it?" McConaughey said "And there are awkward ways to deny it, we've all seen it."

The star isn't immune, either. He shared that he contemplated getting a hair transplant in the late ’90s.

"I had a silver-dollar bald on top and I went, 'Go gracefully, be all face,'" McConaughey said. "I remember going, wait a minute, I'm not ready to go quietly into the night on this. I considered hair plugs then I was like, nah, I don't wanna do that, none of those look that good. So I found this topical treatment ... I started working on it topically, and son-of-a-b****, I have a better hairline now than I did in ’99. So, I still use it daily. I'm not going to quit and see if it's all going to stick."

That's not to say he hasn't seen the effects of aging in other areas — especially when it comes to keeping up with his three kids: sons Levi, 14, and Livingston, 10, and daughter Vida, 13, which he shares with wife Camila Alves McConaughey.

"I blew both my knees out a couple years ago," he explained. "[Levi] was 12, good athlete, so obviously he's beating me in sports, right? And so, I get surgery, they're better, but I'm not back to where I was and he still kind of beating me at a lot. But I chose to go, I'm not ready to accept that fact yet."

That's when McConaughey went "hardcore" into post-surgery rehab, where he "really worked on my knees" to get them back in shape. "At least I'm back to competing," the dad of three said. "He's better in some [sports], but I'm still whooping him in some. I wasn't ready to concede."

McConaughey also makes sure he gets "nine-and-a-half hours of sleep a night," which he says helps balance his stress and anxiety levels.

Still, embracing his emotions is par for the course.

"Stress is a word that has such a bad name right now, and I think it's getting a bad name kind of unfairly," he said. "Having a little bit of stress means you give a s***."

"We're labeling everything stress," he says, pointing to a child psychologist he's researched who interviewed children about what stresses them the most. "They were like, 'Well, I don't have as good of grades as Joe, I don't have the shoes that Jane has, I don't look as good as so and so' and he says, 'that's not stress, that's envy.' As soon as he relabelled it envy for the child, the child was like, 'Oh, I can deal with that. I just didn't know how to deal with stress.'"

Changing his perspective on feelings like envy and jealousy, he says, is key to living a happier life. And that's something he tries to practice daily.

"I don't remember the last person I was jealous of. I am jealous of people with traits of what I'm chasing to get to, the man I'm trying to become," he says. "I'm jealous of people that don't seem to need accomplishment and achievement as much as I do to feel significant ... I'll have bouts of insignificance if I don't get what I want, or pull off what I want, or maybe don't feel I'm relevant in the right way. I get jealous of people that have the full belief in themselves, even in those times.

"They're playing the long game, man," he says of people with a positive mindset. "I get jealous of that, of people who can live that way. You don’t know if they've had the freaking worst day, you don't know if they've lost their ass financially, or you don't know if they've just had their best day in the biggest acquisition. That, I really respect."

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