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All of us have a personal Relationship with stress, but
few of us know how it operates within us,
or understand how the onslaught of the modern world can stress us to the point of death.
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Fewer still know what we can do about it.
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But over the last three decades, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky
has been advancing our understanding of stress--how it impacts our bodies, and
how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible. >> Is the aggregate
bad news and more... >> Most of the time, you can find him teaching and
researching in the high-achieving, high-stressed world of brain science.
>> The paper is this huge contrast between... >> But
that's only part of his story. For a few weeks every year or
so, Sapolsky shifts his lab to a place more than 9,000 miles away on
the plains of the Masai Mara Reserve, in Kenya, East Africa.
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Robert Sapolsky first came to Africa over 30 years ago on a hunch.
He suspected he could find out more about human stress and
disease by looking at non-humans, and he knew just the non-humans.
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>> You live in a place like this, you're a baboon, and
you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories. And
if you only have to work three hours a day, you got nine hours of
free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable. [SCREECH
SOUNDS] They are not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time,
they're being stressed by each other. They are being stressed by social and
psychological tumult invented by their own species.
They are a perfect model for Westernized stress-related disease.
>> To determine just what toll stress was taking on their bodies, Sapolsky wanted to
look inside these wild baboons at the cellular level for the very first time.
To do this, he would have to take their blood in the most unassuming way.
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>> Basically, what you're trying to do is anesthetize a baboon, without him knowing
it's coming. Because you don't want to have any of this anticipatory stress, so
you can't just, you know, get in your jeep and chase the baboon up and down the field
for three hours, and, finally, when he's winded, dart him with an anesthetic.
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Now, the big advantages of a blowgun are that it's pretty much silent, and hasn't
a whole lot in a way of moving parts, but the big drawback is doesn't go very far.
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So what you spend just a bizarre amount of time doing is trying to figure out how to
look nonchalant around a baboon. [PUFF SOUND] Got him.
Time? Okay, he is wobbling now. Whoop, there he goes.
>> From each baboon blood sample, Robert measured levels of hormones central to
the stress response. >> Well, to make sense of what's happening in your body,
you've got these two hormones that are the workhorses, the whole stress response.
One of them, we all know, adrenaline--American version, epinephrine.
The other is a less known hormone called glucocorticoids, comes out of the adrenal
gland along with adrenaline. And these are the two backbones of the stress response.
[ZEBRA BARKS]. >> That stress response and
those two hormones are critical to our survival. [HOOF SOUNDS].
>> Because what stress is about is somebody is very intent on eating you, or
you are very intent on eating somebody, and there's an immediate crisis going on.
>> When you run for your life, basics are all that matter. Lungs work overtime to
pump mammoth quantities of oxygen into the bloodstream. The heart races to pump
that oxygen throughout the body so muscles respond instantly. [SPLASHING SOUNDS].
>> You need your blood pressure up to deliver that energy.
You need to turn off anything that's not essential--growth, reproduction, you know,
you're running for your life, this is no time to ovulate, tissue repair, all
that sort of thing--do it later, if there is a later. >> When the zebra escapes,
its stress response shuts down. But human beings can't seem
to find their off switch. >> We turn on the exact same stress response for
purely psychological states---thinking about the ozone layer, the taxes coming
up, mortality, 30-year mortgages--we turn on the same stress response.
And the key difference there is, we're not doing it for a real physiological reason,
and we're doing it nonstop. >> By not turning
off the stress response when reacting to life's traffic jams, we wallow in
a corrosive bath of hormones. Even though it's not life or death,
we hyperventilate, our hearts pound, muscles tense. >> Ironically,
after a while, the stress response is more damaging than the stressor itself,
because the stressor is some psychological nonsense that you're falling for.
No zebra on Earth, running for its life,
would understand why...fear of speaking in public would cause you to secrete
the same hormones that it's doing at that point to save its life.
>> Stress is the body's way of rising to a challenge, whether the challenge is
life-threatening, trivial, or fun. >> You get the right amount of stress,
and we call it stimulation. The goal in life isn't to get rid of stress--the goal
in life is to have the right type of stress, because when it's the right type,
we love it. [ROARING SOUND]
We jump out of our seats to experience it, we pay good money to get stressed that way.
It tends to be a moderate stressor, where you've got a stressor that's transient.
It's not for nothing roller coaster rides are not three weeks long. And most of all, what they're about
is, you relinquish a little bit of control in a setting that overall feels safe.