Robert Sapolsky: If you're a normal mammal, stress is the three minutes of screaming terror on the Savanna after which it's either over with or you're over with.
Narrator: 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. Most of the time, you can find him teaching and researching in the high-achieving, high-stressed world of brain science. But that's only part of his story. For a few weeks every year or so, Sapolsky ships his lab to a place more than nine thousand miles away on the plains of the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, east Africa.
Robert Sapolsky: 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've got nine hours of free time every day to devot to making somebody else just miserable. They're not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time; they're being stressed by each other. They're being stressed by social and psychological tumult invented by their own species. They're a perfect model for Westernized stress-related disease. Because what stress is about is somebody is very intent on eating you or you are very intent on eating somebody, and there's immediate crisis going on.
Narrator: When you run for your life, basics are all that matter. Lungs work over time to pump mammoth quantities of oxygen into the bloodstream. The heart races to pump that oxygen throughout the body, so muscles respond instantly.
Robert Sapolsky: 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 of that sort of thing. Do it later if there is a later.
Narrator: When the zebra escapes its stress response shuts down, but human beings can't seem to find their off switch.
Robert Sapolsky: We turn on the exact same stress response for purely psychological states. Thinking about the ozone layer, the taxes coming up, mortality, thirty-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. After a while the stress response is more damaging than the stresser itself because the stress is some psychological nonsense 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. I'm studying stress for thirteen years now and I even tell people how they should live differently, so presumably I should've incorporated all of this. And the reality is I'm unbelievably stressed and type A and poorly coping, and why else would I study this stuff eighty hours a week? No doubt everything I advise is going to lose all of its credibility if I keel over dead from a heart attack in my early fifties. Nah, I'm not good at dealing with stress. One thing that works to my advantange is I love my work and I love every aspect of it, so that's good. Nonetheless, this is pretty clearly a different place than the Savanna in east Africa. You can do science here -- that's very different and more interesting in some ways. You can have hot showers on a regular basis. It's a more interesting and varied world in a lot of ways, but there's a lot out there that you sure have missed.
