Robert Sapolsky: The Psychology of Stress

back to a term I guarantee you had a ninth grade biology with any luck you have not thought about this word since then do you remember homeostasis Oh miss is having an ideal body temperature and ideal level of glucose in the bloodstream having an ideal everything being in homeostatic balance a stress or is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance you're some zebra and a lion is left out and ripped your stomach open and your inner jar dragging in the dust and you still need to get out of there this counts as being out of homeostatic balance or or you are that lion who's half starve to death and if you know manage to chase something down to eat you're not going to survive the night a short term physical crisis and the stress response is what you do with your body you secrete adrenaline and 11d other hormones I won't torture you with the stress response reestablishes homeostatic balance that's all you need to know about the subject if your zebra or a lion if you're human though you've got to expand the definition in a very critical way which is among us some of the time we turn on the stress response because we've had a challenge to homeostatic balance all of that sort of thing but some of the time we turn on the stress response because we think we're just about to be stressed and if it turns out that you're right hooray for you you know here comes the elephant you don't have to wait to be stomped by it before increasing your blood pressure you can have an anticipatory stress response which is great on the other hand if you think that way all the time and you're constantly assuming that there are stressors coming that do not really exist we have technical terms for you you're being neurotic as hell you're being anxious you're being paranoid you're being hostile you are being profoundly human sit down a Pipo and try to describe what the prime lending rate is and it's going to have no idea what you're talking about but we do and that's the central concept in the whole field we cognitively socially sophisticated primates turn on the exact same stress response as does that zebra running for its life or a lion running for a meal and we turn it on for purely psychological reasons we turn it on with memories with emotions with thoughts and the whole punchline is is that's not what it evolved for what stress is like for 99% of the beasts on this planet is 3 minutes of screaming terror in the Savannah after which it's either over with a year over with and what do we do we turn on the identical stress response for 30 year mortgages and that's where you begin to get the wear and tear on the system

Channel: Greater Good Science Center

Views: 208,283

Keywords: Psychology, stress, Robert M. Sapolsky, Science of a Meaningful Life, Greater Good Science Center

Id: bEcdGK4DQSg

Length: 3min 18sec (198 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2012