What am I thinking about?
Mortgage, debt, money pouring out...
And I felt a lump ...I know cancer when I feel it.
Where is she? What is she up to? Never calling, never saying a word...
Stress.
It is everyone's inferno,
bedevilling our minds, igniting our nights,
upending our equilibrium, but it hasn't
always been so.
Once, its purpose was to save us.
if you're a normal mammal, what stress
about
is three minutes of screaming terror
on the savannah, after which it's either
over with you or you are over with.
But everything changed.
What once helped us survive has now
become the scourge of our lives.
And I just burst into tears, and wept, and wept.
Today,
scientific discoveries, in the field
and in the lab,
prove that stress is not a state of mind,
but something measurable
and dangerous. This is not an abstract
concept. It's not something that
maybe someday you should do something about.
You need to attend to it
today. In some of the most unexpected
places,
scientists are revealing just how lethal
stress can be.
Chronic stress could do something as
unsubtle
and grotesque as kill some of your
brain cells.
The impact of stress can be found deep
within us, shrinking our brains,
adding fat to our bellies, even
unraveling our chromosomes.
This is real this is not just somebody
whining.
Stress... savior, tyrant, plague...
its portrait revealed.
This program was made possible by
contributions to your
PBS station from viewers like you. Thank
you.
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.
Fewer still know what we can do about
it.
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...
class... 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 plaines of the Masai Mara Reserve,
in Kenya, East Africa.
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.
You live in a place like this, you are 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
They're not being stressed by lions
chasing them all the time,
they are being stressed by each other. They're
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.
Basically, what you're trying to do is anaesthetize 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.
Now, the big advantages of a blow gun
are that it's pretty much silent, and
hasn't a whole lot of moving parts,
but the big drawback
is that it doesn't go very far. So what you
spend just
a bizarre amount of time doing, is
trying to figure out
how to look nonchalant around a baboon.
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 of the
whole stress response. One of them we all
know
adrenaline, American version, epinephrine,
the other is
a less known hormone called
glucocorticoids that comes out of the adrenal gland
along with adrenaline and these are
the two backbones of the stress response.
That stress response
and those two hormones are critical to
our survival.
Because what stress is about is that somebody
is very intent on eating
you, or you are very intent on eating
somebody, and there is 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. You need
your blood pressure up to deliver that
energy.
You need to turn off anything that is 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 real
physiological reason and we're doing it
non-stop.
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 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 is not to get rid of stress,
the goal in life is to have the right
type of stress,
because when it is the right type, we love it.
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 are about is that you
relinquish a little bit of control
in a setting that overall feels safe.
but in real life for so many of us
primates including Roberts baboons
control is not an option. Here you have a
big male
who loses a fight and chases a sub-adult
who bites on a female who slaps a
juvenile that knocks an infant
out of a tree, all in fifteen seconds
you know in so far as a huge component of
stress is
lack of control, lack of predictability
you're sitting there and just
watching the zebra
and somebody else is having a bad day and it is your rear-end that is going to get slashed
some tremendously psychologically stressful for
for the folks further down on the hierarchy. One of
Roberts
early revelations was identifying the
link between stress
and hierarchy in baboons. Some baboons troops are over 100 strong
like us they have evolved large brains
to navigate the complexities of large
societies
survival here requires a kind of
baboon political savvy with the most
cunning and aggressive males
gaining top rank and all the perks,
females for the choosing, all the food
they can eat
and an endless retenue of willing
groomers. Every male knows where he
stands in society
who can torture him whom he can torture
and who in turn the torturee can
torture
Well it sound like a terrible thing to confess
after thirty years but
I don't actually like baboons all that much and there
has been individual guys over the years
that I absolutely love
but they are these scheming, back-stabbing
machiavellian bastards that hurt each
other
so they're great for my science, I mean I'm
not out here to commune with them
they're perfect for what I study.
22 years ago
at the age of 30 Sapolsky's landmark
research
earned him the MacArthur Foundation's
Genius fellowship
his early work
measuring stress hormones from extracted
blood led to two remarkable discoveries
a baboon's rank determine the level of
stress hormone in his system
so if you're a dominant male you can
expect your stress hormones to be low
and if you are submissive
much higher, but there was an even
more revealing find
in Sapolsky's sample of low rankers
the have-nots had increased heart rates
and higher blood pressure. This was the
first time
anyone had linked stress to the
deteriorating health
of a primate in the wild. Basically
if you're a stressed, unhealthy
baboon in a typical troop
high blood pressure. elevated levels of
stress hormones, you have an immune
system that doesn't work as well
your reproductive system is more
vulnerable to being knocked out of whack
your brain chemistry is one that has
some similarity to what you see in
clinically depressed humans
and all that stuff those are not
predictors of a hale and hearty old age
could this also be true for that
other primate as Robert Sapolsky
was monitoring stress in baboons
professor Sir Michael Marmot
was leading a study in Great Britain they
tracked the health of more than
28,000 people over the course of forty
years
it was named for
Whitehall, citadel of the British civil
service where every job is ranked in a
precise hierarchy
the perfect laboratory to determine
whether in humans
there might be a link between rank and
stress
I mean that's the thing about stress I
think you've got to look at it in both
acute terms and chronic terms I think
I've been under chronic stress
in this organization simply because I'm
a square peg in a round hole
Kevin Brooks is a government lawyer, his
rank
level 7 means he has little seniority in
his department
he lives the life of a subordinate
I think what I was most aware of at the
time was the workload and how
I had most of it under control but one of my
cases wasn't
wholly under control I let it slip
and it was a bit like
being in a car hitting an
ice patch
and skating but nonetheless I came in
Monday morning and my immediate
manager
let's call him Ben, then wants a word
with you, so we find a room
he shuts the door, then he says you know what you have
done
you know what happened while you were away we
couldn't find one of your files
Do you know what that meant? He just gave me a
good kicking, psychologically he did me over
and at the end of it it was more threats. It was right
that's maybe a disciplinary matter
so I left the room crossed over the
corridor to my own room
and I just burst into tears and wept and
wept
Sarah Woodall also works for the
government
unlike Kevin she is a senior civil
servant
there about a hundred and sixty people
reporting to me ultimately
one way or another within the sector. I do
really enjoy working with our service
it's quite a dynamic
environment, it can be quite exciting
I like working with lots of people
I do really enjoy my job. Such
dramatically different reflections
dramatize one of the most astounding
scientific findings in the Whitehall
study
firstly it showed that
the lower you were in the hierarchy the
higher your risk of heart disease
and other diseases, so people second from
the top
had higher risk than those at the top
people third from the top
had a higher risk than those second from the top and
it ran
all the way from top to bottom. We are
dealing with people in stable jobs with
no industrial exposures
and yet your position in the hierarchy
intimately related to your risk of disease
and lenght of life. I've been very
lucky
I have never experienced any problems with
my health
since I've been in the senior service I haven't had a day off
with ill health, I've been very
fortunate
In my own situation I think that my career is pretty much
tainted, is pretty much
arrested because I have had, for instance, for the
last three years at work I've been off
sick
for probably half that time. This
particular study is sort of the Rosetta
Stone of a whole field because
it's the British civil service system,
everybody's got the same medical care
everybody's got the same universal
health care system
just like the baboons all the baboons eat
the same thing, they have the same level
of activity
it's not the stuff that oh if you're a
low-ranking baboon you smoke to much and
you drink too much and if you're a
low-ranking british civil service
guy you never go to the doctor and you
don't get preventive vaccines both of this
studies rule out all this confounds
and they produce virtually identical
findings. On both sides of the primate
divide
there are soul wrenching stories and
life-threatening consequences
For every subordinate like Kevin
living a life of baboon uncertainty there
is an alpha
strutting his stuff, glorying in power
over someone else someone unsuspecting
someone low ranking
Got him.
12:46 do either of you see where the
dart is?
Yes. Okay guys who do you think
is higher-ranking?
Our guy... Yes.
Much carefully make sure the other guy
doesn't hassle him.
this year Robert brought his family to
Africa
his wife neuropsychologist Lisa
Sapolsky
has also done extensive research with
baboons
and for the first time they brought
along their kids
Benjamin and Rachel. As asleep as he looks...
all the baboons are perfectly
willing to get very freaked out by
a human coming over and touching one of
these guys but cover him with a
burlap and he doesn't exist anymore
oh my God he's there, he's... not there
anymore
this is not quite like taking your kids to
work day
but it's a pretty central feature of
who I am by now and who my wife and I
are
and kids want to know where we came from
and this is pretty fundamental. As in
previous seasons
Robert measures how individuals at every
level of the baboon hierarchy
reacts to and recovers from stress
So what we're doing it is, we're now going to
challenge the system
with increasing doses of epinephrine
the baboon's response is immediately picked
up in its blood
vital signs that can be deep frozen in
perpetuity
It's this storehouse of potential knowledge and I
got 30 years of those blood samples
frozen away at this point because
you never know when some new hormone or some
new something or other pops up
and that is the thing to look at and start pulling out this
samples back to when
you know Jimmy Carter was
president. 150... 125...
Anticipating the long reach of stress is
a recent idea,
for one when robert was Rachel's age,
scientists believed stress was the cause
of only one major problem. This is a
picture of a major american
personnel problem... an ugly sore that
doctors call a peptic ulcer
eating away at the wall of a man's
stomach.
Those stomach pains that you talk about,
the gnawing, the burning, those are obvious symptoms of
gastric ulcer.
Thirty years ago, what's the disease that
comes to everybody's mind when you
mention stress...
it's ulcers, stress
and ulcers. And
this was the first stress related disease
discovered, in fact 70 years ago.
What I want you to do is to work on your attitude.
My attitude? That's right. Ulcers breed on the wrong kind of feelings.
You've got to be honest with yourself
about the way you feel about it.
Finding a new doctor sounds like a better
answer to me.
The connection between stress and
ulcers was mainstream medical gospel
until the early 1980s.
Then Australian researchers identified a
bacteria
as the major cause of ulcers.
And this overthrew the entire field, this was,
it's got nothing to do with stress, it's
a bacterial disorder.
And I'm willing to bet half the
gastroenterologists on Earth when they
heard about this, went out and celebrated
that night. This was, like, the greatest
news... never again were they going to have to sit
down their patients, and
make eye contact and ask them how is it going, so, anything stressful...
it's got nothing to do with stress, it's a
bacterial disorder... So no longer would the
solution be stress management,
now it could be something as simple as a
pill.
It was a major breakthrough. Stress
didn't cause ulcers.
Case closed.
But a few years later,
the research took a new twist. Scientists
discovered that this
ulcer-causing bacteria wasn't unique... in
fact,
as much as two thirds of the world's
population has it.
So why do only a fraction of these
people develop ulcers?
Research revealed that when stressed,
the body begins shutting down all
non-essential systems,
including the immune system. And it
became clear that,
if you shut down the immune system,
stomach bacteria
can run amok... Because what the stress
does,
is wipe out the ability of your body to
begin to repair your stomach walls
when they start rotting away from this
bacteria... So stress
can cause ulcers by disrupting our
body's ability to heal itself.
If stress can undermine the immune
system,
what other havoc can it wreak? One
answer comes from a colony of captive
macaque monkeys
near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. People
think of stress as something that keeps
them up at night, or
something that makes them yell at their
kids.
But, when you ask me, what is stress, I say
look at it, it's this huge plaque
in this artery, that's what stress is.
For two decades doctor Carol Shively
has been studying the arteries of macaques.
Like baboons and British Civil
Servants,
these primates organize themselves into
distinctly hierarchical groups,
and subject one another to social stress.
Stress hormones can trigger an intense
negative cardiovascular response,
a pounding heart, at increased blood
pressure
So if stress follows rank, would the
cardiovascular system of a high-ranking
macaque,
call him a primate CEO, be different from
his subordinate?
When Shively looked at the arteries of a
dominant monkey,
one with little history of stress, its
arteries were clean.
But a subordinate monkey's arteries
told a grim tale... A subordinate artery
has lots more atherosclerosis build
up inside it than a dominant artery has.
Stress, and the resulting flood of
hormones, had
increased blood pressure, damaging artery
walls,
making them repositories for plaque.
So now, when you feel threatened, your arteries
don't expand,
and your heart muscle doesn't get more blood, and that
can lead to a heart attack. This is not
an abstract concept, it's not something
that
maybe someday you should do something
about, you need to attend to it
today, because it's affecting the way
your body functions,
and a stress today will affect your
health tomorrow and for years to come.
Social and psychological stress,
whether macaque, human, or baboon, can
clog our arteries,
restrict blood flow, jeopardize the
health of our heart...
and that's just the beginning of
stress's
deadly curse.
Robert's early research
demonstrated that stress can work on us
in an even more frightening way.
Well, back when I was starting
in this business what I wound up focusing
on was what
seemed an utterly implausible idea at
the time,
which was chronic stress and chronic
exposure to
glucocorticoids could do something as unsubtle
and grotesque as
kill some of your brain cells. As a PhD
candidate at Rockefeller University in
the early 80s,
Sapolsky collaborated with his mentor,
doctor Bruce McEwan,
to follow the path of stress into the
brain. They subjected lab rats to chronic
stress,
and then examined their brain cells. The
team made an astonishing find.
While the cells of normal rat brains
have extensive branches,
stressed rats brain cells were
dramatically smaller.
And what was most interesting in many
ways was the part of the brain where this
was happening...
the hippocampus. You take Intro Neurobiology
anytime for the last 5000 years and
what you learn is:
hippocampus is learning and memory.
Stress in these rats
shrank the part of their brain
responsible for memory.
Stress affects memory in two ways.
Chronic stress can actually change
brain circuits, so that we lose the
capacity
to remember things as we need to. Very
severe
acute stress can have another effect,
which is often... we refer to as stress
makes you stupid,
which is making it impossible for you in,
over short periods of time to
remember things you know perfectly well.
We all know that phenomenon, we all know
that one, from back when we stressed
ourselves by not getting any sleep at
all. And
the next morning at nine o'clock, we
couldn't remember a single thing for
that final exam.
You take a human and stress them
big-time, long time,
and you're going to have a hippocampus that
pays the price as well. In addition to
undermining our health
stress can make us feel plain miserable
Carol Shively set out to find out why
she began not with misery but with
pleasure
Shively suspected that there was a link
between stress
pleasure and where we stand on the
social hierarchy
just like stress, pleasure is linked to
the chemistry of the brain
when a neurotransmitter called dopamine
is released in the brain
it binds to receptors signaling pleasure
Shively used a positron emission tomography scanner to
examine the brain of a non-stressed
primate
our primate CEO. What we see
is that the brains of dominant monkeys
light up bright with lots of dopamine
binding
in this area that is so important to
reward and feeling pleasure about life
Shively then looked at the
subordinates brain.
What we discovered is that the brains of
the subordinate monkeys
are very dull because there's
much less receptor-binding going on in
this area.
Why is that, what is it about this area
of the brain?
When you have less dopamine everything
around you that you would normally take
pleasure in, is less pleasurable. So the
Sun doesn't shine so bright, the grass is
not so green,
food doesn't taste as good. It's because of
the way your brain is functioning that
you're doing that, and your brain is functioning that
way because you are low
on the social status hierarchy. One
feature of low rank is being low
ranking
the reality, an even stronger feature by
the time you get to humans, is
not just being low ranking or poor, it's feeling
low ranking or poor and one of the
best ways for society to make you feel
like one of the have-nots
is to rub your nose over and over and
over again
with what you don't have. Richmond California
a town where societies extremes can be
spotted right from your car
this is the regular commute of cardiologist Jeffrey Ritterman
You can learn a lot about the distress
and
health outcome just from the
neighborhoods you visit and
in this neighborhood the life
expectancy is quite good and
most of the people are pretty healthy
and as we reach the top of the hill it
gets to be a little bit less
privileged and as we make this
transition
the social status begins to drop
and correspondingly in those areas
the health outcome is much worse
and these people are not going to have
the same life expectancy
as the people in that middle class
area we started in.
People are on guard, people are vigilant,
they are living a more stressful life
this is a community that produces high
stress hormones in people
and overtime it takes its toll. One of
doctor Ritterman's
patient is 65-year-old Emanuel Johnson
his career is guidance counselor in one of
America's most dangerous neighborhoods
well last year actually I think we had forty seven
homicides
in the last four days we had
11 shootings three deaths
and nine times out of ten it's
going to be a relative
or someone I bet the kids know. For Emanuel
Johnson
there is a price for chronic exposure to
this stress
five years ago I had a heart attack I'm a
diabetic too. I have to work on it
constantly
because I've been in this business twenty
years, so just it's stressful
just working the job, so over the years
that, you know
the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the sugar came on later
but the stress was always in
before they came on
Emanuel Johnson's body may be telling
yet another story of stress
the Whitehall study in england
found an incredible link between stress,
your position in the social hierarchy
and how you put on weight. So it may not
be just
putting on weight but also the
distribution
of that weight and the distribution of that
weight
putting it on around the center is
related to position in the hierarchy
and that in turn may be related to
chronic stress pathways.
So we said, does that happen in monkeys
because they organize themselves in a
hierarchy too and it turns out that it
does.
Subordinate monkeys are more likely to
have fat in their abdomen
then are dominant monkeys. I think the
most amazing
observation that
I've made in my lab is this idea that
stress
could actually change the way you deposit fat
on your body
to me that was a bizarre idea that you
could actually
alter the way fat is distributed
Sapolsky, Shively and others think stress
could be a critical factor in the global
obesity epidemic
Even worse fat brought on by stress
is dangerous fat. You know that fat
carried on the trunk or actually
inside the abdomen is much worse for you
than fat carried elsewhere in the body
it behaves differently, it
produces different kinds of
hormones and chemicals and has different
effects on your health
whatever it is that works
for an individual, they need to value
stress reduction. I think the problem in
our society is that we don't
value stress reduction we in fact value the opposite
We admire the person who not only
multitasks and does two things at once
but does five things at once. We
admire that person. How they manage that
you know
that's an incredibly stressful
way to live we have to change our values
and value people who understand
a balanced and serene life.
One heartbreaking moment in history
reveals that stress may in fact
damage us long before we are even aware
Holland late 1944
a brutal winter and a merciless army of
occupation
conspire to starve a nation
it is known as the Dutch hunger winter
for those who survive today
these are haunting memories.
I had nothing. I could no longer feed my son.
I was so sick.
And then you have to take care of a child.
I found that terrible.
I went to the church at the Dam next to the palace,
and asked the priest's wife if she would raise my child as long as the war took place.
Because I can't do it anymore.
dutch researcher Tessa Roseboom had
heard many of those tragic memories
she and her team wanted to know if
there were any lingering effects
Roseboom knew
that our bodies respond to famine in
much the same way they respond to other
stressors
so she set out to see if the fetuses of
women pregnant during these arduous days
could possibly be affected by stress
because of meticulous record-keeping by
the Dutch
Roseboom was able to identify over 2400
people
who could have been impacted. She and her
team
analyzed the data from those born during
and after the famine
and came to a surprising conclusion. I
think that you could say that
these babies were exposed to stress
in fetal life and they're still
suffering the consequences of that
now, sixty years later.
Many of the Dutch hunger winter
children live today
all in their sixties many still bear the
scars of war
we found that the babies who were conceived
during the famine
have an increased risk of cardiovascular
disease they have
more hypercholesterolemia they are
more responsive to stress and
generally are in
poorer health than people who were born
before the famine
or conceived after it
researchers think that stress hormones
in a mother's blood
triggered a change in the nervous system
of the fetus as it struggled with
starvation
this was the fetuses first encounter
with stress
six decades later the bodies of these
Dutch hunger winter children
still haven't forgotten. What we now know
is that
it's not just your fat cells that
wind up being vulnerable to build up
towards events like this, it's your brain
chemistry, it's your capacity to learn
it's your capacity
to respond to stress adaptively rather
than maladaptively
how readily you fall into depression, how
vulnerable you are to psychiatric
disorders
yet another realm in which early
experience and early stress can leave a very
very bad footprint. If I had had an
option I would not have opted to be
bipolar but now that I am bipolar
I'll have to live with it. It's hard for me to be flexible.
I am very quick to anger.
What the Dutch hunger winter phenomenon
is about is
experience, environments start long
before birth and adverse
stressful environments can imprint and leave scars
lasting a whole lifetime.
We are taking
fingerprints because no baboon has the same fingerprints as another one.
So we just took Gummibear's and I am hoping to get over to Riff and get his.
During this
years multi-generational research,
Robert who has spent his career
documenting stresses effects on the
individual
and on the cell tracks the trail of
stress even deeper into our bodies
One of the most interesting new direction in stress
research
is taking the effects of stress down to
a bolts and nuts level
how cells work, how genes work, that half
a dozen years ago nobody could have
imagined.
the once unimaginable genetic structures
called telomeres
which protect the ends of our chromosomes
from fraying
as we age our telomeres shorten. What is
interesting
is stress, by way of stress hormones
can accelerate the shortening of
telomeres, so the assumption is for
the exact same aged guys
if you're a low-ranking guy who's just
marinating in stress hormones
your telomeres are going to be shorter. So
how does this formidable finding apply
to us
San Rafael California
once a week Janet Lawson keeps a very
important appointment.
She joined other mothers who share
circumstances that produce chronic
unremitting stress. So... but she looses her
balance and that's the scary part
so we just went out actually last night
and bought a new helmet just for fun
She's getting older and wanting more
independence, it's getting harder.
Each of these women is mother to a
disabled child
For us my son's only 8 and and there's
enough I can handle and I don't allow
myself to go
too much out, i can't. I had a friend recently
who said to me
you know I think you really should
consider putting Lexie at a home and
that was really stressful in and of itself
to think
wahou so...
so it's like how can you
even say that? She is, you know a little
girlfriend
she's, even though she can't really
communicate
she loves
she loves
These remarkable women came to the
attention of biologist
doctor Elizabeth Blackburn. I didn't
directly know the individuals
but I know the stories and I am a mother
myself and so when I heard about this
cohort
I really thought it was worthwhile
finding out
what really is happening at the heart of
the cells in
these mothers who are doing such a difficult
thing for such a long time.
Doctor Blackburn is a leader in the
field of telomere research.
We have 46 chromosomes and they are capped off
at each end by telomeres. Nobody knew in
humans
wether telomeres and their fraying down over
life
would be affected by chronic stress, and
so,
we decided we would look at this cohort
of
chronically stressed mothers. And we
decided to ask what's happening to their
telomeres and to the maintenance of their telomeres.
What we found was the length of the telomeres
directly relates to the amount of stress
somebody is under, and the number of years
that they've been under the stress. Such
stressed mothers became the focus of a
study by doctor Blackburn's colleague,
psychologist Elissa Epel.
Mothers of young children are a highly
stressed group.
They are often balancing competing demands
like work
and child rearing, and often don't
have time to take care of themselves.
So, if you add on top of that, the extra
burden of caring
for a child with special needs, it can be
overwhelming.
It can tax the very reserves that sustain
people,
and if they're stressed, if they report
stress, they tend to die earlier.
These women have shortened telomeres,
decreased activity of this enzyme,
and a very very rough number for every
year you were taking care of a chronically
ill child,
you got roughly six years worth of aging.
This is real, this is not just somebody
whining...
this is real, medically serious
aging going on, and we can see that it is
actually caused
by the chronic stress.
But there is hope. Doctor Blackburn co-discovered an
enzyme, telomerase, that can repair the
damage.
It is what I always call the threat of hope... That's good. That's good... Yes.
Preliminary data
suggests that a meeting of minds, such as
this, may actually have a health benefit,
by stimulating the healing effects
of telomerase.
And laugh and laugh, if you
don't laugh, forget it, you can't handle it... It's...
What I found is that the humor is
something...
there's a certain level of black humor
that we have about our kids
that only we appreciate, we're the only
ones who get the jokes, and
in a way we are the only ones who are
allowed to laugh at the jokes.
One of the questions in the stress field is, you
know, what are the active ingredients
that reduce stress and that promote
longevity?
And compassion and and caring for others
maybe one of those most important
ingredients. So, those maybe the factors
that promote longevity and increase telomerase,
and keep our cells rejuvenating and
regenerating.
So, perhaps connecting with and helping
others
can help us to mend ourselves, and maybe
even live longer,
healthier lives.
Twenty years ago, Robert got a shocking
preview of this idea.
The first troop he ever studied, the
baboons he felt closest to
and had written books about, suffered a
calamity.
It would have a profound effect on his
research.
The Keekorok troop is the one
I started with thirty years ago,
and they were your basic old baboon
troop at the time, and which means
males were aggressive, and society was
highly stratified, and
females took a lot of grief, in your
basic off the rack baboon troop.
And then about, by now almost twenty
years ago
something horrific and scientifically
very interesting happened to that troop.
The Keekorok troop took to foraging
for food in the garbage dump of a popular
tourist lodge.
it was a fatal move. The trash
included meat
tainted with tuberculosis.
The result was that nearly half the
males in the troop died.
Not unreasonably, I got depressed as hell
and pretty damn angry about what
happened.
You know, when you are 30 years old, you can
afford to expend a lot of emotion on
a baboon troop, and
there was a lot of emotion there.
For Robert, a decade of research appeared
to have been lost.
But then he made a curious
observation
about who had died and who had survived.
It wasn't random who died. In that troop,
if you were aggressive, and if you were
not particularly socially connected,
socially affiliative, you didn't spend your
time grooming and hanging out,
if you were that kind of male you died .
Every alpha male was gone. The Keekorok troop
had been transformed. And what you were
left with was
twice as many females as males. And the
males who were remaining were,
you know, just to use scientific jargon, they
were good guys.
They were not aggressive jerks, they
were nice to the females, they were very
socially affiliative, it completely transformed
the atmosphere in the troop.
When male baboons reach adolescence,
they typically leave their home troop and roam,
eventually finding a new troop.
And when new adolescent males would join the troop,
they'd come in just as jerky as any
adolescent males elsewhere on this
planet,
and it would take them about six months to
learn... we're not like that in this troop.
We don't do stuff like that. We're not
that aggressive. We spend more time
grooming each other. Males are calmer
with each other. You do not dump on a
female if you're in a bad mood.
And it takes these new guys about six
months, and
they assimilate this style, and you have
baboon culture. And this particular troop
has a culture of
of very low levels of aggression, and high
levels of social affiliation, they're
doing that twenty years later.
And so the tragedy had provided
Robert with a fundamental lesson,
not just about cells, but how the
absence of stress could impact society.
Do these guys have the same problems
with high blood pressure?
No. Do these guys have the same
problems with brain chemistry related
to anxiety stress hormone levels? Not at all.
It's not just your rank,
it is what your rank means in your society.
And the same is true for humans,
with only a slight variation. We belong
to multiple hierarchies,
and you may have the worst job in your
corporation, and no autonomy and control
and predictability,
but you're the captain of the company
softball team that year.
And you better bet you are going to have
all sorts of psychological means to
decide
it's just a job, 9 to 5, that's not what
the world is about, what the world is
about is
softball, I am the head of my team, people
look up to me
and you come out of that deciding you are on top
of the hierarchy that matters to you.
Well, that worked... and lots of baboon excrement.
Which,
under the right circumstances, with the right
season's experiment is a gold mine.
Unfortunately, this time around it is just
a cage that I have to clean now.
I am studying stress for thirty years
now, and I even
tell people how they should live differently, so presumably I should
have incorporated all of this, and the reality is,
like, I am unbelievably stressed, and type A, and
poorly coping, and why else would I
study the stuff 80 hours a week?
No doubt everything I advises could lose
all its credibility if i keel over dead
from a heart attack in my early 50s.
I'm not good at dealing with
stress.
You know, one thing that works to my
advantage 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 savannah 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 more regular basis
That is a more
interesting, varied world in lots of ways
but there is a lot out there that you sure
miss.
There is a pretty miraculous place, where
every meal tastes good, and your are
ten times more aware of every sensation.
This is a hard place to
come to year after year without getting,
I think, a very
different metabolism and temperament.
I am more extroverted here, I am more,
more happy...
It is a hard place not to be happy.
So one
antidote to stress may be finding a place
where we have control
but how do we reckon with all the time
we spend at work
I would say what we've learned from
the Whitehall study, from the studies of
non-human primates
is the conditions in which people live
and work
are absolutely vital for the health
Senior civil servant Sara Woodhall
enjoys the benefits of control. I
don't
think I suffer from stress I don't work
a 100 hours a week
I control the amount of work that I do
to make sure that
I can continue to deliver long-term
Control... the amount of control is
intimately related
to where you are in the occupational
hierarchy
and what we have found is in general
people report to us that things have
got worse.
That the amount of work stress has gone
up.
Their illness rates go up. Where people
report to us that they got more control
they're being treated more fairly at
work, there is more justice
in the amount of treatment, so things
are getting better,
the amount of illness goes down. I've
been very lucky I
I have never experienced any problems with my health. But not everyone is so lucky.
So is there a prescription for the vast
majority of us
who aren't at the top? Give people more
involvement in the work give them more say in
what they're doing
give them more reward for the amount of
efforts they put out
and it might well be you have not just a
healthier workplace
but a more productive workplace as well.
I've managed to achieve a degree of
control
at the moment I'm in a very good
position this is the first time were I feel
I have had
a boss who appreciates me. He doesn't
dominate team meetings he sits back
he invites people to contribute, he lets
other people chair
He's a real manager and he, from the
start when I returned of my latest sick
leave just six months ago
he was so positive I think I feel
sufficiently
empowered
Who would have imagined
that Robert's baboons would point us
humans
towards a stress-free utopia. This may
sound
a little fanciful but I think what we're
trying to create
is a better society. The implications
both of the baboons
and of the British civil services is how
can we create
a society that has the conditions
that will allow people to flourish.
And that's where this is heading to
create
a better society that promotes human
flourishing
So what does the baboons teach the average
person in there
don't bite somebody because you're
having a bad day
don't just displace on them in any sort of
manner, social affiliation is a remarkably
powerful thing and
that said by somebody who lives in a
world where ambition and drive and type A things
and all of that sort of things
dominates
those things are really important and one
of the greatest forms of sociality
is giving rather than receiving and
all those things make for a better world
Another one of the things that baboons teach us
is if they are able to, in one
generation transform what are supposed
to be
textbooks social systems, sort of engraved in
stone,
we don't have an excuse when we say
they're certain inevitabilities about
human social systems
And so, the haunting question that
endures from Robert's life work
are we brave enough to learn from a
baboon?
The Kikarak troop didn't just
survive without stress
they thrived.
Can we?