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
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?