Stress, Portrait of a Killer - Full Documentary (2008)

Robert Sapolsky National Geographic Documentary Stanford University

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?