Best Quotes from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky with Page Numbers

You are exceedingly unlikely to obsess about getting a serious case of dysentery if it starts pouring.

Our nights are filled with worries about a different class of diseases.

We are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.

Stress can make us sick.

Extreme emotional disturbances can adversely affect us.

The body has a surprisingly similar set of responses to a broad array of stressors.

If you experience every day as an emergency, you will pay the price.

The stress-response can become damaging.

Chronic or repeated stressors can potentially make you sick.

If you want to increase your chances of avoiding stress-related diseases, make sure you don't inadvertently allow yourself to be born poor.

The purpose of this chapter is to learn a bit about the lines of communication between the brain and elsewhere.

If you sit in your chair not moving a muscle, and simply think a thought, a thought having to do with feeling angry or sad or euphoric or lustful, and suddenly your pancreas secretes some hormone.

We all understand intellectually that the brain can regulate functions throughout the rest of the body, but it is still surprising to be reminded of how far-reaching those effects can be.

The half of the autonomic nervous system that is turned on is called the sympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system kicks into action during emergencies, or what you think are emergencies.

It's no surprise that it would be a disaster if both branches were very active at the same time, kind of like putting your foot on the gas and brake simultaneously.

The brain turned out to be the master gland.

The body does not respond to stress merely by preparing for aggression or escape, and that there are important gender differences in the physiology and psychology of stress.

As the master gland, the brain can experience or think of something stressful and activate components of the stress-response hormonally.

Collectively, these shifts in secretion and activation form the primary stress-response.

"You alter cardiovascular functions to divert more blood flow to your thigh muscles. In such cases, there's a wonderful match between blood flow and metabolic demand."

"Chronic stress can cause hypertension and atherosclerosis— the accumulation of these plaques."

"Your heart is just a dumb, simple mechanical pump, and your blood vessels are nothing more exciting than hoses."

"If you do that on a regular basis, they will wear out, just like any pump or hose you'd buy at Sears."

"Put another way, your sympathetic nervous system probably has roughly the same effect on your coronary arteries whether you are in the middle of a murderous rage or a thrilling orgasm."

"Stress can increase the risk of atherosclerosis."

"One of the clearest demonstrations of this...is to be found in the work of the physiologist Jay Kaplan...subordinate males show a lot of the physiological indices of chronically turning on their stress-responses."

"If stress causes your blood pressure to go up, then chronic stress causes your blood pressure to go up chronically."

"If you’re at risk, trouble is occurring under all sorts of circumstances of psychological stress in everyday life."

"For women, heart disease is nonetheless the leading cause of death among women in the United States—500,000 a year."

"Your body must get energy from its places of storage, like fat or liver or non-exercising muscle."

"Surplus energy is not kept in the body's form of cash— circulating amino acids, glucose, and fatty acids—but stored in more complex forms."

"It's insulin that's filling out the deposit slips at your fat banks."

"This grand strategy of breaking your food down into its simplest parts and reconverting it into complex storage forms is precisely what your body should do when you've eaten plenty."

"Turn up the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, turn down the parasympathetic, and down goes insulin secretion: step one in meeting an emergency accomplished."

"You want to dip into your bank account, liquidate some of your assets, turn stored nutrients into your body's equivalent of cash to get you through this crisis."

"What happens if you can't mobilize energy during a crisis? The lion is more likely to feast."

"Frequent stress and/or big stress-responses might increase the odds of getting juvenile diabetes, accelerate the development of the diabetes, and cause major complications in this life-shortening disease."

"Stress promotes insulin resistance."

"Prosperity has become a cause of death."

Not having enough food or water definitely counts as a stressor.

The question, of course, is in what way.

You're the zebra running for your life, don't think about lunch.

Stress can alter appetite.

Appetite goes up.

Timing turns out to be critical.

Good time to turn off appetite.

What if you have to salivate for a living?

Stress not only affects the gut, but also how we digest and absorb food.

Digestion is quickly shut down during stress.

"The key to this phenomenon seems to be not only that you were undernourished as a fetus, but that after birth you had plenty of food and were able to recover from the deprivation quickly."

"You don't really believe in the process either. Maybe we're too primitive to comprehend the transmogrification of material."

"You see, growth does occur as a result of eating. And in a kid, it's not a trivial process."

"It turns out that during development, beginning with fetal life, your body is also learning about the nature of the world and, metaphorically, making lifelong decisions about how to respond to the outside world."

"Perhaps we can even risk scientific credibility and detachment and mention the word love here, because that most ephemeral of phenomena lurks between the lines of this chapter."

"Their growth rates were entirely different. Fraulein Schwartz's kids grew in height and weight at a slower pace than the kids in the other orphanage."

"The absence of touch is seemingly one of the most marked developmental stressors that we can suffer."

"How can they produce the same thrifty metabolism in the fetus? Remember, you have elevated levels of glucose in the bloodstream in the case of diabetes because you can't store the stuff."

"If you clear away the grief, the overwhelming emotion that makes parents neurotic, it is the fundamental essence of parenting that persists: a bond that should be rooted in love."

"No one wants to believe that they could cause lifelong damage to their child by a seemingly small or trivial act; but there are many days in which we, as parents, do not behave perfectly."

"Reproduction represents a vast hierarchy of behavioral and physiological events that differ considerably in subtlety."

"That reproductive physiology still operated in any individual to any extent, under those circumstances, strikes me as extraordinary."

"The basic machinery of reproduction can be astoundingly resistant to stress in a subset of individuals."

"Stress can wreak havoc with subtleties."

"And while it is easy to make fun of those obsessions of ours, those nuances of sexuality, the Cosmos and GQs and other indices of our indulged lives, matter to us."

"Some steps are basic and massive—the eruption of an egg, the diverting of rivers of blood to a penis. Others are as delicate as the line of a poem that awakens your heart."

"It would be disadvantageous if the stress of mating caused erectile dysfunction."

"Stress will knock out erections quite readily."

"Perhaps some of the gynecological diseases that plague modern westernized women have something to do with this activation of a major piece of physiological machinery hundreds of times when it may have evolved to be used only twenty times."

"If you are going to be nonwesternized, choose to be a hunter-gatherer over being a nomadic pastoralist or an agriculturist."

The hallways of academia are filling with a newly evolved species of scientist—the psychoneuroimmunologist—who makes a living studying the extraordinary fact that what goes on in your head can affect how well your immune system functions.

The dogma of the separation of the immune and nervous systems has fallen by the wayside.

The brain has a vast potential for sticking its nose into the immune system's business.

Studies such as these convinced scientists that there is a strong link between the nervous system and the immune system.

The sight of an artificial rose or the taste of an artificially flavored drink can alter immune function, then stress can, too.

If something goes wrong with the immune system's sorting, one obvious kind of error could be that the immune system misses an infectious invader.

During stress, the immune system is being activated, rather than inhibited.

Sustained major stressors drive the numbers down to 40 to 70 percent below baseline.

If you don't have an adequate phase B, that pushes the immune system spiral upward into autoimmunity.

There is a strong connection between social relationships and life expectancy—a belief that truly resonates with the human experience.

"Pain can hurt like hell, but it can inform us that we are sitting too close to the fire, or that we should never again eat the novel item that just gave us food poisoning."

"Pain is useful to the extent that it motivates us to modify our behaviors in order to reduce whatever insult is causing the pain, because invariably that insult is damaging our tissues."

"In our westernized lives, it is often a good signal that we had better see a doctor before it is too late."

"What is surprising is how malleable pain signals are—how readily the intensity of a pain signal is changed by the sensations, feelings, and thoughts that coincide with the pain."

"Pain is useless and debilitating, however, when it is telling us that there is something dreadfully wrong that we can do nothing about."

"The brain's interpretation of pain can be extremely subjective."

"Stress-induced analgesia is a real biological phenomenon."

"The emotional/interpretative level can be dissociated from the objective amount of pain signal that is coursing up to the brain from the spine."

"Stress blocks pain perception, enabling you to sprint away from the lion despite your mauling."

"When chronic stress is present, pain perception may worsen, illustrating the complex relationship between stress and pain."

"Stress can enhance memory."

"Your mind's a funny thing."

"We've all had similar experiences."

"A day to remember!"

"Mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory."

"Stress acutely causes increased delivery of glucose to the brain."

"When a stressor is occurring it is a good time to be at your best in memory retrieval."

"Memory for the emotional components is enhanced, whereas memory for the neutral details is not."

"The more severe the glucocorticoid excess, the greater the loss of hippocampal volume and the greater the memory problems."

"Most of us recognize the ways in which stress can also disrupt how we learn and remember."

You know, this newborn business is really quite manageable if you just stay on top of things.

Contained in this are the two central features of this chapter. Not getting enough sleep is a stressor; being stressed makes it harder to sleep.

For a third of your life, you're just not there, floating in this suspended state.

If you skip a night's sleep, when you finally get to sleep the next night, you have more REM sleep than normal.

Sleep deprivation definitely stimulates glucocorticoid secretion.

The elevated glucocorticoid levels during sleep deprivation play a role in breaking down some of the stored forms of energy in the brain.

Three hours earlier than the other group...was about the stressfulness of anticipating being woken up earlier than desirable.

When it comes to what makes for psychological stress, a lack of predictability and control are at the top of the list.

Sleep is predominately a time when the stress-response is turned off.

We have an unprecedented number of ways to make us sleep deprived.

"How can you just sit there? Am I the only one who realizes that we're all going to die someday?"

"It's as if we were trapped in a mine, shouting out for rescuers, 'Save us, we're alive but we're getting old and we're going to die.'"

"They wait their whole lives to become powerful elders."

"Just let me be as unafraid of dying as you are."

"Maybe we will luck out and wind up as respected village elders."

"There is so little time."

"Most of us will age with a fair degree of success."

"The average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long."

"Maybe old age is not so bad."

"It is time to begin to get some good news."

The stress-response is about preparing your body for an explosive burst of energy consumption right now; psychological stress is about doing all the same things to your body for no physical reason whatsoever.

We humans also deal better with stressors when we have outlets for frustration—punch a wall, take a run, find solace in a hobby.

It helps to have a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, an ear to listen to you, someone to cradle you and to tell you it will be okay.

Predictability makes stressors less stressful.

Some lack of control and predictability can be a great thing—a good roller-coaster ride, a superbly terrifying movie, a mystery novel with a great surprise ending.

It is not just the external reality; it’s the meaning you attach to it.

The exercise of control is not critical; rather, it is the belief that you have it.

For most, though, occupational stress is built more around lack of control, work life spent as a piece of the machine.

The perception that events are improving helps tremendously.

We differ in the psychological filters through which we perceive the stressors in our world.

Depression can be as tragic as cancer or a spinal cord injury.

What could be more tragic than a disease that, as its defining symptom, robs us of that capacity?

The hallmark of depression is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

Through adversity, we learn to cope and even feel vast pleasures.

Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure; it is consistent among depressives.

Small wonder that, worldwide, depression accounts for 800,000 suicides per year.

Not only are depressive individuals struggling against a sense of hopelessness, but they are also at war within themselves.

Depression represents a state where positive and negative emotions tend to collapse into one inverse relationship.

The essence of depression is not simply feeling sad but feeling an absence of everything that makes life meaningful.

While depression can lead to despair, it is also important to recognize that it is a genuine disease and not simply a state of mind.

"Your style, your temperament, your personality have much to do with whether you regularly perceive opportunities for control or safety signals when they are there."

"Some folks are good at modulating stress in these ways, and others are terrible."

"If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is almost always because another baboon has worked hard and long to bring about that state."

"Among some male baboons, there are at least two routes for winding up with elevated basal glucocorticoid levels... an inability to keep competition in perspective and social isolation."

"The males who were coping best (at least by this endocrine measure) had high degrees of social control, predictability, and outlets for frustration."

"Lower basal glucocorticoid levels are found in males who are best at telling the difference between threatening and neutral interactions."

"Those who take advantage of the coping responses that might make a stressor more manageable... they don't make use of effective outlets when the going gets tough, and they lack social support."

"This is not the study of what external stressors have to do with health. This is... the impact on health of how an individual perceives, responds to, and copes with those external stressors."

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."

"Sometimes, it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors."

A relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it.

The pleasure is in the anticipation of a reward; from the standpoint of dopamine, the reward is almost an afterthought.

Pleasurable lack of control is all about transience.

We can make some pretty informed guesses. Maybe they release atypically low amounts of dopamine.

What should be obvious is that instead of the term 'adrenaline junkies'... more proper would be 'transiently and moderately increased levels of glucocorticoids junkies.'

Experience moderate and transient stress, and memory, synaptic plasticity, and immunity are enhanced.

You feel focused, alert, alive, motivated, anticipatory. You feel great.

If it's the right person tickling you...maybe, just maybe, that tickling is going to be followed by something really good.

There’s really no such thing as an ex-addict—it is simply an addict who is not in the context that triggers use.

Our sources of pleasure have become so narrowed and artificially strong.

'Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale.'

'Physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor.'

'If we can't consider disease outside the context of the person who is ill, we also can't consider it outside the context of the society in which that person has gotten ill, and that person's place in that society.'

'Being poor involves lots of physical stressors... and a greater risk of work-related accidents.'

'Lack of control, lack of predictability: numbing work on an assembly line, an occupational career spent taking orders or going from one temporary stint to the next.'

'If life is filled with a disproportionate share not only of physical stressors but of psychological stressors... it is indicative of a low-ranking position in society.'

'Feeling poor in our socioeconomic world predicts poor health.'

'It’s about being made to feel poor.'

'To recognize the extent to which the poor exist without feedback, just consider the varied ways that most of us have developed for looking through homeless people as we walk past them.'

'The more income inequality in a society, the lower the social capital, and the lower the social capital, the worse the health.'

There is hope. Although it may sneak onto the scene in a quiet, subtle way, it is there.

Not everyone falls apart miserably with age, not every organ system poops out, not everything is bad news.

If you can look at your child having cancer and decide that God is choosing you for this special task, you are likely to have less of a stress-response.

Not all individuals cope with stress in the same way, and this variance shows that resilience exists even in dire circumstances.

This degeneration is not inevitable.

Successful aging is more successful than many would guess.

If manipulating such psychological variables can work in these trying circumstances, it certainly should for the more trivial psychological stressors that fill our daily lives.

We can change the way we cope, both physiologically and psychologically.

The message that fills stress management seminars: find means to gain at least some degree of control in difficult situations.

Nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously.