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290 reviews for:
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
Robert M. Sapolsky
4.05 AVERAGE
290 reviews for:
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
Robert M. Sapolsky
4.05 AVERAGE
Really good if you’re looking to read 560 pages (18 audio hours) on stress, which apparently I was not. It totally stressed me out! Part of me wondered if he was doing an experiment on how stressed people would become while learning about stress. I really enjoyed the end on how stress can be beneficial and stress coping techniques.
Sapolsky's book teeters on a self-help category of "stress management" books and it's fine. Managing and controlling the stress in one's life is important and the book explains in depth how the anatomy of a human works to counter stress and the effects of it on the body in the long run. However, there's another book that I found more interesting (and entertaining) that speaks about similar anatomical responses in depth and puts it in a context that made more sense to me - "The Hour Between the Dog and the Wolf", by John Coates.
If you do not want to get into the intricacies of neuro-anatomy then this book is fine. If you want a more intense reading on the subject, I'd suggest the book above.
If you do not want to get into the intricacies of neuro-anatomy then this book is fine. If you want a more intense reading on the subject, I'd suggest the book above.
„În medicină s-a produs o revoluție a modului de înțelegere a bolilor care ne afectează în prezent. Ea presupune recunoașterea interacțiunilor dintre corp și minte, a modalităților în care emoțiile și personalitatea pot avea un impact colosal asupra funcționalității și a sănătății de care se bucură practic fiecare celulă din organism. Revoluția se referă la rolul stresului în a-i face pe unii dintre noi mai vulnerabili față de boli, la modalitățile în care unii dintre noi fac față factorilor stresanți și la ideea esențială că nu se poate înțelege o boală în mod izolat, ci numai în contextul persoanei care suferă de boala respectivă.”
Really insightful! I never thought I would find reading about stress to be so entertaining.
Extremely well researched and detailed book about our body's sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and how they impact our emotions and behaviors. I learned so much. At times I found it overly technical but Sapolsky does a wonderful job summarizing the technical parts so I never felt too lost.
Some quotes from the book that stood out to me:
Sustained psychological stress is a recent invention, mostly limited to humans and other social primates. We can experience wildly strong emotions(provoking our bodies into an accompanying uproar) linked to mere thoughts.
A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, and the stress response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis. A stressor can also be the anticipation of something happening. Based only on anticipation, we can turn on a stress response as robust as if the event had actually occurred.
With sufficient activation, the stress response can become more damaging than the stressor itself, especially when the stress is purely psychological. This is a critical concept, because it underlies the emergence of much stress related disease.
A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress related diseases are disorders of excessive stress responses.
Never is the maladaptiveness of the stress response during psychological stress clearer than in the case of the cardiovascular system.
CRP(c reactive protein) levels are turning out to be a much better predictor of cardiovascular disease risk than cholesterol.
If you are turning on your sympathetic nervous system all the time, you are chronically shutting off the parasympathetic system. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you're not feeling stressed about something.
When you have a somewhat under-active stress response you have trouble mobilizing energy in response to the demands of daily life. That is precisely what is seen in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome, which is characterized by, among other things, too low levels of glucocorticoids in the bloodstream.
If you activate the stress response too often you wind up expending so much energy that as a first consequence, you tire more readily.
Stress makes 2/3s of people hyperphagic(want to eat more) and 1/3 hypophagic(want to eat less)
Suppose you feel terrible and the docs can't find a thing wrong. Congratulations, you now have a functional GI disorder. These are immensely sensitive to stress. This is not just touchy feely psychologists saying this. Ongoing stress is closely related to IBS.
Chronic stress increases the risk of osteoporosis.
***Everything bad in human health is not caused by stress, nor is it in our power to cure ourselves merely by reducing stress and thinking healthy thoughts full of courage and spirit and love. Would that it were so. And shame on those who would profit from selling this view.
It is surprising how malleable pain signals are - how readily the intensity of a pain signal is changed by the sensations, feelings & thoughts that coincide with the pain. One example is the blunting of pain perception during some circumstances of stress.
A striking aspect of the pain system is how readily it can be modulated by other factors. The strength of the pain signal can depend on what other sensory info is funneled to the spine at the same time. Chronic throbbing pain can be inhibited by certain types of sharp & brief sensory stimulation.
The most relevant dichotomy is between nerve fibers that carry info about sharp sudden pain & fibers that carry info about constant diffuse pain. Fast fibers are about getting you to move as quickly as possible from the source of the piercing pain. Slow fibers are about getting you to hunker down, immobile, so you can heal.
Sometimes something goes wrong with pain pathways and you feel pain in response to stimuli that shouldn't be painful. Now you've got allodynia, which is feeling pain in response to a normal stimulus.
The emotional/interpretive level can be dissociated from the objective amount of pain signal. In other words, how much pain you feel and how unpleasant that pain feels, can be two separate things.
What if you are the sort of person where just seeing the nurse take the cap off the needle makes your arm throb? What we've got now is stress-induced hyperalgesia. Valium blocks stress induced hyperalgesia.
People with anxiety disorders have exaggerated startle responses.
Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. It is rooted in a cognitive distortion. Anxious people overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.
What is anxiety? A sense of disquiet, of the sands constantly shifting menacingly beneath your feet where constant vigilance is the only hope of effectively protecting yourself. Life consists of the concrete, agitated present of solving a problem that someone else might not even consider to exist.
5% of the population have chronically activated stress responses. What's their problem? These are the archetypal people who cross all their t's & dot their i's. They describe themselves as planners who don't like surprises. They live structured lives, walking to work the same way each day, the sort of people who can tell you what they are having for lunch in two weeks. Not surprisingly, they don't like ambiguity and strive to set up their world in black & white. They are stoic, regimented, hardworking people who are fine but have overactive stress responses. The levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstream as elevated and they have elevated sympathetic tone as well.When exposed to a cognitive challenge, they show unusually large increases in heart rate, blood pressure, sweating and muscle tension....Back to our envious thought, "I wish I had their discipline, how do they do it?" They do it by working like maniacs to generate their structured repressed world with no surprises. And that comes with a physiological bill. It can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.
Some quotes from the book that stood out to me:
Sustained psychological stress is a recent invention, mostly limited to humans and other social primates. We can experience wildly strong emotions(provoking our bodies into an accompanying uproar) linked to mere thoughts.
A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, and the stress response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis. A stressor can also be the anticipation of something happening. Based only on anticipation, we can turn on a stress response as robust as if the event had actually occurred.
With sufficient activation, the stress response can become more damaging than the stressor itself, especially when the stress is purely psychological. This is a critical concept, because it underlies the emergence of much stress related disease.
A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress related diseases are disorders of excessive stress responses.
Never is the maladaptiveness of the stress response during psychological stress clearer than in the case of the cardiovascular system.
CRP(c reactive protein) levels are turning out to be a much better predictor of cardiovascular disease risk than cholesterol.
If you are turning on your sympathetic nervous system all the time, you are chronically shutting off the parasympathetic system. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you're not feeling stressed about something.
When you have a somewhat under-active stress response you have trouble mobilizing energy in response to the demands of daily life. That is precisely what is seen in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome, which is characterized by, among other things, too low levels of glucocorticoids in the bloodstream.
If you activate the stress response too often you wind up expending so much energy that as a first consequence, you tire more readily.
Stress makes 2/3s of people hyperphagic(want to eat more) and 1/3 hypophagic(want to eat less)
Suppose you feel terrible and the docs can't find a thing wrong. Congratulations, you now have a functional GI disorder. These are immensely sensitive to stress. This is not just touchy feely psychologists saying this. Ongoing stress is closely related to IBS.
Chronic stress increases the risk of osteoporosis.
***Everything bad in human health is not caused by stress, nor is it in our power to cure ourselves merely by reducing stress and thinking healthy thoughts full of courage and spirit and love. Would that it were so. And shame on those who would profit from selling this view.
It is surprising how malleable pain signals are - how readily the intensity of a pain signal is changed by the sensations, feelings & thoughts that coincide with the pain. One example is the blunting of pain perception during some circumstances of stress.
A striking aspect of the pain system is how readily it can be modulated by other factors. The strength of the pain signal can depend on what other sensory info is funneled to the spine at the same time. Chronic throbbing pain can be inhibited by certain types of sharp & brief sensory stimulation.
The most relevant dichotomy is between nerve fibers that carry info about sharp sudden pain & fibers that carry info about constant diffuse pain. Fast fibers are about getting you to move as quickly as possible from the source of the piercing pain. Slow fibers are about getting you to hunker down, immobile, so you can heal.
Sometimes something goes wrong with pain pathways and you feel pain in response to stimuli that shouldn't be painful. Now you've got allodynia, which is feeling pain in response to a normal stimulus.
The emotional/interpretive level can be dissociated from the objective amount of pain signal. In other words, how much pain you feel and how unpleasant that pain feels, can be two separate things.
What if you are the sort of person where just seeing the nurse take the cap off the needle makes your arm throb? What we've got now is stress-induced hyperalgesia. Valium blocks stress induced hyperalgesia.
People with anxiety disorders have exaggerated startle responses.
Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. It is rooted in a cognitive distortion. Anxious people overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.
What is anxiety? A sense of disquiet, of the sands constantly shifting menacingly beneath your feet where constant vigilance is the only hope of effectively protecting yourself. Life consists of the concrete, agitated present of solving a problem that someone else might not even consider to exist.
5% of the population have chronically activated stress responses. What's their problem? These are the archetypal people who cross all their t's & dot their i's. They describe themselves as planners who don't like surprises. They live structured lives, walking to work the same way each day, the sort of people who can tell you what they are having for lunch in two weeks. Not surprisingly, they don't like ambiguity and strive to set up their world in black & white. They are stoic, regimented, hardworking people who are fine but have overactive stress responses. The levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstream as elevated and they have elevated sympathetic tone as well.When exposed to a cognitive challenge, they show unusually large increases in heart rate, blood pressure, sweating and muscle tension....Back to our envious thought, "I wish I had their discipline, how do they do it?" They do it by working like maniacs to generate their structured repressed world with no surprises. And that comes with a physiological bill. It can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.
Impressive in both detail and scope. Approachable without losing scientific rigor.
Nice read ... The author Robert M. is a good teacher. concepts are moderately easy to grasp even for someone with no medical training like me. This book contains valuable knowledge and would definitely read it again.
I found this book almost as charismatic as its writer. It did not provide much new information for me and I found myself skipping parts ergo the rating.
Another book from Robert Sapolsky, it talks about stress (the stimulating and the chronic one), and you won’t believe the extent of damage caused by the chronic stress, from cardiovascular diseases to diabetes , depressions, hypertension , mental illnesses etc. . this book should be your guide to understand stress and manage it.