14 DAY TRIAL // You are always in stress: the deadline you have not managed to accomplish, the kids, the partner which is so sensitive at any of your words, going out with the lover...
Being so highly intelligent and social, the human beings experience more stress-related diseases than any other creature, being constantly worried by anything, for the future of his/her family, health, job and so on.
But we are not the only species suffering from stress: some other highly intelligent mammals, especially primates, suffer from it too, like the baboons, and their study could explain better the human stress mechanism. "Nowadays, relatively few people die from the flu; instead most humans die of ailments that are relatively new to our species, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease," said Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroscientist who studies baboons in Kenya. "These are all diseases that are either caused by or being worsened by stress," said Sapolsky.
Level zero of stress is the homeostasis, a state in which an organism is in perfect balance: it has an ideal level of glucose amount in the blood stream and the body's temperature is just right.
A stressor is any factor that could make the organism get out of this stage. "You're a zebra, a lion has leapt out, ripped your stomach open and you still need to get out of there. This counts as being out of homeostatic balance. The stress response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis", explained Sapolsky.
This is the animal stress, but humans can forecast that something harmful is going to happen to them and have a reaction to stress even before the event actually happens. If a person is on a continuous stage of preparing for stress situations it is dealing with chronic stress. "Sit down a hippo and try to describe what's up with the ozone layer and he's going to have no idea what you're talking about. We go exactly through that stress response as that zebra or lion, but we do it for chronic psychosocial reasons," he said. "This condition among humans evolved from dealing with short-term crises. For 99 % of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages," he said.
A stressed organism releases stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol (this occurs in all vertebrates), that put the organism in stage of fight or flee. They mobilize the body's resources: they make fat cells release sugar in their blood streams. "Next, you want to deliver this energy as fast as you can. You increase your heart rate, your blood pressure and your breathing rate, to get that glucose to your thigh muscles in two seconds instead of three and you're that much more likely to survive."
"However, humans, also generate these responses in non-life threatening situations. If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure," Sapolsky said.
Making the organism to continuously and - what's even worse - vainly function at this rate leads to its impairment. "If you're chronically shutting down the digestive system, there's a bunch of gastrointestinal disorders you're more at risk for as well."
For 30 years, Sapolsky's team has been making behavioral and physiological researches (like blood samples, tissue biopsies and electrocardiograms) on baboons, primates with no predators that suffered from environmental and social stress sources like humans.
Unhealthy baboons possess elevated levels of stress hormones and their immune and reproductive systems are shut down. "We've found that baboons have diseases that other social mammals generally don't have," Sapolsky said. "If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression. The reason baboons are such good models is, like us, they don't have real stressors," Sapolsky said.
"If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines; they're getting done in by each other."
The only difference is that humans can employ different mechanisms of dealing with psychosocial stress. "We are capable of social supports that no other primate can even dream of. For example, I might say, 'This job, where I'm a lowly mailroom clerk, really doesn't matter. What really matters is that I'm the captain of my softball team or deacon of my church,' that sort of thing. It's not just somebody sitting here, grooming you with their own hands."
People also possess a powerful support system. "We can actually feel comfort from the discovery that somebody on the other side of the planet is going through the same experience we are and feel, I'm not alone. We can even take comfort reading about a fictional character, and there's no primate out there that can feel better in life just by listening to Beethoven." added Sapolsky.