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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'talways been so.

once, its purpose was to save us. if you're a normal mammal, what stressabout is three minutes of screaming terroron the savannah, after which it's either over with you or you are over with. but everything changed. what once helped us survive has nowbecome 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 abstractconcept. it's not something that maybe someday you should do something about.you need to attend to it today. in some of the most unexpectedplaces, scientists are revealing just how lethalstress can be. chronic stress could do something asunsubtle and grotesque as kill some of yourbrain cells. the impact of stress can be found deepwithin us, shrinking our brains,

adding fat to our bellies, evenunraveling our chromosomes. this is real this is not just somebody whining. stress... savior, tyrant, plague... its portrait revealed. this program was made possible bycontributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thankyou. all of us have a personalrelationship with stress, but few of us know how it operateswithin us,

or understand how the onslaught of themodern world can stress us to the point of death. fewer still know what we can do aboutit. but over the last three decades, stanforduniversity neurobiologist robert sapolsky, has been advancing ourunderstanding of stress, how it impacts our bodies, and how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible. is the aggregatebad news and more... most of the time, you can find him teaching and researching in the high-achieving, high-stressed world ofbrain science.

the paper is this huge contrast between... class... but that's only part of hisstory. 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 africaover 30 years ago on a hunch. he suspected he could find out moreabout 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 ababoon, and you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories. and if you only have to work three hoursa day, you got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else justmiserable they're not being stressed by lionschasing them all the time, they are being stressed by each other. they'rebeing 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 wastaking on their bodies, sapolsky wanted to look inside thesewild baboons at the cellular level for the very first time. to do this he would have to take their blood in themost 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 jeepand chase the baboon up and down the field

for three hours, and finally when he'swinded, 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 youspend just a bizarre amount of time doing, istrying 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 measuredlevels of hormones central to the stress response. well, to make sense of what's happening inyour body, you've got these two hormones that are the workhorses of thewhole stress response. one of them we all know adrenaline, american version, epinephrine,the other is a less known hormone calledglucocorticoids that comes out of the adrenal gland

along with adrenaline and these arethe two backbones of the stress response. that stress response and those two hormones are critical toour survival. because what stress is about is that somebodyis very intent on eating you, or you are very intent on eatingsomebody, and there is immediate crisis going on. when you run for your life, basics are all that matter. lungs workovertime to pump mammoth quantities of oxygen into the bloodstream.

the heart races to pump that oxygenthroughout the body so muscles respond instantly. you needyour blood pressure up to deliver that energy. you need to turn off anything that is notessential... growth, reproduction, you know, you're running for your life this is notime to ovulate, tissue repair, all that sort of thing... doit later, if there is a later. when the zebra escapes, its stressresponse shuts down. but human beings can't seem to findtheir off switch. we turn on the exact samestress response

for purely psychological states... thinkingabout the ozone layer, the taxes coming up,mortality, 30-year mortgages... we turn on thesame stress response and the key difference there is, we're not doing it for realphysiological reason and we're doing it non-stop. by not turning off the stress responsewhen 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 stressresponse is more damaging than the stressor itself, because the stressor is some psychologicalnonsense that you're falling for. no zebra on earth, running forits life, would understand why... fear of speaking in public would cause you to secrete the samehormones that it's doing at that point to save its life.

stress is the the body's way of rising toa challenge, whether the challenge is life-threatening,trivial or fun. you get the right amount of stress and wecall 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'vegot 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 yourelinquish a little bit of control in a setting that overall feels safe. but in real life for so many of usprimates including roberts baboons control is not an option. here you have abig male who loses a fight and chases a sub-adult who bites on a female who slaps ajuvenile that knocks an infant out of a tree, all in fifteen seconds you know in so far as a huge component ofstress is lack of control, lack of predictabilityyou'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 ofroberts early revelations was identifying thelink between stress and hierarchy in baboons. some baboons troops are over 100 strong like us they have evolved large brainsto navigate the complexities of large societies survival here requires a kind of

baboon political savvy with the mostcunning and aggressive males gaining top rank and all the perks, females for the choosing, all the foodthey can eat and an endless retenue of willinggroomers. every male knows where he stands in society who can torture him whom he can torture and who in turn the torturee cantorture well it sound like a terrible thing to confessafter thirty years but i don't actually like baboons all that much and therehas been individual guys over the years

that i absolutely love but they are these scheming, back-stabbing machiavellian bastards that hurt eachother so they're great for my science, i mean i'mnot out here to commune with them they're perfect for what i study. 22 years ago at the age of 30 sapolsky's landmarkresearch earned him the macarthur foundation'sgenius fellowship his early work measuring stress hormones from extractedblood led to two remarkable discoveries

a baboon's rank determine the level ofstress hormone in his system so if you're a dominant male you canexpect your stress hormones to be low and if you are submissive much higher, but there was an evenmore revealing find in sapolsky's sample of low rankers the have-nots had increased heart rates and higher blood pressure. this was thefirst time anyone had linked stress to thedeteriorating health of a primate in the wild. basically

if you're a stressed, unhealthybaboon in a typical troop high blood pressure. elevated levels ofstress hormones, you have an immune system that doesn't work as well your reproductive system is morevulnerable to being knocked out of whack your brain chemistry is one that hassome similarity to what you see in clinically depressed humans and all that stuff those are notpredictors of a hale and hearty old age could this also be true for that other primate as robert sapolsky

was monitoring stress in baboonsprofessor sir michael marmot was leading a study in great britain theytracked the health of more than 28,000 people over the course of fortyyears it was named for whitehall, citadel of the british civilservice where every job is ranked in a precise hierarchy the perfect laboratory to determinewhether in humans there might be a link between rank andstress i mean that's the thing about stress ithink you've got to look at it in both

acute terms and chronic terms i thinki've been under chronic stress in this organization simply because i'ma square peg in a round hole kevin brooks is a government lawyer, hisrank level 7 means he has little seniority inhis department he lives the life of a subordinate i think what i was most aware of at thetime was the workload and how i had most of it under control but one of mycases wasn't wholly under control i let it slipand it was a bit like being in a car hitting anice patch

and skating but nonetheless i came in monday morning and my immediatemanager let's call him ben, then wants a wordwith you, so we find a room he shuts the door, then he says you know what you havedone you know what happened while you were away wecouldn'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 rightthat's maybe a disciplinary matter so i left the room crossed over thecorridor to my own room

and i just burst into tears and wept andwept sarah woodall also works for thegovernment unlike kevin she is a senior civilservant there about a hundred and sixty peoplereporting to me ultimately one way or another within the sector. i do really enjoy working with our serviceit's quite a dynamic environment, it can be quite exciting i like working with lots of people i do really enjoy my job. suchdramatically different reflections

dramatize one of the most astoundingscientific findings in the whitehall study firstly it showed that the lower you were in the hierarchy thehigher your risk of heart disease and other diseases, so people second fromthe top had higher risk than those at the toppeople third from the top had a higher risk than those second from the top andit ran all the way from top to bottom. we aredealing 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 verylucky i have never experienced any problems withmy health since i've been in the senior service i haven't had a day off with ill health, i've been veryfortunate in my own situation i think that my career is pretty much tainted, is pretty much arrested because i have had, for instance, for thelast three years at work i've been off

sick for probably half that time. thisparticular 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 universalhealth care system just like the baboons all the baboons eatthe same thing, they have the same level of activity it's not the stuff that oh if you're alow-ranking baboon you smoke to much and you drink too much and if you're alow-ranking british civil service

guy you never go to the doctor and youdon't get preventive vaccines both of this studies rule out all this confounds and they produce virtually identicalfindings. on both sides of the primate divide there are soul wrenching stories andlife-threatening consequences for every subordinate like kevin living a life of baboon uncertainty thereis 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 thedart is? yes. okay guys who do you thinkis higher-ranking? our guy... yes. much carefully make sure the other guydoesn't hassle him. this year robert brought his family toafrica his wife neuropsychologist lisa sapolsky has also done extensive research withbaboons

and for the first time they broughtalong their kids benjamin and rachel. as asleep as he looks... all the baboons are perfectlywilling 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 thereanymore this is not quite like taking your kids towork day but it's a pretty central feature of who i am by now and who my wife and iare

and kids want to know where we came from and this is pretty fundamental. as inprevious seasons robert measures how individuals at everylevel of the baboon hierarchy reacts to and recovers from stress so what we're doing it is, we're now going tochallenge the system with increasing doses of epinephrine the baboon's response is immediately pickedup in its blood vital signs that can be deep frozen inperpetuity it's this storehouse of potential knowledge and igot 30 years of those blood samples

frozen away at this point because you never know when some new hormone or somenew something or other pops up and that is the thing to look at and start pulling out thissamples back to when you know jimmy carter waspresident. 150... 125... anticipating the long reach of stress isa recent idea, for one when robert was rachel's age,scientists believed stress was the cause of only one major problem. this is apicture of a major american personnel problem... an ugly sore thatdoctors call a peptic ulcer eating away at the wall of a man'sstomach.

those stomach pains that you talk about, the gnawing, the burning, those are obvious symptoms ofgastric ulcer. thirty years ago, what's the disease thatcomes to everybody's mind when you mention stress... it's ulcers, stressand ulcers. and this was the first stress related diseasediscovered, 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 yourselfabout the way you feel about it.

finding a new doctor sounds like a betteranswer to me. the connection between stress and ulcers was mainstream medical gospeluntil the early 1980s. then australian researchers identified abacteria as the major cause of ulcers. and this overthrew the entire field, this was, it's got nothing to do with stress, it'sa bacterial disorder. and i'm willing to bet half thegastroenterologists on earth when they heard about this, went out and celebratedthat night. this was, like, the greatest

news... never again were they going to have to sitdown 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 abacterial disorder... so no longer would the solution be stress management, now it could be something as simple as apill. it was a major breakthrough. stressdidn't cause ulcers. case closed. but a few years later, the research took a new twist. scientistsdiscovered that this

ulcer-causing bacteria wasn't unique... infact, as much as two thirds of the world'spopulation has it. so why do only a fraction of thesepeople develop ulcers? research revealed that when stressed, the body begins shutting down allnon-essential systems, including the immune system. and itbecame clear that, if you shut down the immune system,stomach bacteria can run amok... because what the stressdoes, is wipe out the ability of your body tobegin to repair your stomach walls

when they start rotting away from thisbacteria... so stress can cause ulcers by disrupting ourbody's ability to heal itself. if stress can undermine the immunesystem, what other havoc can it wreak? oneanswer comes from a colony of captive macaque monkeys near winston-salem, north carolina. peoplethink of stress as something that keeps them up at night, or something that makes them yell at theirkids. 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 civilservants, these primates organize themselves intodistinctly hierarchical groups, and subject one another to social stress. stress hormones can trigger an intensenegative cardiovascular response, a pounding heart, at increased bloodpressure

so if stress follows rank, would thecardiovascular system of a high-ranking macaque, call him a primate ceo, be different fromhis subordinate? when shively looked at the arteries of adominant monkey, one with little history of stress, itsarteries 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 ofhormones, had increased blood pressure, damaging arterywalls, making them repositories for plaque. so now, when you feel threatened, your arteriesdon't expand, and your heart muscle doesn't get more blood, and that can lead to a heart attack. this is notan abstract concept, it's not something that maybe someday you should do somethingabout, you need to attend to it today, because it's affecting the wayyour body functions,

and a stress today will affect yourhealth tomorrow and for years to come. social and psychological stress, whether macaque, human, or baboon, canclog our arteries, restrict blood flow, jeopardize thehealth of our heart... and that's just the beginning ofstress's deadly curse. robert's early research demonstrated that stress can work on usin an even more frightening way. well, back when i was starting

in this business what i wound up focusingon was what seemed an utterly implausible idea atthe time, which was chronic stress and chronicexposure to glucocorticoids could do something as unsubtleand grotesque as kill some of your brain cells. as a phdcandidate at rockefeller university in the early 80s, sapolsky collaborated with his mentor,doctor bruce mcewan, to follow the path of stress into thebrain. they subjected lab rats to chronic stress,

and then examined their brain cells. theteam made an astonishing find. while the cells of normal rat brainshave extensive branches, stressed rats brain cells weredramatically smaller. and what was most interesting in manyways was the part of the brain where this was happening... the hippocampus. you take intro neurobiologyanytime for the last 5000 years and what you learn is: hippocampus is learning and memory.stress in these rats shrank the part of their brainresponsible for memory.

stress affects memory in two ways. chronic stress can actually change brain circuits, so that we lose thecapacity to remember things as we need to. verysevere acute stress can have another effect, which is often... we refer to as stressmakes you stupid, which is making it impossible for you in, over short periods of time toremember things you know perfectly well. we all know that phenomenon, we all knowthat one, from back when we stressed

ourselves by not getting any sleep atall. and the next morning at nine o'clock, wecouldn't remember a single thing for that final exam. you take a human and stress thembig-time, long time, and you're going to have a hippocampus thatpays 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 withpleasure

shively suspected that there was a linkbetween stress pleasure and where we stand on thesocial hierarchy just like stress, pleasure is linked tothe chemistry of the brain when a neurotransmitter called dopamineis released in the brain it binds to receptors signaling pleasure shively used a positron emission tomography scanner toexamine the brain of a non-stressed primate our primate ceo. what we see is that the brains of dominant monkeyslight up bright with lots of dopamine

binding in this area that is so important toreward and feeling pleasure about life shively then looked at thesubordinates brain. what we discovered is that the brains ofthe subordinate monkeys are very dull because there's much less receptor-binding going on inthis area. why is that, what is it about this areaof the brain? when you have less dopamine everything around you that you would normally takepleasure in, is less pleasurable. so the

sun doesn't shine so bright, the grass isnot so green, food doesn't taste as good. it's because ofthe way your brain is functioning that you're doing that, and your brain is functioning thatway because you are low on the social status hierarchy. onefeature of low rank is being low ranking the reality, an even stronger feature bythe time you get to humans, is not just being low ranking or poor, it's feeling low ranking or poor and one of thebest ways for society to make you feel like one of the have-nots

is to rub your nose over and over andover again with what you don't have. richmond california a town where societies extremes can bespotted right from your car this is the regular commute of cardiologist jeffrey ritterman you can learn a lot about the distressand health outcome just from theneighborhoods you visit and in this neighborhood the lifeexpectancy is quite good and most of the people are pretty healthyand as we reach the top of the hill it gets to be a little bit less

privileged and as we make thistransition the social status begins to drop and correspondingly in those areas the health outcome is much worseand these people are not going to have the same life expectancy as the people in that middle classarea we started in. people are on guard, people are vigilant,they are living a more stressful life this is a community that produces highstress hormones in people and overtime it takes its toll. one ofdoctor ritterman's

patient is 65-year-old emanuel johnson his career is guidance counselor in one ofamerica's most dangerous neighborhoods well last year actually i think we had forty sevenhomicides in the last four days we had11 shootings three deaths and nine times out of ten it'sgoing to be a relative or someone i bet the kids know. for emanueljohnson there is a price for chronic exposure tothis stress five years ago i had a heart attack i'm adiabetic too. i have to work on it constantly

because i've been in this business twentyyears, so just it's stressful just working the job, so over the yearsthat, you know the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the sugar came on later but the stress was always inbefore they came on emanuel johnson's body may be tellingyet 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 notbe just putting on weight but also thedistribution

of that weight and the distribution of thatweight putting it on around the center isrelated to position in the hierarchy and that in turn may be related tochronic stress pathways. so we said, does that happen in monkeys because they organize themselves in ahierarchy too and it turns out that it does. subordinate monkeys are more likely tohave fat in their abdomen then are dominant monkeys. i think themost amazing observation that

i've made in my lab is this idea thatstress could actually change the way you deposit faton your body to me that was a bizarre idea that youcould actually alter the way fat is distributed sapolsky, shively and others think stresscould be a critical factor in the global obesity epidemic even worse fat brought on by stress is dangerous fat. you know that fatcarried on the trunk or actually inside the abdomen is much worse for youthan fat carried elsewhere in the body

it behaves differently, itproduces different kinds of hormones and chemicals and has differenteffects on your health whatever it is that works for an individual, they need to value stress reduction. i think the problem inour society is that we don't value stress reduction we in fact value the opposite we admire the person who not onlymultitasks and does two things at once but does five things at once. weadmire that person. how they manage that you know

that's an incredibly stressful way to live we have to change our valuesand value people who understand a balanced and serene life. one heartbreaking moment in historyreveals that stress may in fact damage us long before we are even aware holland late 1944 a brutal winter and a merciless army ofoccupation conspire to starve a nation it is known as the dutch hunger winterfor 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 hadheard many of those tragic memories

she and her team wanted to know ifthere were any lingering effects roseboom knew that our bodies respond to famine inmuch the same way they respond to other stressors so she set out to see if the fetuses of women pregnant during these arduous dayscould possibly be affected by stress because of meticulous record-keeping bythe dutch roseboom was able to identify over 2400people who could have been impacted. she and herteam

analyzed the data from those born duringand after the famine and came to a surprising conclusion. ithink that you could say that these babies were exposed to stress in fetal life and they're stillsuffering the consequences of that now, sixty years later. many of the dutch hunger winterchildren live today all in their sixties many still bear thescars of war we found that the babies who were conceivedduring the famine have an increased risk of cardiovasculardisease they have

more hypercholesterolemia they are more responsive to stress and generally are in poorer health than people who were bornbefore the famine or conceived after it researchers think that stress hormonesin a mother's blood triggered a change in the nervous systemof the fetus as it struggled with starvation this was the fetuses first encounterwith stress six decades later the bodies of thesedutch hunger winter children

still haven't forgotten. what we now knowis that it's not just your fat cells thatwind up being vulnerable to build up towards events like this, it's your brainchemistry, it's your capacity to learn it's your capacity to respond to stress adaptively ratherthan maladaptively how readily you fall into depression, howvulnerable you are to psychiatric disorders yet another realm in which earlyexperience 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 phenomenonis about is experience, environments start longbefore 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 thisyears multi-generational research, robert who has spent his careerdocumenting stresses effects on the individual and on the cell tracks the trail ofstress even deeper into our bodies one of the most interesting new direction in stressresearch is taking the effects of stress down toa bolts and nuts level how cells work, how genes work, that halfa dozen years ago nobody could have

imagined. the once unimaginable genetic structurescalled telomeres which protect the ends of our chromosomesfrom fraying as we age our telomeres shorten. what isinteresting is stress, by way of stress hormones can accelerate the shortening oftelomeres, so the assumption is for the exact same aged guys if you're a low-ranking guy who's justmarinating in stress hormones your telomeres are going to be shorter. sohow does this formidable finding apply

to us san rafael california once a week janet lawson keeps a veryimportant appointment. she joined other mothers who sharecircumstances that produce chronic unremitting stress. so... but she looses herbalance and that's the scary part so we just went out actually last nightand bought a new helmet just for fun she's getting older and wanting moreindependence, it's getting harder. each of these women is mother to adisabled child for us my son's only 8 and and there'senough i can handle and i don't allow

myself to go too much out, i can't. i had a friend recentlywho said to me you know i think you really shouldconsider 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 littlegirlfriend she's, even though she can't reallycommunicate she loves

she loves these remarkable women came to theattention of biologist doctor elizabeth blackburn. i didn'tdirectly know the individuals but i know the stories and i am a mothermyself and so when i heard about this cohort i really thought it was worthwhilefinding out what really is happening at the heart ofthe cells in these mothers who are doing such a difficultthing for such a long time. doctor blackburn is a leader in thefield of telomere research.

we have 46 chromosomes and they are capped off at each end by telomeres. nobody knew inhumans wether telomeres and their fraying down overlife would be affected by chronic stress, andso, we decided we would look at this cohortof chronically stressed mothers. and wedecided 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. suchstressed mothers became the focus of a study by doctor blackburn's colleague, psychologist elissa epel. mothers of young children are a highlystressed group. they are often balancing competing demandslike work and child rearing, and often don'thave time to take care of themselves. so, if you add on top of that, the extraburden of caring for a child with special needs, it can beoverwhelming.

it can tax the very reserves that sustainpeople, and if they're stressed, if they reportstress, they tend to die earlier. these women have shortened telomeres,decreased activity of this enzyme, and a very very rough number for everyyear you were taking care of a chronically ill child, you got roughly six years worth of aging. this is real, this is not just somebodywhining... this is real, medically serious aging going on, and we can see that it isactually caused

by the chronic stress. but there is hope. doctor blackburn co-discovered an enzyme, telomerase, that can repair thedamage. 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 asthis, may actually have a health benefit, by stimulating the healing effectsof telomerase. and laugh and laugh, if youdon't laugh, forget it, you can't handle it... it's... what i found is that the humor issomething...

there's a certain level of black humorthat we have about our kids that only we appreciate, we're the onlyones who get the jokes, and in a way we are the only ones who areallowed to laugh at the jokes. one of the questions in the stress field is, youknow, what are the active ingredients that reduce stress and that promotelongevity? and compassion and and caring for others maybe one of those most importantingredients. so, those maybe the factors that promote longevity and increase telomerase, and keep our cells rejuvenating andregenerating.

so, perhaps connecting with and helpingothers can help us to mend ourselves, and maybeeven live longer, healthier lives. twenty years ago, robert got a shockingpreview of this idea. the first troop he ever studied, thebaboons he felt closest to and had written books about, suffered acalamity. it would have a profound effect on hisresearch. the keekorok troop is the onei started with thirty years ago, and they were your basic old baboontroop at the time, and which means

males were aggressive, and society washighly stratified, and females took a lot of grief, in yourbasic off the rack baboon troop. and then about, by now almost twentyyears ago something horrific and scientificallyvery interesting happened to that troop. the keekorok troop took to foragingfor food in the garbage dump of a popular tourist lodge. it was a fatal move. the trashincluded meat tainted with tuberculosis. the result was that nearly half themales in the troop died.

not unreasonably, i got depressed as helland pretty damn angry about what happened. you know, when you are 30 years old, you canafford to expend a lot of emotion on a baboon troop, and there was a lot of emotion there. for robert, a decade of research appearedto have been lost. but then he made a curiousobservation about who had died and who had survived. it wasn't random who died. in that troop,

if you were aggressive, and if you werenot particularly socially connected, socially affiliative, you didn't spend yourtime 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 wereleft with was twice as many females as males. and themales who were remaining were, you know, just to use scientific jargon, theywere good guys. they were not aggressive jerks, theywere nice to the females, they were very socially affiliative, it completely transformedthe 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 thisplanet, and it would take them about six months tolearn... we're not like that in this troop. we don't do stuff like that. we're notthat aggressive. we spend more time grooming each other. males are calmerwith each other. you do not dump on a female if you're in a bad mood.

and it takes these new guys about sixmonths, and they assimilate this style, and you havebaboon culture. and this particular troop has a culture of of very low levels of aggression, and highlevels of social affiliation, they're doing that twenty years later. and so the tragedy had providedrobert 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 sameproblems 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 belongto multiple hierarchies, and you may have the worst job in yourcorporation, and no autonomy and control and predictability, but you're the captain of the companysoftball team that year. and you better bet you are going to haveall sorts of psychological means to

decide it's just a job, 9 to 5, that's not whatthe world is about, what the world is about is softball, i am the head of my team, peoplelook up to me and you come out of that deciding you are on topof the hierarchy that matters to you. well, that worked... and lots of baboon excrement. which, under the right circumstances, with the rightseason'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 yearsnow, 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 istudy the stuff 80 hours a week? no doubt everything i advises could loseall its credibility if i keel over dead from a heart attack in my early 50s. i'm not good at dealing withstress.

you know, one thing that works to myadvantage is i love my work and i love every aspect of it, so that's good... nonetheless, this is pretty clearly adifferent place than the savannah in east africa. you can do science here that's verydifferent and more interesting in some ways, you canhave 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 suremiss.

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 placewhere we have control but how do we reckon with all the timewe spend at work i would say what we've learned from the whitehall study, from the studies ofnon-human primates is the conditions in which people liveand work are absolutely vital for the health senior civil servant sara woodhall enjoys the benefits of control. idon't think i suffer from stress i don't worka 100 hours a week

i control the amount of work that i doto make sure that i can continue to deliver long-term control... the amount of control isintimately related to where you are in the occupationalhierarchy and what we have found is in general people report to us that things havegot worse. that the amount of work stress has goneup. their illness rates go up. where peoplereport to us that they got more control they're being treated more fairly atwork, there is more justice

in the amount of treatment, so thingsare getting better, the amount of illness goes down. i'vebeen 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 vastmajority of us who aren't at the top? give people moreinvolvement in the work give them more say in what they're doing give them more reward for the amount ofefforts they put out and it might well be you have not just ahealthier workplace but a more productive workplace as well.

i've managed to achieve a degree ofcontrol at the moment i'm in a very goodposition this is the first time were i feel i have had a boss who appreciates me. he doesn'tdominate team meetings he sits back he invites people to contribute, he letsother people chair he's a real manager and he, from thestart when i returned of my latest sick leave just six months ago he was so positive i think i feelsufficiently empowered

who would have imagined that robert's baboons would point ushumans towards a stress-free utopia. this maysound a little fanciful but i think what we'retrying to create is a better society. the implicationsboth of the baboons and of the british civil services is howcan we create a society that has the conditionsthat will allow people to flourish. and that's where this is heading tocreate a better society that promotes humanflourishing

so what does the baboons teach the averageperson in there don't bite somebody because you'rehaving a bad day don't just displace on them in any sort ofmanner, social affiliation is a remarkably powerful thing and that said by somebody who lives in aworld where ambition and drive and type a things and all of that sort of thingsdominates those things are really important and oneof 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 onegeneration transform what are supposed to be textbooks social systems, sort of engraved instone, we don't have an excuse when we saythey're certain inevitabilities about human social systems and so, the haunting question thatendures from robert's life work are we brave enough to learn from ababoon? the kikarak troop didn't justsurvive without stress

they thrived. can we?