Excerpts from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
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Sustained or repeated stress can disrupt our bodies in seemingly endless ways.
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I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
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We are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.
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We have come to recognize the vastly complex intertwining of our biology and our emotions, the endless ways in which our personalities, feelings, and thoughts both reflect and influence the events in our bodies.
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Our human experience is replete with psychological stressors, a far cry from the physical world of hunger, injury, blood loss, or temperature extremes.
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We activate the stress-response in anticipation of challenges, and typically those challenges are the purely psychological and social tumult that would make no sense to a zebra.
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Touch is one of the central experiences of an infant. We readily think of stressors as consisting of various unpleasant things that can be done to an organism. Sometimes a stressor can be the failure to provide something essential, and the absence of touch is seemingly one of the most marked developmental stressors that we can suffer.
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Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer. Scientists and physicians and other caregivers have often been dim at recognizing its importance in the mundane biological processes by which organs and tissues grow and develop.
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Why should evolution set us up to do something as apparently stupid as disassembling our immune system during stress? Maybe there isn’t a good reason. This actually isn’t as crazy of a response as you might think. Not everything in the body has to have an explanation in terms of evolutionary adaptiveness.
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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.
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A scientist examined a decade’s worth of records at a suburban hospital, noting how many painkillers were requested by patients who had just had gallbladder surgery. It turned out that patients who had views of trees from their windows requested significantly less pain medication than those who looked out on blank walls.
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An extremely high percentage of primate aggression represents frustration displaced onto innocent bystanders. Humans are pretty good at it, too.
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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They’re about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
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It is important to find sources of social affiliation and support. Even in our obsessively individualistic society, most of us yearn to feel part of something larger than ourselves. But one should not mistake true affiliation and support for mere socializing. A person can feel vastly lonely in a vast crowd or when faced with a supposed intimate who has proved to be a stranger.
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In the face of strong winds, let me be a blade of grass.
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the things we all find stressful—traffic jams, money worries, overwork, the anxieties of relationships. Few of them are “real” in the sense that that zebra or that lion would understand. In our privileged lives, we are uniquely smart enough to have invented these stressors and uniquely foolish enough to have let them, too often, dominate our lives.
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Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!