Why zebras don’t get ulcers

According to Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Neurology at Stanford University:

“Stress is anything in the external world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, “Sapolsky said. “Let’s say you’re a zebra, and a lion has leaped out, ripped your stomach out. . . this counts as being out of homeostatic balance.”

For a zebra, though, stress had an extremely short if potentially deadly span; it was “three minutes of screaming terror” after which the animal was either dead or once again roaming the Savannah and feeling safe. Human beings, on the other hand, had an “anticipatory stress response” that spun easily out of control, like a car losing traction on an icy slope.

“If you think you’re about to be knocked out of homeostatic balance and really aren’t, and this happens on a regular basis, then you’re being anxious. . . paranoid. . . profoundly human,” Saplosky said. The point is that humans, unlike primates, “can get stressed simply with thought, turning on the same stress response as does the zebra.” And when that stress response is turned on chronically, “We get sick.”

“Cerebrovascular disorder, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer’s disease: what we have now is the ecological luxury that we have diseases that slowly build up over time”. ” In Western societies it’s not that we have more stressful lives than anybody else does, we have the luxury to finally pay the price”.

http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/zebras

You may also want to check his conference on iTunes U (Stanford).