This article from Wired describes the work of Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress. It gives a good overview of the causes and costs of stress, some suggestions for how to cope, and fascinating news about work toward a vaccine against stress.
Sapolsky’s book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Third Edition
The Wired article describes how social status affects stress; low-status baboons first alerted Sapolsky to the unfortunate effects of being low on the social ladder. Further studies in humans across a variety of fields have confirmed the effects. The presence or absence of control appears to be crucial to the way status mediates stress: if you have more control (which is typically associated with higher status), a demanding workload is easier to cope with than a dead-end job where you have little control.
The article suggests some things that you can do to help relieve stress (surprisingly, exercise is listed as being good for you only if you enjoy it overall—if you’re forcing yourself and gritting your teeth to get through it, maybe you should just stay home). It also describes some fascinating work on a vaccine for stress. It uses a reconfigured version of the herpes virus; all the harmful genes have been removed and replaced by various neuroprotective genes. This vaccine has been found to limit cell damage in rodents who have undergone a massive release of glucocorticoids (stress hormones). I was very impressed by this; it’s still nowhere near ready for humans, but it’s amazing to me that it could be done at all.
I really hope this work pans out in the long run and provides a stress vaccine for humans. I’d be tempted to say why bother doing all that when people can just exercise, meditate, or try to find other ways to control their stress. However, I know from personal experience that it can be extremely hard to do that. Sometimes it feels like my body has a mind of its own when it comes to stressing out, even over relatively trivial things. The reason it can be hard to combat stress is that the stress response operates on a kind of positive feedback loop. Basically, once your body and mind consistently get the idea that life is dangerous and that fear or caution is appropriate, it’s hard to persuade them otherwise. If you’re chronically stressed, you’re more sensitive to the effects of future stressors, and stresses that happen early in life can cast a very long shadow. The saddest part of the whole thing was probably this:
A recent study found that individuals abused by their parents during early childhood showed epigenetic changes to their DNA, which altered how their genes were read. The most prominent changes involved genes encoding glucocorticoid receptors, which led to a magnified stress response. The abuse might be temporary, but the damage is permanent, a wound that never heals.
It would be a wonderful world if children were never exposed to treatment or conditions that had the potential to hurt them for the rest of their lives, but that’s not possible. I hope that all the various stress-combatting activities can help even those with such a magnified stress response, but still, I wish Sapolsky and his colleagues success in their work on a human anti-stress vaccine.
