Sapolsky Stress Quotes & Sayings

I need the shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don't see that type of blue around here. — Cath Crowley

Even though I don't necessarily believe in everything that's supernatural, I like being scared and I like things that are suspenseful. — Gemma Chan

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Habim had told Iseult once, War is senseless. She'd always thought he'd meant it figuratively. Now she knew he'd meant it exactly as he'd said. War was senseless, overwhelming her sight, her touch, her hearing. Even her witchery. Every piece of Iseult was crushed. Crumbled. Shattered to shreds. — Susan Dennard

Once randomly aggressive behavior gets started in an organization, it tends to be contagious, rapidly spreading itself because of a built-in mammalian device for relieving stress, called redirected aggression. Stanford physiologist Robert Sapolsky describes it this way:"Numerous psychoendocrine studies show that in a stressful or frustrating circumstance, the magnitude of the subsequent stress-response is decreased if the organism is provided with an outlet for frustration. For example, the [glucocorticoid] secretion triggered by electric shock in a rat is diminished if the rat is provided with a bar of wood to gnaw on, a running wheel, or, as one of the most effective outlets, access to another rat to bite. — Richard Conniff

There are so many beautiful girls who aren't photogenic. In real life, half the models you see look really hideous. — Lisanne Falk

I've always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn't. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me. — Conor McGregor

Males who do extreme amounts of exercise, such as professional soccer players and runners who cover more than 40 or 50 miles a week, have less LHRH, LH, and testosterone in their circulation, smaller testes, less functional sperm. They also have higher levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstreams, even in the absence of stress. (A similar decline in reproductive function is found in men who are addicted to opiate drugs.) — Robert M. Sapolsky

Stress is not a state of mind ... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Prior to the monotheistic Yahweh, the gods made sense, in that they had familiar, if supra-human appetites - they didn't just want a lamb shank, they wanted the best lamb shank, wanted to seduce all the wood nymphs, and so on. But the early Jews invented a god with none of those desires, who was so utterly unfathomable, unknowable, as to be pants-wettingly terrifying. So even if His actions are mysterious, when He intervenes you at least get the stress-reducing advantages of attribution - it may not be clear what the deity is up to, but you at least know who is responsible for the locust swarm or the winning lottery ticket. There is Purpose lurking, as an antidote to the existential void. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) - their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds. To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, "Are you crazy? That's stressful." Throughout hominid history, if you're running 26 miles in a day, you're either very intent on eating someone or someone's very intent on eating you. — Robert M. Sapolsky

The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat develops a prolonged stress-response: its heart rate and glucocorticoid secretion rate go up, for example. For convenience, we can express the long-term consequences by how likely the rat is to get an ulcer, and in this situation, the probability soars. In the next room, a different rat gets the same series of shocks - identical pattern and intensity; its allostatic balance is challenged to exactly the same extent. But this time, whenever the rat gets a shock, it can run over to a bar of wood and gnaw on it. The rat in this situation is far less likely to get an ulcer. You have given it an outlet for frustration. Other types of outlets work as well - let the stressed rat eat something, drink water, or sprint on a running wheel, and it is less likely to develop an ulcer. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Digestion is quickly shut down during stress ... The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else - not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled - But that one is not - that one knows me.

Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you. — Walt Whitman

A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Wisdom and strength, and my family, is what I'd like for you to pray for. — George W. Bush

By using two elephants to do the job, damage will occur just because of how large, lumbering, and unsubtle elephants are. They squash the flowers in the process of entering the playground, they strew leftovers and garbage all over the place from the frequent snacks they must eat while balancing the seesaw, they wear out the seesaw faster, and so on. This is equivalent to a pattern of stress-related disease that will run through many of the subsequent chapters: it is hard to fix one major problem in the body without knocking something else out of balance (the very essence of allostasis spreading across systems throughout the body). Thus, you may be able to solve one bit of imbalance brought on during stress by using your elephants (your massive levels of various stress hormones), but such great quantities of those hormones can make a mess of something else in the process. And a long history of doing this produces wear and tear throughout the body, termed allostatic load. — Robert M. Sapolsky

A good catcher is the quarterback, the carburetor, the lead dog, the pulse taker, the traffic cop and sometimes a lot of unprintable things, but no team gets very far without one. — Miller Huggins

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. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other. — Robert M. Sapolsky

As an independent, my views, in fact, are a little bit different than many of my Democratic colleagues. — Bernie Sanders

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right. — Mel Brooks