This book has helped me understand the science of stress and some unpleasant results that I've been experiencing. I'm someone who always wants to know WHY certain things are happening, and finds that helpful when figuring out how to fix them. I really like the author's tone: He's a scientist, but one with a great sense of humor and also a lot of compassion. This book, while not exactly New Agey/touchy-feely, is also not cold and clinical as it explains the biology behind stress and how it affects body and mind. Once you reach the point where you say, "OK, now I understand how stress is affecting me ... Now what do I DO about it?," you'll probably need resources other than this book. But if, like me, you like to start out with a good understanding of what the problem is, then this book is a great place to find that foundation. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Third Edition
This new edition of why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers is extensively revised and exceeds earlier additions in terms of explaining the effects of stress on the body. This is a very detailed exploration, but well worth the sometimes difficult reading. If you don't have some sort of background in biology, you may find that you have to read it a bit more slowly.
Sapolsky as always explains his topics very clearly and uses humor and good examples to illustrate important points. I particularly liked his analogy of two elephants on a teeter totter for the ways in which the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system can become imbalanced under chronic stress from being activated to frequently and where each is trying to compensate for the massive activation of the other in a vicious cycle.
Sapolosky also develops the implications of long term stress and explains the mechanisms involved in a lot of detail. He also explores how mechanisms that evolved to save our lives in actual life and death struggles can hurt us by being activated over things like traffic jams or missed deadlines.
An example that he uses in the book is that if you are a zebra with your guts dragging on the ground while you are being stocked by a predator, then maybe it's useful not to experience pain under stress. If you may not be alive in an hour, then shutting down long term building processes and depressing short term immunity makes sense as does a narrowing of the attention.
The author goes on to further explain in the example above that the real problem comes when the flight or fight response is triggered chronically and long term repair and important building projects like bolstering immunity are depressed for long periods of time. This example helped me to understand the logic of why our stress reactions work the way they do. The way I explained it was paraphrased from memory, but Sapolsky tells a story that makes sense and helps you to remember important points.
While I was reading this book, I could viscerally sense the kinds of things stress was doing to my body. The information and evidence presented here is very compelling. Sapolsky also looks at how stress is linked to cancer and other controversial topics. He sensitively explores all sides of the arguments and why direct causal links are so difficult to prove for things like cancer. On the other hand, he doesn't back off from looking at the implications of stress with respect to cancer or other difficult areas to research.
Sapolosky is not only a good scientist with excellent credentials, he is a very fine writer. I recommend this book without reservation to anyone who wants an in-depth knowledge of how stress affects the body.
From my background as a biologist, this book really covers the topic with strong support and detail. From my perspective as a reader, it's a true page-turner that doesn't just accomplish its point, but goes well beyond. Sapolsky brilliantly makes incredibly complex systems seem simple and mechanistic by breaking them into manageable pieces and using strong analogies, making a prior knowledge of neuroscience unecessary. Humorous, witty, and easy-to-understand, this book is a must for anyone remotely interested in the topic of stress!
Suddenly I found out that my co-workers needed medicines to go on with their lives, a friend of mine is a workaholic and she has terrible stomachaches, another one took her life after a long depression following a very stressful time, ...
My life is great but sometimes I have to fight against anxiety that comes from I do not know where...
I read this book and now at least I have an explanation, a scientific model for certain behaviours.
The language is so clear that anyone can understand what stress is, how it affects our bodies, why some people develop ulcer and others do not. And it is funny, entertaining, telling little stories as well as technical data.
It is exactly what a scientific book for the masses must be. I highly recommend it.
Imagine yourself at your favorite watering hole in an African savannah. You spot a lion. Your body hops up. Your stress response shifts into high gear. And all just as it was designed to do. Now imagine yourself sitting in front of a new mortgage, worrying about if your boss likes you, or if you look too fat, or your hair is just not falling the way it did after its fresh new cut. Your body hops up, and your stress response shifts into high gear. Only difference, no lion. And this lionless stress, day after day after day will take its toll. Depression, ulcers, heart disease, colitis, irritable bowl syndrome, and more.
Sapolsky's hard-hitting and entertaining book will inform you exactly why too much stress will make you sick. He lives half of his life in a neuroendocrine lab in Stanford, the other half camped out with stressed out baboons in Africa. He draws both on personal experience and solid research to lead you through a detailed understanding of how stress affects our bodies as well as our psyches. You'll get no mantras, no workbook exercises, and no easy step-by-step guides to follow. Nor does he fool around with feel good proclamations. What you will get is a lot of scientifically based facts based on solid research.
Sapolsky is a scientist, and comes to the subject with a scientist's critical eyes. He is also a brilliant and entertaining writer, who knows how to give his message a personal touch. You'll sit through page after page feeling as though he's talking just to you. (Did you know that Type A personality was first discovered by an upholsterer? Or that graves used to be robbed by medical schools to provide it with fresh bodies, and how this is connected to why SIDS was erroneously thought to be caused by abnormally large thyroids?) His scathing attack on Bernie "all-you-need-is-love" Siegel's "Love, Medicine and Miracles" in itself is worth the price of admission. Sapolsky is to stress science, neuroendocrinology and primatology what Springsteen is to rock-n-roll. If you ever get a chance to hear him lecture, camp out to buy your tickets well ahead of time. - Sapolsky - Psychology - Biology - Science'
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