Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex

by Aubrey Marcus

The real problem is when the body can’t distinguish between physical threats and psychosocial threats—threats to our job security, or bank account, or social status. These threats often have no concrete conclusion, and so the stress hormones that were built for brief bursts to ward off acute stress go buck wild in your brain box, and chronic stress develops. Leading neuroscientist and stress specialist Robert Sapolsky summed it up for the Stanford News: “If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you’re dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for some of the leading causes of death in Westernized life.”