Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Social Support This far into this book, this one should be a no brainer—social support makes stressors less stressful, so go get some. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. To begin, social affiliation is not always the solution to stressful psychological turmoil. We can easily think of people who would be the last ones on earth we would want to be stuck with when we are troubled. We can easily think of troubled circumstances where being with anyone would make us feel worse. Physiological studies have demonstrated this as well. Take a rodent or a primate that has been housed alone and put it into a social group. The typical result is a massive stress-response. In the case of monkeys, this can go on for weeks or months while they tensely go about figuring out who dominates whom in the group’s social hierarchy.*

Throughout this section I have been emphasizing getting social support from the right person, the right network of friends, the right community. Often, one of the strongest stress-reducing qualities of social support is the act of giving social support, to be needed. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides constructed a hierarchy of the best ways to do charitable acts, and at the top was when the charitable person gives anonymously to an anonymous recipient. That’s a great abstract goal, but often there is a staggering power in seeing the face that you have helped. In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.

First, some definitional issues. What’s religiosity versus spirituality? The former is about an institutionalized system with a historical precedent and a lot of adherents; the latter is more personal. As pointed out by Ken Pargament of Bowling Green University, the former has also come to mean formal, outward-oriented, doctrinal, authoritarian, and inhibiting of expression, while the latter often implies subjective, emotional, inward-oriented, and freely expressive. When comparing religious people with people who define themselves as spiritual but without a religious affiliation, the former tend to be older, less educated, and lower in socioeconomic status, with a higher percentage of men. So religiosity and spirituality can be very different things.

Next, if it is an intervening deity with discernible rules, the deity provides the comfort of both attribution and predictive information—carry out ritual X, or Y is going to happen. And thus, when things go wrong, there is an explanation.* If it happens that things have really gone wrong just to you, there is the opportunity to reframe the event, in the extraordinary way achieved by some of the parents of children with cancer—God has entrusted you with a burden that he can’t entrust to just anyone. If it is a deity who does all the above, and will respond to your personal and specific entreaties (especially if the deity preferentially responds to people who look/talk/eat/dress/pray like you), there is an added layer of control introduced. And if on top of all that, the deity is viewed as benign, the stress-reducing advantages must be extraordinary. If you can view cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, if you can view the inevitable cessation of the beating of the hearts of all your loved ones, all in the context of a loving plan, that must constitute the greatest source of support imaginable.

As noted by Sharon Packer of the New School for Social Research, religion can be very good at reducing stressors, but is often the inventor of those stressors in the first place.

As a more meaningful example, consider a major illness in the family, complete with a bunch of brutally difficult decisions looming, versus a death in the family. Typically, problem-solving approaches work better in the illness scenario; emotion- and relationship-based coping works better in the case of a death.

Another version of this need for switching strategies crops up in the work of Martin Seligman. Amid all the good press that an inner locus of control gets, we just saw from the John Henryism example how counterproductive it can be. Seligman’s work has demonstrated how useful and healthy it is to be able to switch loci of control. When something good happens, you want to believe that this outcome arose from your efforts, and has broad, long-lasting implications for you. When the outcome is bad, you want to believe that it was due to something out of your control, and is just a transient event with very local, limited implications.

Here’s an additional idea that doesn’t even feel half-baked yet. One of the themes of this book is the goal of contrasts. Physical stressor, you want to activate a stress-response; psychological stressor, you don’t. Basal conditions, as little glucocorticoid secretion as possible; real stressor, as much as possible. Onset of stress, rapid activation; end of stress, rapid recovery. Consider a schematic version of this, based on those Norwegian soldiers learning to parachute: the first time they jumped, their blood pressure was through the roof at the time of the jump (Part B). But in addition it was up for hours before with anticipatory terror (Part A), and for hours after—still weak-kneed (Part C). By the zillionth time they jumped, what was the profile like? The same massive stress-response during the jump (Part B), but two seconds before and after, nothing—the parachuters are just thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch. This is what “conditioning” is about. Sharpening the contrasts between on and off, between foreground and background. Increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. Framed in the context of this book, when someone has gotten a zillion jumps’ worth of experience, they turn on the stress-response only during the actual stressor. As discussed earlier, what have been winnowed away by that experience are parts A and C—the psychological stress-response. This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conv...

This is an essential truth for mental health professionals—the whole family that’s in therapy is desperately trying to get the one individual to make some changes, and nothing is going to happen if all he’s doing is staring sullenly at the Siggie Freud action figure on the shrink’s bookshelf. But once you sincerely want to change, the mere act of making an effort can do wonders. For example, clinically depressed people feel significantly better simply by scheduling a first appointment to see a therapist—it means they’ve recognized there’s a problem, it means they’ve fought their way up through the psychomotor quagmire to actually do something, it means they’ve turned a corner.

Don’t save your stress management for the weekend, or for when you’re on hold on the phone for thirty seconds. Take the time out to do it almost daily.

Summing Up So what have we learned? In the face of terrible news beyond control, beyond prevention, beyond healing, those who are able to find the means to deny tend to cope best. Such denial is not only permitted, it may be the only means of sanity; truth and mental health often go hand in hand, but not necessarily in situations like these. In the face of lesser problems, one should hope, but protectively and rationally. Find ways to view even the most stressful of situations as holding the promise of improvement but do not deny the possibility that things will not improve. Balance these two opposing trends carefully. Hope for the best and let that dominate most of your emotions, but at the same time let one small piece of you prepare for the worst. Those who cope with stress successfully tend to seek control in the face of present stressors but do not try to control things that have already come to pass. They do not try to control future events that are uncontrollable and do not try to fix things that are not broken or that are broken beyond repair. When faced with the large wall of a stressor, it is great if there emerges one singular solution that makes the wall crumble. But often, a solution instead will be a series of footholds of control, each one small but still capable of giving support, that will allow you to scale the wall. It is generally helpful to seek predictable, accurate information. However, such information is not useful if it comes too soon or too late,...

Perhaps I’m beginning to sound like your grandmother, advising you to be happy and not to worry so much. This advice may sound platitudinous, trivial, or both. But change the way even a rat perceives its world, and you dramatically alter the likelihood of its getting a disease. These ideas are no mere truisms. They are powerful, potentially liberating forces to be harnessed. As a physiologist who has studied stress for many years, I clearly see that the physiology of the system is often no more decisive than the psychology. We return to the catalogue at the beginning of the first chapter, the things we all find stressful—traffic jams, money worries, overwork, the anxieties of relationships. Few of them are “real” in the sense that that zebra or that lion would understand. In our privileged lives, we are uniquely smart enough to have invented these stressors and uniquely foolish enough to have let them, too often, dominate our lives. Surely we have the potential to be uniquely wise enough to banish their stressful hold.