The author spends 22 chapters beating us to death with hundreds of studies about how and why stress is bad for us. He focuses strongly on the chemistry and physiology of stress in animals and humans. He then spends 1 chapter on things we can do about it. Basically: don't be born poor, don't have a bad marriage, exercise and be religious. There. Now you don't have to read the book.

Actually I had to read this book for one of my study courses ‘Stress and Health’ so you can already guess what mood I was in when I started reading it. Oh how wrong I was: I never thought I’d like a study book that much - although Psychology is a great study - and would catch myself laughing out loud during the majority of the chapters. What a great book. I would definitely recommend it, especially if you want to know more about stress (in its broadest sense) and everything related to that (spoiler: a lot, I almost got stressed out - don’t do that folks - by reading about all the different kinds of stress and the possibility to die from it… lol). That being said, I think living the zebra life is maybe one I’d sign for ;)

الكتاب يتناول موضوع القلق وتاثيره على الجسم والانسان بشكل عام منذ قبل ولاده وحتى طفولته وحتى موته وهل يؤثر قلقه وقلق امه ومجتمعه ومن حوله عليه بطريقة مباشرة او غير مباشرة

وفي الختام يعطي نصائح على كيفية التخلص من القلق والتقليل منه

قرأة ممتعة للجميع

I really have nothing to add to the top review on this at the moment by uhh, user Always Pouting. I picked it up because I really like Robert Sapolsky, and while I didn't learn a ton of new stuff here, it's exactly the kind of thing I would recommend to someone who wants to learn more because Robert Sapolsky is really good at explaining things in a way anyone can understand. I didn't think this book was perfect, but it's a good jumping off point for considering how stress impacts you from a scientific perspective.

A hugely informative book that served as a refresher of all my Biopsych courses, only harder and more complicated. Sapolsky missed his calling as a comedian. He's genuinely likeable, and there really aren't that many physiology books currently on the market that can be described as "laugh out loud funny".

But I did. I LOL'd. Unabashed.

The take-home (or punchline, as Sapolsky was fond of referring to every thought that wasn't a quip -- but after 560 pages of the guy, I can say with a fair degree of authority that the irony was deliberate) is a continual state of stress ramps up your glucocorticoids which, essentially, burns you out. Diverts power from the thrusters, eats holes in your stomach, gives your immune system blind spots -- pretty much anything that sucks.

I liked his fond remembrances of his time among the baboons, stress within primate hierarchies, and any other lapses into evolutionary psych he made. But then, I tend to. I also liked how, after writing a book about stress, he strongly implied that meditation does nothing to help aside from in the moments when you're actively (inactively?) meditating, and religiousness/spirituality doesn't make you healthier, or prone to faster recovery, or anything except less stressed if your child has cancer.

Crowning achievement of the book was the Classic Coke anecdote. Genius.
Honorable mention to the warpath he went on regarding Dr. Siegel, the loon M.D. who initially perpetuated the flagrantly erroneous belief that you can just shrug off cancer if you keep a positive attitude and powerful faith in God. And I quote:

"This is relatively benign gibberish, and history buffs may even feel comforted by those among us who live the belief system of medieval peasants."

Savage.

I was also a big fan of his stress-avoidance recommendations. "Don't be born poor" most of all. Huh. Good idea. The whole SES section was fascinating, if deeply disheartening and vaguely socialistic. But, hey! Can't argue with math. I was intrigued by rich people experiencing more stress in higher income-inequality countries, but I don't think "cuz they're always on guard to keep poor people out of their sweet mansion" is the actual reason. That was a stretch. Li'l more research needed on that front, I reckon.

If nothing else, I walked away from this book with intimate knowledge of a hormone I didn't know existed, and a whole lexicon of new medical jargon with which to alienate friends and loved ones.

Sapolsky's 'Behave' was in my list of favourites back in 2021. So when I got to know about this book, it it was a must-read, and that title really helped. The book was originally written in 1994, and is now in its third edition, so things continue to be updated.
He gets the title out of the way very quickly, and this is perhaps the underlying premise of the book - zebras, and the lions who chase them both are stressed, and their bodies are brilliantly adapted to handle these emergencies - fear of life and fear of starvation respectively. Go up to the apex predator - humans, and it can even handle things like drought, famine, pests. But when we include psychological and social disruptions - from finding a parking spot to an unpleasant conversation with a manager/spouse etc - and start worrying about them, we turn on the same physiological responses. When this is chronic (and it is - think about the things you get stressed about daily), the stress response itself becomes harmful to the body, sometimes even more than the stressor itself. Because they were not meant to do this all the while, they were only for emergencies!
The early pages also draw out a significant difference - between homeostasis and allostasis. 'The brain seeks homeostasis', but the concept itself is now modernised because there is no single optimal level (e.g. it can't be the same when sleeping vs skiing) and because we now understand that the point cannot always be reached by a local regulatory mechanism, it requires 'the brain coordinating body-wide changes, often including changes in behaviour'. And this tinkering has its own second-order consequences. Even more complicated because in allostatic thinking, there can be changes made in anticipation of a level going awry. When it is stressed for 'emergencies', the body goes for homeostasis, with consequences in the long run.
The book then traces out the working of the brain - and the regulation of glands and hormones (and how it is different in males and females), before getting into specific areas that stress specialises in! This includes physiological things cardiovascular health, ulcers and IBS, (oh, if only I knew this 3 years ago, I would have been better equipped to deal with idiot doctors) pregnancy and parenting, sex and reproduction, pain, immunity and diseases, memory, sleep, cancer (the jury is still out on this) and aging and death, as well as psychological domains like addiction, depression. It also looks at how temperament and personality can either assist or resist stress.
In the personality section, Sapolsky practically described my (former) Type A personality down to a behavioural "time-pressuredness" (research by Meyer Friedman and colleagues), default hostility, and a persistent sense of insecurity, the last being a predictor of cardiovascular problems. Add to it disciplined, discomfort with ambiguity, and (formerly) repressive in terms of emotional expression, and you have my profile! Damn!
Towards the end, there is also a very interesting section (and studies) on how socio-economic-status (SES) can affect stress. The poor have more chronic daily stressors, and feeling poor (not the same as being poor) in our socioeconomic world (digital media expands 'our' from friends, family and neighbours to anyone on Insta) predicts poor health. Income inequality predicts mortality rates across all ages in the US.
The last chapter is on managing stress - exercise, meditation, increasing control and predictability, social support, finding outlets for frustration. And building coping mechanisms around fixed rules and flexible strategies - when stress management is not working, instead of trying extra hard on our preferred strategy - problem solving/emotional/social support - switch the approach.
I was expecting a fair amount of trudging and it turned out to be that way. But it is definitely fascinating to see the stress fingerprint in so many of our ailments - ranging from very visible to almost invisible. Great book, if you have the interest and patience for it. :)

1. Water shortage in California. Homeostatic solution: mandate smaller water tanks. Allostatic: smaller toilet tanks, convince people to conserve water, buy rice from SE Asia instead of doing water-intensive farming in a semi-arid state.
2. When stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the parasympathetic nervous system is turned down, the heart shifts into a higher gear, glucocorticoids enter the play enhancing the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine. As a result blood pressure goes up, the blood sent to nonessential areas like digestive tract and kidneys go down (fascinating how we wet our pants in fear though the kidney function is kept low - basically to remove excess water quickly from the bladder). Chronic use of this mechanism promotes plaque formation in arteries by increasing the chances of blood vessels being damaged and inflamed and the likelihood of platelets, fat, cholesterol sticking to those areas.
3. Also when stressed, the contractions in the colon increase to get rid of the 'dead weight'. See how IBS and diarrhoea works!
4. In a British Victorian family, the mother's favourite son David dies and she takes to bed, ignoring her 6 year old son. And when the boy comes to the darkened room, she asks 'David, is that you?', before saying 'Oh, it's only you'. The younger boy stops growing, because this is the only way he seems to get some chance of affection. He is J M Barrie, the author of Peter Pan!
5. Stress-induced analgesia (not feeling pain during strenuous activities - from war to exercise) and stress- induced hyperalgesia (feeling more pain, e.g. waiting for a dentist) Both are emotional reactivity to pain and do not involve pain receptors or the spinal cord.
6. Personality style can lead to stress-related disease - either due to a mismatch between the magnitude of stressors and respective stress responses, or even reacting to a situation that is not a stressor
7. How does social capital turn into better health throughout the community? Less social isolation. More rapid diffusion of health information. Potentially social constraints on publicly unhealthy behaviour. Less psychological stress. Better organised groups demanding better public services.
8. If you want to improve health and quality of life, and decrease the stress, for the average person in a society, you do so by spending money on public goods - better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. The bigger the income inequality is in a society, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average. The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead they would derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good - a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As (Robert) Evans writes, "The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be its disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have (available to them) to mount effective political opposition." He notes how this "secession of the wealthy" pushes toward "private affluence and public squalor". And more public squalor means more of the daily stressors and allostatic load that drives down health for everyone. For the wealthy, this is because of the costs of walling themselves off from the rest of society, and for the rest of the society because they have to live in it.
8. Heaven, we are told, consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. In contrast, hell consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. :D
9. In a diagnosis that helps explain the confusing and contradictory aspects of the cosmos that have baffled philosophers, theologians, and other students of the human condition for millennia, God, creator of the universe and longtime deity to billions of followers, was found Monday to suffer from bipolar disorder. ~ The Onion https://www.theonion.com/god-diagnose...

Ar yra geresnė knyga apie stresą ir jo poveikį mums? Galbūt, bet kol kas su tokia nesusidūriau, tad laurai atitenka Roberto Sapolskio knygai su itin šmaikščiu pavadinimu, kurio prasmė jau greit atsiskleidžia knygoje. Knyga parašyta labiau moksliniu stiliumi, tačiau jis labai gyvybingas, šmaikštus ir aiškiai suprantamas. Ilgametė Sapolskio patirtis dirbant su gyvūnais ir tyrinėjant stresą atsiskleidžia šioje knygoje. Knygą labai rekomenduoju, ji taip pat turi ne tik teorinių, bet ir praktinių įžvalgų.

I may be a bit biased. I really like Robert Sapolsky. I've taken his human biology course online, and he's very kind when you email him. The book is a thorough examination of stress in the contemporary context, and there's a tonne of scientific jargon in some parts of the book. You can, however, get through it but I recommend you spend a bit of extra time and effort to actually understand what he's trying to convey. In general, Stress is bad for you. Like really bad, and do whatever you can in your current environment to get rid of it.

First off, Sapolsky is a delightful writer. For a rather depressing book on all the scientifically understood harmful effects of stress, this book is often laugh out loud funny. But beyond that, Sapolsky is brilliant. He makes complex topics seem simple, but doesn't simplify to the point of losing the complexity. Quite a feat. If you are ever curious about examining what stress really is, and what effect it has on your body, this book is a must-read (especially useful I think for yoga teachers).

У боротьбі зі стресом ця книга сумнівний помічник. Головні поради - народитись у багатій родині, займатись медитацією і ходити до психологів. Проте наукова база дійсно цікава і вражаюча.

Sapolsky is god. He's a great writer. But he is an immortal lecturer. Youtube his Stanford classes and behold! Pure genius.

Kerrassaan oivallinen ja kattava kirja stressistä, siitä mitä se meille tekee ja mitä se ei tee. Ja mitä sille voi tehdä. Ei typeriä kikkakolmosia vaan laajaa tietämystä ja sujuvaa tekstiä.