“We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it -… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
As long as experiencing your optimal level of good stress doesn't damage others, it's hard to objectively define where normal enjoyment of… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD—one reason why cognition… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“if you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from,… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“contemporary studies show that the worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed “fight or flight” stress response.… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function—working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories,… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“how acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Meaney and colleagues, one of the most cited papers published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience. They had shown previously that offspring… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Work by Shelley Taylor of UCLA shows that “fight or flight” is the typical response to stress in males, and naturally, the… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Joseph LeDoux at New York University has shown how the BLA learns fear.fn14,20 Expose a rat to an innate trigger of fear—a… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease. — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress. — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The gigantic challenge is the magnitude of the individual differences in the optimal set point for "good stress." For one person, it's… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus—essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy—while strengthening frontal… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Moreover, sustained stress and glucocorticoid exposure enhance LTP and suppress LTD in the amygdala, boosting fear conditioning, and suppress LTP in the… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“This is central to understanding the nature of motivation, as well as its failures (e.g., during depression, where there is inhibition of… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Secure-attachment 7Rs show more generosity than average. Thus 7R has something to do with generosity—but its effect is entirely context dependent.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Finally, for the same criminal conviction, the more stereotypically Af-rican a black individual’s facial features, the longer the sentence.15 In contrast, juries view black… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“So testosterone does subtle things to behavior. Nonetheless, this doesn’t tell us much because everything can be interpreted every which way. Testosterone increases anxiety—you… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.” — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“No brain region is an island, and the formation of circuits connecting far-flung brain regions is crucial—how else can the frontal cortex use its… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function—working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
“Most broadly, the PFC chooses between conflicting options—Coke or Pepsi; blurting out what you really think or restraining yourself; pulling the trigger or not.… — Robert M. Sapolsky Copy Share Image
