Stress: Portrait of a Killer | NatGeo Documentary

[00:00:13][Music] [Music] what am I thinking about mortgage money pouring out I know cancer when I feel it there she what is she up to never call me never say a word stress it is everyone's Inferno be deviling our minds igniting our nights offending our equilibrium but it hasn't always been so once its purpose was to save us if you're a normal mammal what stress is about is three minutes of screaming terror on the Savannah after which it's on there over with the air over with but everything changed what once helped us survive has now become the scourge of our lives and I just burst into tears and wet and wet today scientific discoveries in the field and in the lab prove that stress is not a state of mind but something measurable and dangerous this is not an abstract concept it's not something that maybe someday you should do something about you need to attend to it today in some of the most unexpected places scientists are revealing just how lethal stress can be chronic stress could do something as unsubtle and grotesque as kill some of your brain cells the impact of stress can be found deep within us the shrinking our brains adding fat to our bellies even unraveling our chromosomes this is real this is not just somebody whining stress Savior tyrant plague its portrait revealed [Music] [Music] all of us have a personal relationship with stress but few of us know how it operates within us or understand how the onslaught of the modern world can stress us to the point of death fewer still know what we can do about it but over the last three decades Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has been advancing our understanding of stress how it impacts our bodies and how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible is the aggregate bad news most of the time you can find in teaching and researching in the high achieving high stressed world of brain science as this huge contrast between but that's only part of his story for a few weeks every year or so Sapolsky shifts his lab to a place more than 9,000 miles away on the plains of the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya East Africa [Music] Robert Sapolsky first came to Africa over 30 years ago on a hunch he suspected he could find out more about humans stress and disease by looking at nonhumans and he knew just the nonhumans [Music] you live in a place like this you're a baboon and you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories and you only have to work three hours a day you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable they're not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time they're being stressed by each other they're being stressed by social and psychological tolt invented by their own species they're a perfect model for westernized stress-related disease to determine just what toll stress was taking on their bodies Sapolsky wanted to look inside these wild baboons at the cellular level for the very first time to do this he would have to take their blood in the moat mission basically what you're trying to do is anesthetize a baboon without him knowing it's coming because you don't want to have any other scientist Batory stress so you can't just you know get in your Jeep and chase the bad moon up and down the field for three hours and finally when he's winded darting with an anaesthetic the big advantages of a blowgun are that it's pretty much silent and hasn't a whole lot in the way of moving parks but the big drawback is it doesn't go very far so what you spend just bizarre amount of time doing is trying to figure out how to look nonchalant around a baboon [Music] I'm time okay he is wobbling now here he goes from each baboon blood sample Robert measured levels of hormones central to the stress response well to make sense of what's happening in your body you've got these two hormones that are the workhorses a whole stress response one of them we all know adrenaline American version epinephrine the other is a less known hormone called glucocorticoids comes out of the adrenal gland along with adrenaline and these are the two backbones of the stress response that stress response and those two hormones are critical to our survival because what stress is about is if somebody is very intent on eating you or you are very intent on eating somebody and there's an immediate crisis going on when you run for your life basics are all that matter lungs work overtime to pump mammoth quantities of oxygen into the bloodstream the heart races to pump that oxygen throughout the body so muscles respond instantly you need your blood pressure up to deliver that energy you need to turn off anything that's not essential and growth reproduction you know you're running for your life this is no time to ovulate tissue repair all that sort of thing do it later if there is a later when the zebra escapes it's stress response shuts down but human beings can't seem to find their off switch we turn on the exact same stress response for purely psychological states thinking about the ozone layer the taxes coming up mortality 30-year mortgages we turn on the same stress response and the key difference there is we're not doing it for a real physiological reason and we're doing it non-stop by not turning off the stress response when reacting to life's traffic jams we wallow in a corrosive bath of hormones even though it's not life or death we hyperventilate our hearts pound muscles tense ironically after a while the stress response is more damaging than the stressor itself because the stressor is some psychological nonsense that you're falling for no zebra on earth running for its life would understand why fear of speaking in public would cause you to secrete the same hormones that it's doing at that point to save its life stress is the body's way of rising to a challenge whether the challenge is life-threatening trivial or fun you get the right amount of stress when we call stimulation the goal in life isn't to your room to rest your life or to have the right type stress because when it's the right type we love it we jump out of our seats to experience it we pay good money to get stressed that way it tends to be a moderate stressor we've got a stressor that's transient it's not for nothing roller coaster rides are not three weeks long and most of all what they're about is you relinquish a little bit of control in a setting that overall feels safe but in real life for so many of us primates including Roberts baboons control is not an option so you have some big male who loses a fight and chases a sub-adult who fights an adult female who slaps a juvenile who knocks an infant out of a tree only 15 seconds no in so far as a huge component of stress is like a control lack of predictability you're sitting there and yours is watching the zebra and somebody else is having a bad day and it's your rear end that's gonna get slashed so tremendously psychologically stressful for the folks further down on the hierarchy one of Roberts early revelations was identifying the link between stress and hierarchy and baboons some baboon troops are over 100 strong like us they have evolved large brains to navigate the complexities of large societies survival here requires a kind of baboon political savvy with the most cunning and aggressive males gaining top rank and all the perks females for the choosing all the food they can eat and an endless retinue of willing groomers every male knows where he stands in society who can torture him he can torture and who in turn the torture II can torture well sounds like a terrible thing to confess after 30 years but I don't actually like baboons all that much there's been individual guys over the years who I absolutely love but there are these schemee backstabbing Machiavellian bastards they're awful to each other so they're great for my science I mean I'm not out here to commune with them they're perfect for what I study 22 years ago at the age of 30 Sapolsky x' landmark research earned him the MacArthur Foundation's genius fellowship his early work measuring stress hormones from extracted blood led to two remarkable discoveries a baboon's rank determined the level of stress hormone in his system so if you're a dominant male you can expect your stress hormones to be low and if you're submissive much higher but there was an even more revealing fine in Sapolsky sample low rancors the have-nots had increased heart rates and higher blood pressure this was the first time anyone had linked stress to the deteriorating health of a primate in the wild basically if you're you know a stressed unhealthy baboon and a typical true high blood pressure elevated levels of stress hormones you have an immune system that doesn't work as well your reproductive system is more vulnerable to being knocked out of whack your brain chemistry is one that there's some similarity to what you see in clinically depressed humans and all that stuff those are not predictors of a hale and hearty old age [Music] could this also be true for that other primate as Robert Sapolsky was monitoring stress and baboons professor Sir Michael Marmot was leading a study in Great Britain that tracked the health of more than 28,000 people over the course of 40 years it was named for Whitehall Citadel of the British civil service where every job is ranked in a precise hierarchy the perfect laboratory to determine whether in humans there might be a link between rank and stress I mean that's the thing about stress I think you've got to look at it in both acute terms and chronic terms and I think I've been under chronic stress in this organization simply because I'm a square peg in a round hole Kevin Brooks is a government lawyer his rank level 7 means he has little seniority in his department he lives the life of a subordinate I think what I was most aware of at the time was the workload and how I had most of it under control but one of my cases wasn't wholly under control I'd let it slip and it was a bit like um you know in being in a car and hitting an ice patch and skidding but nonetheless I came in Monday morning and my immediate manager let's call him Ben Ben wants a word with you so we find a room she shuts the door then he says you know what you've done you know what happened while you were away we couldn't find one of your files do you know what that meant he just gave me a darn good kicking you know psychologically did me over and at the end of that it was more threats it was right this may be a disciplinary matter so I left the room crossed over the corridor to my own room and I just burst into tears and wet and wet Sarah Woodall also works for the government unlike Kevin she is a senior civil servant there are about 160 people reporting to me ultimately one way or another within the sector I do really enjoy working with all service it's quite a dynamic environment it's can be quite exciting I like working with lots of people so yeah I I do really enjoy my job such dramatically different reflections dramatize one of the most astounding scientific findings in the Whitehall study firstly it showed that the lower you were in the hierarchy the higher your risk of heart disease and other diseases so people second from the top had higher risk than those at the top people third from the top had higher risk than those second from the top and it ran all the way from top to bottom we're dealing with people in stable jobs with no industrial exposures and yet your position in the hierarchy intimately related to your risk of disease and length of life I've been very lucky I haven't ever experienced any problems with my house since I've been in the series at Senior Service I haven't had a day off with ill health so I've been very fortunate in my own situation I think that my career is pretty much tainted is pretty much arrested because I've had for instance after the last three years at work I've been off sick for probably half that time this particular study is sort of the Rosetta Stone of a whole field because it's the British civil service system everybody's got the same medical care everybody's got the same universal health care system just like the baboon it's all the baboons eat the same thing they have the same level of activity it's not the stuff that oh if you're a low-ranking baboon you smoke too much and you drinks too much and if you're a low-ranking british civil service you never go to the doctor and you don't get preventive vaccines both of these studies rule out all those confounds and they produce virtually identical bindings on both sides of the primate divide there are soul wrenching stories and life-threatening consequences for every subordinate like Kevin living a life of baboon uncertainty there is an alpha strutting his stuff glorying in power over someone else someone unsuspecting someone who low-ranking [Music] 12:46 do either of you see where the dart is yeah okay guys who do you think's higher ranking okay yeah let's carefully make sure the other guy doesn't house alone this year Robert brought his family to Africa his wife neuropsychologist Lisa shares Sapolsky has also done extensive research with baboons and for the first time they brought along their kids Benjamin and Rachel as asleep as he looks [Music] you know all the baboons are perfectly willing to get very freaked out by a human coming over and touching one of these guys but cover them with a burlap and he doesn't exist anymore oh my god he's there he's it look not there anymore so this is not quite I take your kids to work day but you know this is a pretty central feature of who I am by now and who my wife and I are and you know our kids want to know where we came from this is pretty fundamental as in previous seasons Robert measures how individuals at every level of the baboon hierarchy react to and recover from stress what we're doing it you are now going to challenge the system with increasing doses of epinephrine the baboon's response is immediately picked up in its blood vital signs that can be deep frozen in perpetuity it's this storehouse of potential knowledge and I got 30 years of those blood samples frozen away at this point because you never know when some new hormone or some new something or other pops up and that's the thing to look at and start blowing out their samples back to when you know Jimmy Carter was president 150 anticipating the long reach of stress is a recent idea for when Robert was Rachel's age scientists believed stress was the cause of only one major problem this is a picture of a major American personnel problem an ugly sore that doctors call a peptic ulcer eating away at the wall of a man's stomach [Music] those stomach pains that you've talked about the knowing the burning those are obvious symptoms of gastric ulcer 30 years ago what's the disease that comes to everybody's mind when you mentioned stress its ulcers stress and ulcers stress and ulcers and this was the first stress-related disease discovered in fact 70 years ago what I want you to do is to work on your attitude I had to that's right ulcers breed on the wrong kind of feelings you've got to be honest with yourself about the way you feel about things finding a new doctor sounds like a better answer to me the connection between stress and ulcers was mainstream medical gospel until the early 1980s then Australian researchers identified a bacteria as the major cause of ulcers and this overthrew the entire field this was he's got nothing to do with stress it's a bacterial disorder and I'm willing to bet half the gastroenterologist on earth when they heard about this one out and celebrated that night this was like the greatest news never again where they gonna have to sit down their patients and make eye contact and ask him how's it goin so anything stressful it's got nothing to do with stress it's bacterial disorder so no longer with the solution these stress management now it could be something as simple as a pill it was a major three stressed didn't cause ulcers case closed but a few years later the research took a new twist scientists discovered that this are causing bacteria wasn't unique in fact as much as two-thirds of the world's population has it so why do only a fraction of these people develop ulcers research revealed that when stressed the body begins shutting down all non-essential systems including the immune system and it became clear that if you shut down the immune system stomach bacteria can run amok because what the stress does is wipe out the ability of your body to begin to repair your stomach walls when they start rotting away from this bacteria so stress can cause ulcers by disrupting our body's ability to heal itself if stress can undermine the immune system what other have it can it wreak one answer comes from a colony of captive macaque monkeys near winston-salem North Carolina people think of stress is something that keeps them up at night or something that makes them yell at their kids but when you ask me what is stress I say look at it it's it's this huge plaque in this artery that's what stress is for two decades dr. Carol Shively has been studying the arteries of macaques like baboons and British civil servants these primates organize themselves into distinctly hierarchical groups and subject one another to social stress stress hormones can trigger an intense negative cardiovascular response a pounding heart and increased blood pressure so if stress follows rank with the cardiovascular system of a high-ranking macaque call him a primate CEO be different from his subordinate when Shively looked at the arteries of a dominant monkey one with little history of stress its arteries were cleaned but a subordinate monkeys arteries told a grim tale a subordinate artery has lots more atherosclerosis built up inside it than a dominant artery is stress and the resulting flood of hormones had increased blood pressure damaging artery walls making them repositories for plaque so now when you feel threatened your arteries don't expand and your heart muscle doesn't get more blood and that can lead to a heart attack this is not an abstract concept it's not something that maybe someday you should do something about you need to attend to it today because it's affecting the way your body functions and it's dress today will affect your health tomorrow and for years to come social and psychological stress whether macaque human or baboon can clog our arteries restrict blood flow jeopardize the health of our heart and that's just the beginning of stresses deadly curse [Music] Roberts early research demonstrated that stress can work on us in an even more frightening way well back when I was starting in this business what I wound to focusing on was what seemed an utterly impossible idea at the time which was chronic stress and chronic exposure to glucocorticoids could do something as unsubtle and grotesque as kill Samir brain cells as a PhD candidate at Rockefeller University in the early 80s Sapolsky collaborated with his mentor dr. Bruce McEwen to follow the path of stress into the brain they subjected lab rats to chronic stress and then examined their brain cells the team made an astonishing find while the cells of normal rat brains have extensive branches stressed rats brain cells were dramatically smaller and what was most interesting in many ways was the power of the brain where this was happening hit the campus you take intro neurobiology anytime for the last five thousand years and what you learn is hippocampus is learning and memory stress in these rats shrank the part of their brain responsible for memory stress affects memory in two ways chronic stress can actually change brain circuits so that we lose the capacity to things as we need to very severe acute stress can have another effect which is often we refer to as stress makes you stupid which is making it impossible for you in over short periods of time to remember things you know perfectly well we all know that phenomenon we all know that one from back when when we stressed ourselves by not getting any sleep at all in the next morning at nine o'clock we couldn't remember a single thing for that final exam you take a human and stress them big time long time and you're gonna have a hippocampus that pays the price as well in addition to undermining our health stress can make us feel plain miserable Carol Shively set out to find out why she began not with misery but with pleasure Shively suspected that there was a link between stress pleasure and where we stand on the social hierarchy just like stress pleasure is linked to the chemistry of the brain when a neurotransmitter called dopamine is released in the brain it binds to receptors signaling pleasure [Music] Shively used a PE T scanner to examine the brain of an on stressed primate our primate CEO what we see is that the brains of dominant monkeys light up bright with lots of dopamine binding in this area that's so important to reward and feeling pleasure about life Shively then looked at the subordinates brain what we discovered is that the brains of the supportive monkeys are very very dull because there's much less receptor binding going on in this area why is that what is it about this area of the brain when you have less dopamine everything around you that you would normally take pleasure in is less pleasurable so the Sun doesn't shine so bright the grass is not so green food doesn't taste as good it's because of the way your brain is functioning that you're doing that in your brains functioning that way because your on a social status hierarchy one feature of Ola rank is being low ranking the reality and even stronger feature by the time you get to humans is not just being low ranking or poor it's feeling low ranking or poor and one of the best ways for society to make you feel like one of the have-nots is to rub your nose over and over and over again with what you don't have Richmond California a town where society's extremes can be spotted right from your car this is cardiologist Jeffery ritterman regular commute you can learn a lot about the distress and health outcome just from the neighborhood's you visit and in this neighborhood the the life expectancy is quite good and most of the people are pretty healthy and as we reach the top of the hill it gets to be a little bit less privileged and as we make this transition the social status begins to drop and correspondingly in those areas the the health outcome is much worse and these people are not going to have the same life expectancy as the people in that the middle-class area we started in people are on guard people are vigilant they're living a more stressful life this is a community that produces high stress hormones and people and over time it takes it's tall one of dr. Ritter meds patients is 65 year old in Manuel Johnson his career guidance counselor in one of America's most dangerous neighborhoods last year I think we had 47 homicides you know in the last 4 days we had 11 shootings 3 deaths and I just know 9 times out of 10 it's going to be a relative of someone that the kids know for Emanuel Johnson there is a price for chronic exposure to this stress five years ago I had a heart attack I'm a diabetic too I have to work on it constantly cuz I've been in this business 20 years so just it's stressful just working the job so over the years that you know the the cholesterol the blood pressure sugar came on later but the stress was always there long before they came on Emanuel Johnson's body may be telling yet another story of stress the Whitehall study in England found an incredible link between stress your position in the social hierarchy and how you put on weight so it may not be just putting on weight but also the distribution of that weight and the distribution of that weight putting it on round the center is related to position in the hierarchy and that in turn may be related to chronic stress pathways so we said does that happen in monkeys because they organize themselves in a hierarchy too and it turns out that it does subordinate monkeys are more likely to have fat in their abdomen then our dominant monkeys I think the most amazing observation that I've made in my lab is this idea that stress could actually change the way you deposit fat on your body to me that was a bizarre idea that you could actually alter the way if that is distributed Sapolsky Shively and others think stress could be a critical factor in the global obesity epidemic even worse fat brought on by stress is dangerous fat you know that fat carried on the trunk or actually inside the abdomen is much worse for you than fat carried elsewhere on the body it behaves differently it is it produces different kinds of hormones and chemicals and has different effects on your health whatever it is that works for an individual they they need to value stress reduction I think the problem in our society is that we don't value a stress reduction we in fact value the opposite we admire the person who not only multitasks and does two things it was but does five things at once we kind of admire that person how do they manage that you know well that's it's that's incredibly stressful way to live and we have to change our values and value people who understand a balanced and serene life one heartbreaking moment in history reveals that stress may in fact damage us long before we are even aware Holland late 1944 a brutal winter and a merciless Army of Occupation conspire to starve a nation it is known as the Dutch hunger winter for those who survive today these are haunting memories it's iike week's economy teselle of food and me a label of a tearing hat so she wasn't in the mood for joking house or hey what the hell Arif the table down up the dumb blasts police in the car after the coast race bill - so long as to all long do it maintain control bring what they can eat it Dutch researcher Tessa roseboom had heard many of those tragic memories she and her team wanted to know if there were any lingering effects roseboom knew that our bodies respond to famine in much the same way they respond to other stressors so she set out to see if the fetuses of women pregnant during these arduous days could possibly be affected by stress because of meticulous record-keeping by the Dutch Rose boom was able to identify over 2,400 people who could have been impacted she and her team analyzed the data from those born during and after the famine and came to a surprising conclusion I think that you could say that these babies were exposed to stress in fetal life and there are still suffering the consequences of that now 60 years later many of the Dutch hunger winter children leave today all in their 60s many still bear the scars of war we found that babies who were conceived during the famine have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease they have more hypercholesterolemia they are more responsive to stress and they generally are in poorer health than people who were born before the famine or conceived after it researchers think that stress hormones in a mother's blood triggered a change in the nervous system of the fetus as it struggled with starvation this was the fetuses first encounter with stress six decades later the bodies of these Dutch hunger winter children still haven't forgotten what we now know is it's not just your fat cell storage that winds up being vulnerable to events like this it's your brain chemistry it's your capacity to learn as an adult it's your capacity to respond to stress adaptively rather than maladaptive ly how readily you fall into depression how vulnerable you are to psychiatric disorders yet another realm in which early experience and early stress can leave a very bad footprint if I had had option I would not have opted to be bipolar but now that I am bipolar I'll have to live with it the latest article foo found achieve that super lace tacky that meathead cannot need sa then though how both what the Dutch hunger winter phenomenon is about is experience environment starts long before birth and adverse stressful environments leave imprints can leave scars lasting a whole lifetime [Music] you where does taking fingerprints cuz no baboon has the same fingerprints as another one so we just took Kony birth and I'm hoping to go over to rest and get him during this year's multi-generational research Robert who has spent his career documenting stresses effects on the individual and on the cell tracks the trail of stress even deeper into our bodies one of the most interesting new directions stress research is taking the effects of stress down to a nuts-and-bolts level of how cells work how genes work that half a dozen years ago nobody could have imagined the once unimaginable genetic structures called telomeres which protect the ends of our chromosomes from fraying as we age our telomeres shorten what's interesting is stress by way of stress hormones can accelerate the shortening of telomeres so the assumption is for the exact same aged cause if you're a low-ranking god who's just marinating and stress hormones your telomeres are going to be shorter so how does this formidable finding apply to us San Rafael California once a week Janet Lawson keeps a very important appointment she joins other mothers who share circumstances that produce chronic unremitting stress so but she loses her balance and that's the scary part so we just went out actually last night and bought a new helmet just for fun Bevan as she's getting older and wanting more independence it's getting harder each of these women is mother to a disabled child for us my son's only eight and and there's enough I can handle and I don't allow myself to go too much out I can't I had a friend recently who said to me you know I think you really should consider putting Lexi in a home and um that was really stressful in and of itself to think wow so sorry sounds like wow hope you even save it she's you know uncle girlfriend she's um even though she can't really communicate she loves these remarkable women came to the attention of biologist dr. Elizabeth Blackburn I didn't directly know the individuals but I know the stories and the mother myself and so when I heard about this cohort I really thought it was worthwhile finding out what really is happening at the heart of the cells in these mothers who are doing such a difficult thing for such a long time dr. Blackburn is a leader in the field of telomere research we have 46 chromosomes and they're capped off at each end by telomeres nobody knew in humans whether telomeres and they're fraying down over life would be affected by chronic stress and so we decided we would look at this cohort of chronically stressed mothers and we decided to ask what's happening to their telomeres and to the maintenance of their telomeres what we found was the length of the telomeres directly relates to the amount of stress somebody is under and the number of years that they've been under the stress such stressed mothers became the focus of a study by dr. Blackburn's colleague psychologist Elissa EPEL mothers of young children are a highly stressed group they're often balancing competing demands like work and child-rearing and often don't have time to take care of themselves so if you add on top of that the extra burden of caring for a child with special needs it can be overwhelming it can tax the very reserves that sustain people and if they're are stressed of the report stress they tend to die earlier these women have shortened telomeres the decreased activity of this enzyme and very very rough number four every year you were taking care of a chronically ill child he got roughly six years worth of Aging this is real this is not just somebody whining this is real medically serious aging going on and we can see that it's actually caused by the chronic stress but there is hope dr. Blackburn Co discovered an enzyme telomerase that can repair the damage it's what I always call it the threat of hope preliminary data suggests that a meeting of minds such as this may actually have a health benefit by stimulating the healing effects of telomerase if you don't laugh forget it you can't handle it when I found is that the humor is something if there's a certain level of black humor that we have about our kids that only we appreciate we're the only ones who get the jokes and in a way were the only ones who are allowed to laugh at the joke one of the questions in the stress field is you know what are the active ingredients that reduce stress and that promote longevity and compassion and and caring for others may be one of those most important ingredients so those may be the factors that promote longevity and increase telomerase and keep ourselves rejuvenating and regenerating so perhaps connecting with and helping others can help us to mend ourselves and maybe even live longer healthier lives twenty years ago Robert got a shocking preview of this idea the first troop he ever studied the baboons he felt closest to and had written books about suffered a calamity it would have a profound effect on his research for the King corrupt truth is the one I started with thirty years ago and they were your basic old baboon troop at the time and which means males were aggressive than society was highly stratified and females took a lot of grief in your basic off-the-rack baboon troop and then about by now almost twenty years ago something horrific and scientifically very interesting happened to that troop the keekorok troop took to foraging for food in the garbage dump of a popular tourist Lodge it was a fatal move the trash included me tainted with tuberculosis the result was that nearly half the males in the troop died not unreasonably I got depressed as hell and pretty damn angry about what happened do you know here you're 30 years old you can afford to expend a lot of emotion on a baboon troop and there was a lot of emotion there for Robert a decade of research appeared to have been lost but then he made a curious observation about who had died and who had survived wasn't random who died and that true if you were aggressive and if you were not particularly socially connected socially affiliative even spend your time grooming and hanging out if you were that kind of male you died every alpha male was gone the keekorok troop had been transformed and what you were left with was twice as many females as males and the males who were remaining were you know just to use scientific jargon they were good guys they were not aggressive jerks they were nice to the females they were very socially affiliative it completely transformed the atmosphere in the troop when male baboons reach adolescence they typically leave their home troop and roam eventually finding a new troop and when new adolescent males would join the truth they'd come in just as jerky as any adolescent males elsewhere on this planet and it would take them about six months to learn we're not like that in this troop we don't do stuff like that we're not that aggressive we spend more time grooming each other males are common with each other you do not dump on a female if you're in a bad mood and it takes these new guys about six months and they assimilate this style and you have baboon culture in this particular troop has a culture of very low levels of aggression and high levels of social affiliation and they're doing that 20 years later and so the tragedy had provided Robert with a fundamental lesson not just about cells but how the absence of stress could impact society did these guys have the same problems with high blood pressure nope - these guys have the same problems with brain chemistry related to anxiety stress hormone levels not at all it's not just your rank it's what your rank means in your society and the same is true for humans with only a slight variation we belong to multiple hierarchies and you may have the worst job in your corporation and no autonomy and control and predictability but you're the captain of the company softball team that year and you better bet you are gonna have all sorts of psychological means to decide it's just the job nine-to-five that's not what the world is about what the world is about is softball on the head of my team people look up to me and you come out of that deciding you are on top of the hierarchy that matters to you and lots of a boom Boop which under the right circumstances with the right seasons experiment is a goldmine unfortunately this time around it's just caged I have to clean now I'm studying stress for 30 years now and I even tell people how they should live differently so presumably I should have incorporated all that listen the reality is like I'm unbelievably stressed in Taipei and poorly coping and like why else would I study this stuff 80 hours a week no doubt everything I advise is going to lose all its credibility if I keel over dead from a heart attack in my early 50s now I'm not good at dealing with stress you know one thing that works to my advantage is I love my work and I love her every aspect of it so that's good you're nonetheless this is pretty clearly a different place than the savanna in East Africa yeah you can do science here that's very different and more interesting in some ways you can have hot showers and a more regular basis it's a more interesting varied world and lots of ways but yeah it's a lot out there the quiche or miss [Music] it is a pretty miraculous place where every meal tastes good and you're 10 times more aware of every sensation this is a hard place to come to year after year without getting I think a very different metabolism and temperament I'm more extroverted here a more more happy a hard place not to be happy so one antidote distress maybe finding a place where we have control but how do we reckon with all the time we spend at work I would say what we've learned from the Whitehall study from the study of the non-human primates is the conditions in which people live and work are absolutely vital for their health I can deliver long-term control the amount of control is intimately related to where you are in the occupational hierarchy and what we have found is in general where people report to us that things have got worse that the amount of work stress has gone up their illness rates go up where people report to us that they've got more control they're being treated more fairly at work there's more justice in the amount of treatment so things are getting better the amount of illness goes down I've been very lucky I I haven't never experienced any problems with my house but not everyone is so lucky so is there a prescription for the vast majority of us who aren't at the top give people more involvement if the work gives them more say in what they're doing give them more reward for the amount of effort they put out and it might well be you'll have not just a healthier workplace but a more productive workplace as well I've managed to achieve a degree of control at the moment I'm in a really good position this is the first time where I feel I've had a boss who appreciates me he doesn't dominate team meetings he sits back he invites people to contribute he lets other people chair he's a real manager and he from the start when I returned after my latest sick leave just six months ago he was so positive I think I feel sufficiently empowered who would have imagined that Roberts baboons would point us humans towards a stress-free utopia this may sound a little fanciful but I think what we're trying to create is a better society [Music] [Laughter] social affiliations remarkably powerful thing and that said by somebody who lives in a world where ambition and drive and type anus and all of that sort of thing dominates those things are real important and one of the greatest forms of sociality is giving or rather than receiving and all those things make for a better world another one of the things that baboons teach us is if they're able to in one generation transform what are supposed to be textbook social systems sort of engraved in stone we don't have an excuse when we say there's certain inevitabilities about human social systems and so the haunting question that endures from Roberts life work are we brave enough to learn from a baboon the keekorok troop didn't just survive without stress they thrived can we [Music]