The End of Stress!
March 11, 2019
“We cannot always control what happens to us. We cannot, and should not, eliminate the fight-or-flight response, for it is a powerful, highly sophisticated resource. But we will be able to find ways of keeping the stress response in balance, so that it works for us and not against us. Our growing understanding of the biological realities of stress will help us achieve this goal in several ways.“
From the book, The End of Stress As We Know It
TRANSCRIPT
So a guy wrote a book, a really amazing guy, wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. It's kinda it's a big insight into this. His name is Robert Sapolsky. He's a behavioral biologist.
A couple other people, wrote another book, and I can't remember their names. It's in your book, called The End of Stress as We Know It.
And he's making a point about this.
Says, all animals have a have radar on for survival.
That's part of what it is to be an animal. The zebra, however, and deer and kitty cats and, you know, all those little animals that we have, they don't get ulcers. And and here's what he says, so the deer has their radar on or the zebra has their radar on. Right? It's there. I'm I'm feeding, I'm eating my grass, you know, I'm hanging out in the field, everything's cool, very calm, but I have radar. It's on.
I sense a bobcat jump out from behind a rock.
Now if I'm a deer or a zebra, I'm going to run. In other words, everything need that needs to go off in my system to help me survive is going off. Right? The blood is going to my extremities, you know, I my brain is kind of focused.
You it's hyper focused. Right? And I'm going, going, going, going. And one of two things happen.
I live or I die.
Over. It's over. Okay? Now for the zebra, it might take a little while for their system to get into a stasis, but once they do that, they go back to grazing.
Right? Radars on.
Okay? They don't go home to their zebra kids and relatives and say, I can't believe that that bobcat did it again, jumped out from what is with that bobcat? I don't get it. Right?
It's not fair. I don't it's you know, not only that, but it's not like he went after that guy. He went after me again. Is there just like a bull is there like a, you know, big circle written on my stomach? Is it always me? I can't I mean, it seems like it's always me.
Why me? It's terrible. It's horrible.
I can't sleep.
Oh, go, yeah. Go to sleep. So you go to sleep. You're laying in bed. You're a little zebra, and you sit bolt upright and review the entire thing fifteen times.
Right? And you're going on and on and on. So every time you do that, right, every time we do that as human beings, we send our system into the survival mode, the survival reaction.
So this is killing us because that is not we are not really in under threat.
We're there there is no bobcat, as far as I know. I haven't seen any running down the hallways recently.
Yeah. And if you if there really was a threat to your life, you would react.
But your system is going off like there's a threat when someone disagrees with you or someone interrupts you or someone steals your idea.
So we are wired, like all animals, to survive. The only problem is this circuitry has gone wackadoodle because we have language.
So we make stuff up or and it's not even really you. It makes stuff up. It has a life of its own.
And it doesn't care about you.
It doesn't care about your happiness.
It doesn't it cares about one thing, survival. Don't experience this.
And anytime you start to feel that kind of, it must be true.
Right? You're gonna feel you're gonna feel a a kind of pain of sort of sorts or an agitation, and then you'll go outward to fight.
So it could be internal. It could be I'm not good enough. It could be you know, not everybody fights. Some people go passive aggressive.
Right? They will do anything to avoid a conflict.
They will lie.
They will pretend they're not upset.
They will get along with people at all costs. That's that is a form of triggered response. Some people some people get, crack jokes, you know, make make just make light of everything. That's a triggered response.
So it's it's learned, it worked, and then you've mastered it.
