What Chronic Stress Does To Your Body - Dr Robert Sapolsky

What do you wish more people knew about how stress impacts the human body?

Um, that while it's worth paying attention to the fact that it does crummy things to your heart, and blood pressure, and bladder, and everything else, uh, for me, most meaningful thing is it does crummy things to your brain. The worst is that it makes you less empathic. It makes you less tolerant. It makes you less willing to take somebody else's perspective. It narrows your tunnel of concerns, and I think what we see is in a world full of stress, uh, people are crummier to each other on the average.

Why does stress cause that reduction in empathy?

All sorts of interesting stuff, various places in the brain, but in one region, uh, we think, we, colleagues and I and lots of other people in the field, um, think we've gotten a sense of the brain region that's relevant, something called the anterior cingulate cortex, and if you wanna summarize it, uh, this is the part of the brain where you feel someone else's pain. Sit someone down, stick them in a brain scanner, poke their finger with a pin, and like all sorts of ouch parts of the brain activate, and as part of that, this part of the brain, anterior cingulate, also activates and it's got a lot to do with interpreting what the pain means, that sort of thing. Like, you poke somebody with a pin after you've told them they've just had this very powerful anesthetic cream smeared over their finger, when in actuality it's, like, cream cheese or something, and they don't feel the pain. The parts of their brain that are saying, "Ouch, that was in my finger," are still going on, but anterior cingulate is gone silent, because you have fallen for a placebo effect. It's, it's about the interpretation of the pain rather than the nuts and bolts features of it. So now stick the person in the brain scanner, and don't poke their finger with a pin, make them watch their loved one have their finger poked, and the pain-o-meter brain regions have nothing to say because, like, nobody's doing anything to your fingertip, but the anterior cingulate activates. And neurons there on this very, like, simplistic level can't tell the difference between your pain and someone else's pain. Um, big amazing sort of footnote in there, uh, typically people suffering from major depression, this part of the brain is overactive. It's just pain 24/7 wherever you look and that kind of thing. Okay, so it turns out that when people are stressed, they become less generous, they're more likely to cheat in a economic game, their moral compass goes out the window, their, their range of concern narrows down to people who look just like me and pray like me and eat like me and all that sort of stuff that we're way familiar with. Um, and it turns out what stress hormones are also doing is disrupting the functioning of this part of the brain, and there's, like, a drug you can give to rats or give to college freshmen volunteers which will block the effects of the stress hormone, and when you throw that in there, uh, they maintain their empathy despite being stressed. They maintain all sorts of physiological markers of it. We're feeling less capacity to look at somebody else's pain and somebody else's perspective on the world when we're stressed because what matters has turned into a very self-interested focus for most people. So, like, amid stress doing terrible things to your memory and your executive function and judgment and all sorts of stuff, this increasingly strikes me as this, this is the outpost that's really interesting.