Robert Sapolsky

When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically

A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, and the stress-response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis.

That the stress-response itself can become harmful makes a certain sense when you examine the things that occur in reaction to stress.

When it’s two-thirty on those mornings, I always have a brain tumor. These are very useful for that sort of terror, because you can attribute every conceivable nonspecific symptom to a brain tumor and justify your panic. Perhaps you do, too; or maybe you lie there thinking that you have cancer, or an ulcer, or that you’ve just had a stroke.

hedonism is “the pursuit of pleasure,” anhedonia is “the inability to feel pleasure”

The first step in the road to stress-related disease is developing hypertension, chronically elevated blood pressure.* This one seems obvious: if stress causes your blood pressure to go up, then chronic stress causes your blood pressure to go up chronically. Task accomplished, you’ve got hypertension

As a measure of how extraordinarily efficient this repeated bifurcation is in the circulatory system, no cell in your body is more than five cells away from a blood vessel—yet the circulatory system takes up only 3 percent of body mass

The false dichotomy between thought and feeling is presented in the classic Descartes’ Error, b

The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.

PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in siz