TTC Video – Stress and Your Body

Feeling stressed? You’re not alone. Stress is an inherent aspect of life in the 21st-century world. Regardless of the cause, stress is bound to affect you at some point during your day or week. And stress can have tremendous negative effects on your mental and physical health. Most Western diseases that slowly get us sick—heart disease, diabetes, stroke—are worsened by stress. Chronic illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis and depression often flare up during repeated instances of stress. This makes coping with stress a critical part of how well we live.
But take heart. Because once you understand the inner workings of our stress response system and its inextricable links to all aspects of your personal health, you’ll find yourself in possession of powerful knowledge that will help you understand and better deal with this common aspect of your busy life.

Now, from one of the world’s foremost researchers on stress and neurobiology comes Stress and Your Body—a fascinating 24-lecture course that guides you through the psychological and psychosocial stress that is a central part of everyday life in Western society. With the guidance of Dr. Robert Sapolsky, acclaimed Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University and one of our most popular professors, you’ll explore the nuts and bolts of the stress-response system and its various effects on your body.

What, Exactly, Is Stress?

Simply put, the stress-response system is a natural, highly adaptive survival system. Imagine you’re a zebra being chased by a lion across some grassy savannah. Once you’ve recognized the threat, your stress-response system will divert energy from storage sites throughout your body to your muscles and inhibit unessential processes like digestion and reproduction, allowing you to flee faster from danger.

For animals, of course, coping with stress isn’t a big deal; once they’ve escaped danger, their bodies and minds soon return to a balanced state. But for humans under chronic stress, there is rarely such a return.

Why? Because, for humans, the stress response is triggered not so much by life-or-death situations as by psychological reasons it wasn’t designed to combat, such as

traffic tie-ups that double the time it takes for you to get to work;
complicated home repairs you haven’t gotten around to making;
troublesome thoughts and recurring memories; and
worries about the economy, the environment, and international events.
In fact, as you quickly discover in this lecture series, the chronic stress that most of us face every day can turn the stress response from a safety mechanism into a real problem for our physical and mental well-being.

At the heart of any serious discussion of the impact of chronic stress on your body and mind lie some pointed questions:

How does everyday stress affect the way your brain behaves?
Why do some people adapt to stress more easily than others?
What occurs at the neurological level during periods of emotional trauma?
Why does stress not just impact your mind (where it’s rooted) but your body as well?
Why does stress prompt you to do certain things, like eat and sleep more (or less)?
The science behind these and other questions is captivating in its intricacies.

Course Lecture Titles

1. Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers? Why Do We?
2. The Nuts and Bolts of the Stress-Response
3. Stress and Your Heart
4. Stress, Metabolism, and Liquidating Your Assets
5. Stress, Overeating, and Your Digestive Tract
6. Stress and Growth—Echoes from the Womb
7. Stress, Growth, and Child Development
8. Stress and Female Reproduction
9. Stress and Male Reproduction
10. Stress and Your Immune System
11. Stress and Cancer
12. Stress and Pain
13. Stress, Learning, and Memory
14. Stress, Judgment, and Impulse Control
15. Stress, Sleep, and Lack of Sleep
16. Stress and Aging
17. Understanding Psychological Stress
18. Psychological Modulators of Stress
19. Stress and the Biology of Depression
20. Stress and the Psychology of Depression
21. Anxiety, Hostility, Repression, and Reward
22. Stress, Health, and Low Social Status
23. Stress Management—Clues to Success?
24. Stress Management—Approaches and Cautions