Oh the things you can learn at four in the morning. Kathy was up watching a program about a scientist who was doing some sort of behavioral and social interaction study on monkeys. She wasn’t positive what kind of monkeys they were, “The ones with the long teeth,” she told me. I nodded and thought to myself that they all have long teeth.
Anyway it seems the scientist had identified two basic types of personality in this monkey commune. There was the nice, friendly, willing to get along type; and the unruly, angry stressed out type. Sound familiar?
One day the monkeys got into some trash that had something in it they shouldn’t have been eating and a large percentage of them died, almost half. The scientist was devastated. He had been conducting the study for 20 years, watching and getting to know and bond with his fellow primates. Now half of them were gone.
Then he noticed an unusual thing. As he identified those who had died from the toxic meal, he found that all of them were the ones who possessed the angry and stressed out traits.
These were the ones who had isolated themselves from the others, becoming antisocial and often just downright nasty.
So now there was a new community of monkeys that was made up of nice stress-free folks. And the children they had were the same. Hope it lasts.
The program was a National Geographic special repeated on PBS called Stress: Portrait of a Killer. The scientist is Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky.
He chose to study primates in the wilds of Kenya because he thought they would be a better indicator of human personality than say a rat. “If a rat’s life is a good barometer for tracking your own then you may have a problem,” Sapolsky says. “A rat can’t look at the bright side of life.”
Stress is all relative, Sapolsky says in his book, “Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers: Stress, Disease and Coping.” He writes it would be hard to convince a zebra that is running along the plains as fast as he can to keep from being eaten by a lion, why humans are stressed out over 30-year mortgage payments, falling stock prices and standing in the long line at a grocery store.
Actually, like the zebra, in the old days, the stress response often saved our lives, making us run from predators and enabling us to take down prey.
Today, we are turning on the same life-saving physical reaction to cope with $4 a gallon gasoline, final exams, difficult bosses and even traffic jams – we can’t seem to turn it off. So, we’re constantly marinating in corrosive hormones triggered by the stress response.
It’s probably those same things that keep us awake at four in the morning watching PBS reruns.
One of the harmful hormones that show up with stress is glucocorticoid. It’s one of those things you want tons of in a crisis, like if you’re storming a beach in France, or when you discover your heat shield may be defective on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere, otherwise it’s going to do you more harm than good.
But back to the baboons, and the plains in Africa where the study took place. It seems this spot was a perfect environment for them. They had plenty of food, and no one was trying to eat them. And they only had to spend about three or four hours a day getting the food, which left them plenty of time, eight or nine hours, to make others in the community miserable, filling the tribe with all kinds of social and psychological stresses.
The social stress comes about through the dominance hierarchy. If you are a primate, and especially a baboon I guess, it’s best to have a high ranking, otherwise your life can be pretty miserable.
As important as rank is, the sort of society you’re ranked in is even more important. If it’s stable, then as the leader you shouldn’t have any problems, but if every decade or so the masses decide they’ve had enough and attempt a coup, then the top spot probably isn’t where you want to be (See the Tsar of Russia in 1918).
The third thing that affects your stress level, and maybe the most crucial of all, is how you deal with it. As Professor Sapolsky says, “The reality is I am unbelievably stressed and Type A and poorly coping. 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. I’m not good at dealing with stress. But one thing that works to my advantage is I love my work. I love every aspect of it.”