Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky
Posted on January 16th, 2006
If there's one thing I can take away from this book, it's that stress is just so not worth it. Which is a pretty obvious conclusion you wouldn't necessarily need a book to tell you, if it weren't for all the subtleties of the body's inner juices. Conscious awareness of stressful settings can be worlds away from all the "hey, that's just life" situations that may be able to throw you all out of whack, whether for reasons of age, heredity, lifestyle, or just about anything else.
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is a good choice if you want to get down to the biology of stress and look at where it intersects with psychology. This is not a self-help book. It's heavy on the science but conversational enough for non-experts. You may end up reading far more about glucocorticoids, norepinephrine, the hypothalamus, and mice ulcers than you necessarily want to. If you slog through though (and this really isn't too hard, there are plenty of asides and digressions to go around), you might end up with a much wider notion of what stress really is.
In looking at how stress can get in the way of everything from sex to memory to aging to depression to metabolism, Spolsky shows what a Molotov cocktail the endocrine world is. Too little of this, and you're in trouble-- at least, if the situation goes on long enough. If it's just temporary you'll probably be fine, or at least the damage may not be noticeable until you've gotten on a bit further in years. Then again, if you have too much it's curtains.
Yet it's never quite that simple. A hundred or so pages into this book and you may start to think it's a miracle, relatively speaking, that you've made it this far in life without exploding. Sapolsky keeps pointing out that he's saved some light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel material for the last chapter; otherwise there's plenty of doom and gloom to go around with respect to all the things that can go wrong with the allostatic balance. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers points out a number of them, but mostly leaves the rest up to you.