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Stress, Portrait of a Killer - Full Documentary (2008) — Transcript

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0:10What am I thinking about?
0:13Mortgage, debt, money pouring out...
0:17And I felt a lump ...I know cancer when I feel it.
0:20Where is she? What is she up to? Never calling, never saying a word...
0:24Stress.
0:26It is everyone's inferno,
0:28bedevilling our minds, igniting our nights,
0:31upending our equilibrium, but it hasn't always been so.
0:36Once, its purpose was to save us.
0:41if you're a normal mammal, what stress about
0:44is three minutes of screaming terror on the savannah, after which it's either
0:48over with you or you are over with.
0:49But everything changed.
0:53What once helped us survive has now become the scourge of our lives.
0:57And I just burst into tears, and wept, and wept.
1:00Today,
1:03scientific discoveries, in the field
1:06and in the lab,
1:10prove that stress is not a state of mind, but something measurable
1:14and dangerous. This is not an abstract concept. It's not something that
1:20maybe someday you should do something about. You need to attend to it
1:24today. In some of the most unexpected places,
1:28scientists are revealing just how lethal stress can be.
1:32Chronic stress could do something as unsubtle
1:35and grotesque as kill some of your brain cells.
1:39The impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains,
1:44adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes.
1:49This is real this is not just somebody
1:52whining.
1:56Stress... savior, tyrant, plague...
1:59its portrait revealed.
2:32This program was made possible by contributions to your
2:35PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
2:41All of us have a personal relationship with stress,
2:46but few of us know how it operates within us,
2:49or understand how the onslaught of the modern world
2:54can stress us to the point of death.
3:01Fewer still know what we can do about it.
3:13But over the last three decades, Stanford University neurobiologist
3:17Robert Sapolsky, has been advancing our understanding of stress,
3:21how it impacts our bodies, and how our social standing can make us more
3:27or less susceptible. Is the aggregate bad news
3:31and more... Most of the time, you can find him teaching and researching in the
3:35high-achieving, high-stressed world of brain science.
3:39The paper is this huge contrast between...
3:42class... But that's only part of his story.
3:45For a few weeks every year or so, Sapolsky shifts his lab to a place more
3:51than 9,000 miles away
3:53on the plaines of the Masai Mara Reserve, in Kenya, East Africa.
4:08Robert Sapolsky first came to Africa over 30 years ago on a hunch.
4:12He suspected he could find out more about human stress and disease
4:18by looking at non-humans, and he knew
4:21just the non-humans.
4:25You live in a place like this, you are a baboon, and you only have to spend about
4:29three hours a day getting your calories.
4:31And if you only have to work three hours a day, you got nine hours of free time
4:35every day
4:36to devote to making somebody else just miserable
4:40They're not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time,
4:48they are being stressed by each other. They're being stressed by social and
4:51psychological tumult
4:53invented by their own species. They are a perfect model for Westernized
4:57stress-related disease.
4:58To determine just what toll stress was taking on their bodies,
5:03Sapolsky wanted to look inside these wild baboons at the cellular level
5:08for the very first time. To do this
5:11he would have to take their blood in the most unassuming way.
5:15Basically, what you're trying to do is anaesthetize a baboon,
5:21without him knowing it's coming. Because you don't want to have any
5:25of this anticipatory stress,
5:27so you can't just, you know, get in your jeep and chase the baboon up and down the field
5:30for three hours, and finally when he's winded,
5:32dart him with an anesthetic.
5:38Now, the big advantages of a blow gun
5:41are that it's pretty much silent, and
5:44hasn't a whole lot of moving parts, but the big drawback
5:48is that it doesn't go very far. So what you spend just
5:55a bizarre amount of time doing, is trying to figure out
5:59how to look nonchalant around a baboon.
6:02Got him... Time?
6:05Okay, he is wobbling now.
6:09Whoop, there he goes.
6:13From each baboon blood sample, Robert measured levels of hormones central to the stress
6:18response.
6:18Well, to make sense of what's happening in your body, you've got these
6:23two hormones that are the workhorses of the whole stress response. One of them we all
6:27know
6:28adrenaline, American version, epinephrine, the other is
6:32a less known hormone called glucocorticoids that comes out of the adrenal gland
6:36along with adrenaline and these are the two backbones of the stress response.
6:40That stress response
6:43and those two hormones are critical to our survival.
6:51Because what stress is about is that somebody is very intent on eating
6:54you, or you are very intent on eating somebody, and there is immediate crisis
6:58going on.
6:59When you run for your life,
7:03basics are all that matter. Lungs work overtime to pump mammoth quantities of
7:08oxygen into the bloodstream.
7:10The heart races to pump that oxygen throughout the body
7:15so muscles respond instantly. You need your blood pressure up to deliver that
7:21energy.
7:22You need to turn off anything that is not essential... growth, reproduction, you know,
7:27you're running for your life this is no time to ovulate,
7:29tissue repair, all that sort of thing... do it later, if there is a later.
7:33When the zebra escapes, its stress response shuts down.
7:38But human beings can't seem to find their
7:42off switch. We turn on the exact same stress response
7:46for purely psychological states... thinking about
7:49the ozone layer, the taxes coming up, mortality,
7:5430-year mortgages... we turn on the same stress response and the key
7:57difference there is,
7:58we're not doing it for real physiological reason and we're doing it
8:02non-stop.
8:05By not turning off the stress response when reacting to life's traffic jams,
8:10we wallow in a corrosive bath of hormones.
8:13Even though it's not life or death,
8:17we hyperventilate, our hearts pound,
8:20muscles tense.
8:23Ironically, after a while the stress response is more damaging than the
8:27stressor itself,
8:28because the stressor is some psychological nonsense that you're falling for.
8:32No zebra on Earth, running for its life, would understand why...
8:37fear of speaking in public
8:40would cause you to secrete the same hormones that it's doing at that point
8:44to save its life.
8:45Stress is the the body's way of rising to a challenge,
8:50whether the challenge is life-threatening, trivial
8:53or fun. You get the right amount of stress and we call it stimulation.
8:59The goal in life is not to get rid of stress, the goal in life is to have the right
9:02type of stress,
9:03because when it is the right type, we love it.
9:10We jump out of our seats to experience it, we pay good money to get stressed that way.
9:15It tends to be a moderate stressor, where you've got a stressor that's transient... it's
9:20not for nothing roller coaster rides are not three weeks long.
9:23And most of all, what they are about is that you relinquish a little bit of control
9:28in a setting that overall feels safe.
9:34but in real life for so many of us primates including Roberts baboons
9:38control is not an option. Here you have a big male
9:50who loses a fight and chases a sub-adult
9:54who bites on a female who slaps a juvenile that knocks an infant
9:59out of a tree, all in fifteen seconds
10:02you know in so far as a huge component of stress is
10:08lack of control, lack of predictability you're sitting there and just
10:12watching the zebra
10:13and somebody else is having a bad day and it is your rear-end that is going to get slashed
10:18some tremendously psychologically stressful for
10:21for the folks further down on the hierarchy. One of Roberts
10:27early revelations was identifying the link between stress
10:31and hierarchy in baboons. Some baboons troops are over 100 strong
10:37like us they have evolved large brains to navigate the complexities of large
10:42societies
10:43survival here requires a kind of
10:46baboon political savvy with the most cunning and aggressive males
10:51gaining top rank and all the perks,
10:54females for the choosing, all the food they can eat
10:58and an endless retenue of willing groomers. Every male knows where he
11:05stands in society
11:06who can torture him whom he can torture
11:10and who in turn the torturee can torture
11:14Well it sound like a terrible thing to confess after thirty years but
11:20I don't actually like baboons all that much and there has been individual guys over the years
11:25that I absolutely love
11:26but they are these scheming, back-stabbing
11:30machiavellian bastards that hurt each other
11:34so they're great for my science, I mean I'm not out here to commune with them
11:38they're perfect for what I study. 22 years ago
11:42at the age of 30 Sapolsky's landmark research
11:45earned him the MacArthur Foundation's Genius fellowship
11:49his early work
11:53measuring stress hormones from extracted blood led to two remarkable discoveries
11:58a baboon's rank determine the level of stress hormone in his system
12:06so if you're a dominant male you can expect your stress hormones to be low
12:11and if you are submissive
12:15much higher, but there was an even more revealing find
12:20in Sapolsky's sample of low rankers
12:23the have-nots had increased heart rates
12:27and higher blood pressure. This was the first time
12:30anyone had linked stress to the deteriorating health
12:34of a primate in the wild. Basically
12:37if you're a stressed, unhealthy baboon in a typical troop
12:41high blood pressure. elevated levels of stress hormones, you have an immune
12:45system that doesn't work as well
12:47your reproductive system is more vulnerable to being knocked out of whack
12:51your brain chemistry is one that has some similarity to what you see in
12:56clinically depressed humans
12:57and all that stuff those are not predictors of a hale and hearty old age
13:07could this also be true for that
13:09other primate as Robert Sapolsky
13:13was monitoring stress in baboons professor Sir Michael Marmot
13:17was leading a study in Great Britain they tracked the health of more than
13:2128,000 people over the course of forty years
13:25it was named for
13:28Whitehall, citadel of the British civil service where every job is ranked in a
13:33precise hierarchy
13:34the perfect laboratory to determine whether in humans
13:40there might be a link between rank and stress
13:43I mean that's the thing about stress I think you've got to look at it in both
13:48acute terms and chronic terms I think I've been under chronic stress
13:51in this organization simply because I'm a square peg in a round hole
13:55Kevin Brooks is a government lawyer, his rank
13:59level 7 means he has little seniority in his department
14:03he lives the life of a subordinate
14:06I think what I was most aware of at the time was the workload and how
14:13I had most of it under control but one of my cases wasn't
14:16wholly under control I let it slip and it was a bit like
14:20being in a car hitting an ice patch
14:24and skating but nonetheless I came in
14:27Monday morning and my immediate manager
14:31let's call him Ben, then wants a word with you, so we find a room
14:34he shuts the door, then he says you know what you have done
14:38you know what happened while you were away we couldn't find one of your files
14:42Do you know what that meant? He just gave me a
14:45good kicking, psychologically he did me over
14:48and at the end of it it was more threats. It was right that's maybe a disciplinary matter
14:53so I left the room crossed over the corridor to my own room
14:57and I just burst into tears and wept and wept
15:05Sarah Woodall also works for the government
15:09unlike Kevin she is a senior civil servant
15:13there about a hundred and sixty people reporting to me ultimately
15:17one way or another within the sector. I do
15:21really enjoy working with our service it's quite a dynamic
15:24environment, it can be quite exciting
15:28I like working with lots of people
15:32I do really enjoy my job. Such dramatically different reflections
15:37dramatize one of the most astounding scientific findings in the Whitehall
15:41study
15:41firstly it showed that
15:44the lower you were in the hierarchy the higher your risk of heart disease
15:49and other diseases, so people second from the top
15:53had higher risk than those at the top people third from the top
15:57had a higher risk than those second from the top and it ran
16:00all the way from top to bottom. We are dealing with people in stable jobs with
16:05no industrial exposures
16:07and yet your position in the hierarchy
16:10intimately related to your risk of disease
16:13and lenght of life. I've been very lucky
16:16I have never experienced any problems with my health
16:19since I've been in the senior service I haven't had a day off
16:23with ill health, I've been very fortunate
16:26In my own situation I think that my career is pretty much
16:31tainted, is pretty much
16:34arrested because I have had, for instance, for the last three years at work I've been off
16:39sick
16:40for probably half that time. This particular study is sort of the Rosetta
16:45Stone of a whole field because
16:46it's the British civil service system, everybody's got the same medical care
16:50everybody's got the same universal health care system
16:54just like the baboons all the baboons eat the same thing, they have the same level
16:57of activity
16:58it's not the stuff that oh if you're a low-ranking baboon you smoke to much and
17:02you drink too much and if you're a low-ranking british civil service
17:05guy you never go to the doctor and you don't get preventive vaccines both of this
17:09studies rule out all this confounds
17:11and they produce virtually identical findings. On both sides of the primate
17:16divide
17:17there are soul wrenching stories and life-threatening consequences
17:21For every subordinate like Kevin
17:25living a life of baboon uncertainty there is an alpha
17:29strutting his stuff, glorying in power
17:32over someone else someone unsuspecting
17:36someone low ranking
17:48Got him.
17:5112:46 do either of you see where the dart is?
17:56Yes. Okay guys who do you think is higher-ranking?
17:59Our guy... Yes.
18:07Much carefully make sure the other guy doesn't hassle him.
18:10this year Robert brought his family to Africa
18:14his wife neuropsychologist Lisa Sapolsky
18:18has also done extensive research with baboons
18:21and for the first time they brought along their kids
18:24Benjamin and Rachel. As asleep as he looks...
18:35all the baboons are perfectly willing to get very freaked out by
18:40a human coming over and touching one of these guys but cover him with a
18:44burlap and he doesn't exist anymore
18:46oh my God he's there, he's... not there anymore
18:54this is not quite like taking your kids to work day
18:57but it's a pretty central feature of
19:01who I am by now and who my wife and I are
19:05and kids want to know where we came from
19:09and this is pretty fundamental. As in previous seasons
19:13Robert measures how individuals at every level of the baboon hierarchy
19:18reacts to and recovers from stress
19:21So what we're doing it is, we're now going to challenge the system
19:26with increasing doses of epinephrine
19:29the baboon's response is immediately picked up in its blood
19:37vital signs that can be deep frozen in perpetuity
19:44It's this storehouse of potential knowledge and I got 30 years of those blood samples
19:50frozen away at this point because
19:51you never know when some new hormone or some new something or other pops up
19:55and that is the thing to look at and start pulling out this samples back to when
20:00you know Jimmy Carter was president. 150... 125...
20:05Anticipating the long reach of stress is a recent idea,
20:09for one when robert was Rachel's age, scientists believed stress was the cause
20:14of only one major problem. This is a picture of a major american
20:20personnel problem... an ugly sore that doctors call a peptic ulcer
20:26eating away at the wall of a man's stomach.
20:33Those stomach pains that you talk about,
20:36the gnawing, the burning, those are obvious symptoms of gastric ulcer.
20:40Thirty years ago, what's the disease that comes to everybody's mind when you
20:44mention stress...
20:45it's ulcers, stress and ulcers. And
20:49this was the first stress related disease discovered, in fact 70 years ago.
20:52What I want you to do is to work on your attitude.
20:57My attitude? That's right. Ulcers breed on the wrong kind of feelings.
21:01You've got to be honest with yourself about the way you feel about it.
21:04Finding a new doctor sounds like a better answer to me.
21:07The connection between stress and
21:10ulcers was mainstream medical gospel until the early 1980s.
21:15Then Australian researchers identified a bacteria
21:19as the major cause of ulcers.
21:22And this overthrew the entire field, this was,
21:25it's got nothing to do with stress, it's a bacterial disorder.
21:28And I'm willing to bet half the gastroenterologists on Earth when they
21:32heard about this, went out and celebrated that night. This was, like, the greatest
21:36news... never again were they going to have to sit down their patients, and
21:39make eye contact and ask them how is it going, so, anything stressful...
21:43it's got nothing to do with stress, it's a bacterial disorder... So no longer would the
21:48solution be stress management,
21:50now it could be something as simple as a pill.
21:53It was a major breakthrough. Stress didn't cause ulcers.
22:00Case closed.
22:05But a few years later,
22:08the research took a new twist. Scientists discovered that this
22:12ulcer-causing bacteria wasn't unique... in fact,
22:16as much as two thirds of the world's population has it.
22:19So why do only a fraction of these people develop ulcers?
22:25Research revealed that when stressed,
22:28the body begins shutting down all non-essential systems,
22:31including the immune system. And it became clear that,
22:35if you shut down the immune system, stomach bacteria
22:39can run amok... Because what the stress does,
22:43is wipe out the ability of your body to begin to repair your stomach walls
22:48when they start rotting away from this bacteria... So stress
22:53can cause ulcers by disrupting our body's ability to heal itself.
22:59If stress can undermine the immune system,
23:02what other havoc can it wreak? One answer comes from a colony of captive
23:08macaque monkeys
23:09near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. People think of stress as something that keeps
23:15them up at night, or
23:16something that makes them yell at their kids.
23:19But, when you ask me, what is stress, I say
23:23look at it, it's this huge plaque
23:26in this artery, that's what stress is.
23:29For two decades doctor Carol Shively
23:32has been studying the arteries of macaques.
23:36Like baboons and British Civil Servants,
23:39these primates organize themselves into distinctly hierarchical groups,
23:44and subject one another to social stress.
23:51Stress hormones can trigger an intense negative cardiovascular response,
23:56a pounding heart, at increased blood pressure
23:59So if stress follows rank, would the cardiovascular system of a high-ranking
24:05macaque,
24:06call him a primate CEO, be different from his subordinate?
24:12When Shively looked at the arteries of a dominant monkey,
24:17one with little history of stress, its arteries were clean.
24:21But a subordinate monkey's arteries
24:24told a grim tale... A subordinate artery
24:28has lots more atherosclerosis build
24:31up inside it than a dominant artery has.
24:35Stress, and the resulting flood of hormones, had
24:38increased blood pressure, damaging artery walls,
24:41making them repositories for plaque.
24:45So now, when you feel threatened, your arteries don't expand,
24:50and your heart muscle doesn't get more blood, and that
24:53can lead to a heart attack. This is not an abstract concept, it's not something
24:59that
24:59maybe someday you should do something about, you need to attend to it
25:03today, because it's affecting the way your body functions,
25:07and a stress today will affect your health tomorrow and for years to come.
25:12Social and psychological stress,
25:16whether macaque, human, or baboon, can clog our arteries,
25:21restrict blood flow, jeopardize the health of our heart...
25:24and that's just the beginning of stress's
25:28deadly curse.
25:33Robert's early research
25:36demonstrated that stress can work on us in an even more frightening way.
25:41Well, back when I was starting
25:45in this business what I wound up focusing on was what
25:49seemed an utterly implausible idea at the time,
25:52which was chronic stress and chronic exposure to
25:56glucocorticoids could do something as unsubtle and grotesque as
26:01kill some of your brain cells. As a PhD candidate at Rockefeller University in
26:07the early 80s,
26:08Sapolsky collaborated with his mentor, doctor Bruce McEwan,
26:13to follow the path of stress into the brain. They subjected lab rats to chronic
26:20stress,
26:21and then examined their brain cells. The team made an astonishing find.
26:27While the cells of normal rat brains have extensive branches,
26:31stressed rats brain cells were dramatically smaller.
26:35And what was most interesting in many ways was the part of the brain where this
26:41was happening...
26:42the hippocampus. You take Intro Neurobiology anytime for the last 5000 years and
26:48what you learn is:
26:49hippocampus is learning and memory. Stress in these rats
26:54shrank the part of their brain responsible for memory.
26:57Stress affects memory in two ways.
27:01Chronic stress can actually change
27:04brain circuits, so that we lose the capacity
27:08to remember things as we need to. Very severe
27:13acute stress can have another effect,
27:17which is often... we refer to as stress makes you stupid,
27:20which is making it impossible for you in,
27:24over short periods of time to remember things you know perfectly well.
27:27We all know that phenomenon, we all know that one, from back when we stressed
27:32ourselves by not getting any sleep at all. And
27:34the next morning at nine o'clock, we couldn't remember a single thing for
27:38that final exam.
27:39You take a human and stress them big-time, long time,
27:43and you're going to have a hippocampus that pays the price as well. In addition to
27:47undermining our health
27:49stress can make us feel plain miserable
27:52Carol Shively set out to find out why
27:55she began not with misery but with pleasure
27:59Shively suspected that there was a link between stress
28:03pleasure and where we stand on the social hierarchy
28:07just like stress, pleasure is linked to the chemistry of the brain
28:12when a neurotransmitter called dopamine is released in the brain
28:17it binds to receptors signaling pleasure
28:25Shively used a positron emission tomography scanner to examine the brain of a non-stressed
28:29primate
28:30our primate CEO. What we see
28:35is that the brains of dominant monkeys light up bright with lots of dopamine
28:39binding
28:40in this area that is so important to reward and feeling pleasure about life
28:44Shively then looked at the subordinates brain.
28:47What we discovered is that the brains of the subordinate monkeys
28:51are very dull because there's
28:55much less receptor-binding going on in this area.
28:58Why is that, what is it about this area of the brain?
29:02When you have less dopamine everything
29:06around you that you would normally take pleasure in, is less pleasurable. So the
29:11Sun doesn't shine so bright, the grass is not so green,
29:14food doesn't taste as good. It's because of the way your brain is functioning that
29:18you're doing that, and your brain is functioning that way because you are low
29:21on the social status hierarchy. One feature of low rank is being low
29:24ranking
29:25the reality, an even stronger feature by the time you get to humans, is
29:29not just being low ranking or poor, it's feeling
29:32low ranking or poor and one of the best ways for society to make you feel
29:36like one of the have-nots
29:38is to rub your nose over and over and over again
29:41with what you don't have. Richmond California
29:45a town where societies extremes can be spotted right from your car
29:50this is the regular commute of cardiologist Jeffrey Ritterman
29:54You can learn a lot about the distress and
29:58health outcome just from the neighborhoods you visit and
30:01in this neighborhood the life expectancy is quite good and
30:06most of the people are pretty healthy and as we reach the top of the hill it
30:11gets to be a little bit less
30:14privileged and as we make this transition
30:18the social status begins to drop
30:21and correspondingly in those areas
30:24the health outcome is much worse and these people are not going to have
30:30the same life expectancy
30:32as the people in that middle class area we started in.
30:39People are on guard, people are vigilant, they are living a more stressful life
30:44this is a community that produces high stress hormones in people
30:49and overtime it takes its toll. One of doctor Ritterman's
30:53patient is 65-year-old Emanuel Johnson
30:56his career is guidance counselor in one of America's most dangerous neighborhoods
31:02well last year actually I think we had forty seven homicides
31:05in the last four days we had 11 shootings three deaths
31:10and nine times out of ten it's going to be a relative
31:15or someone I bet the kids know. For Emanuel Johnson
31:20there is a price for chronic exposure to this stress
31:23five years ago I had a heart attack I'm a diabetic too. I have to work on it
31:29constantly
31:30because I've been in this business twenty years, so just it's stressful
31:33just working the job, so over the years that, you know
31:36the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the sugar came on later
31:40but the stress was always in before they came on
31:44Emanuel Johnson's body may be telling yet another story of stress
31:49the Whitehall study in england
31:52found an incredible link between stress, your position in the social hierarchy
31:57and how you put on weight. So it may not be just
32:02putting on weight but also the distribution
32:05of that weight and the distribution of that weight
32:09putting it on around the center is related to position in the hierarchy
32:14and that in turn may be related to chronic stress pathways.
32:18So we said, does that happen in monkeys
32:22because they organize themselves in a hierarchy too and it turns out that it
32:27does.
32:27Subordinate monkeys are more likely to have fat in their abdomen
32:31then are dominant monkeys. I think the most amazing
32:37observation that
32:40I've made in my lab is this idea that stress
32:45could actually change the way you deposit fat on your body
32:49to me that was a bizarre idea that you could actually
32:53alter the way fat is distributed
32:58Sapolsky, Shively and others think stress could be a critical factor in the global
33:03obesity epidemic
33:04Even worse fat brought on by stress
33:08is dangerous fat. You know that fat carried on the trunk or actually
33:15inside the abdomen is much worse for you than fat carried elsewhere in the body
33:20it behaves differently, it produces different kinds of
33:24hormones and chemicals and has different effects on your health
33:28whatever it is that works
33:32for an individual, they need to value
33:35stress reduction. I think the problem in our society is that we don't
33:39value stress reduction we in fact value the opposite
33:42We admire the person who not only multitasks and does two things at once
33:48but does five things at once. We admire that person. How they manage that
33:52you know
33:52that's an incredibly stressful
33:55way to live we have to change our values and value people who understand
34:01a balanced and serene life.
34:10One heartbreaking moment in history reveals that stress may in fact
34:14damage us long before we are even aware
34:22Holland late 1944
34:26a brutal winter and a merciless army of occupation
34:29conspire to starve a nation
34:32it is known as the Dutch hunger winter for those who survive today
34:37these are haunting memories.
34:42I had nothing. I could no longer feed my son.
34:46I was so sick.
34:50And then you have to take care of a child.
34:53I found that terrible.
34:56I went to the church at the Dam next to the palace,
34:59and asked the priest's wife if she would raise my child as long as the war took place.
35:03Because I can't do it anymore.
35:09dutch researcher Tessa Roseboom had heard many of those tragic memories
35:13she and her team wanted to know if there were any lingering effects
35:17Roseboom knew
35:21that our bodies respond to famine in much the same way they respond to other
35:25stressors
35:26so she set out to see if the fetuses of
35:29women pregnant during these arduous days could possibly be affected by stress
35:34because of meticulous record-keeping by the Dutch
35:40Roseboom was able to identify over 2400 people
35:44who could have been impacted. She and her team
35:49analyzed the data from those born during and after the famine
35:53and came to a surprising conclusion. I think that you could say that
35:59these babies were exposed to stress
36:02in fetal life and they're still suffering the consequences of that
36:07now, sixty years later.
36:11Many of the Dutch hunger winter children live today
36:15all in their sixties many still bear the scars of war
36:21we found that the babies who were conceived during the famine
36:25have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease they have
36:28more hypercholesterolemia they are
36:31more responsive to stress and generally are in
36:35poorer health than people who were born before the famine
36:39or conceived after it
36:42researchers think that stress hormones in a mother's blood
36:46triggered a change in the nervous system of the fetus as it struggled with
36:50starvation
36:50this was the fetuses first encounter with stress
36:55six decades later the bodies of these Dutch hunger winter children
37:00still haven't forgotten. What we now know is that
37:04it's not just your fat cells that wind up being vulnerable to build up
37:08towards events like this, it's your brain chemistry, it's your capacity to learn
37:13it's your capacity
37:15to respond to stress adaptively rather than maladaptively
37:19how readily you fall into depression, how vulnerable you are to psychiatric
37:23disorders
37:24yet another realm in which early experience and early stress can leave a very
37:29very bad footprint. If I had had an
37:33option I would not have opted to be
37:36bipolar but now that I am bipolar
37:40I'll have to live with it. It's hard for me to be flexible.
37:44I am very quick to anger.
37:51What the Dutch hunger winter phenomenon is about is
37:54experience, environments start long before birth and adverse
37:58stressful environments can imprint and leave scars
38:02lasting a whole lifetime.
38:25We are taking
38:26fingerprints because no baboon has the same fingerprints as another one.
38:31So we just took Gummibear's and I am hoping to get over to Riff and get his.
38:35During this years multi-generational research,
38:41Robert who has spent his career documenting stresses effects on the
38:44individual
38:45and on the cell tracks the trail of stress even deeper into our bodies
38:50One of the most interesting new direction in stress research
38:55is taking the effects of stress down to a bolts and nuts level
39:00how cells work, how genes work, that half a dozen years ago nobody could have
39:04imagined.
39:05the once unimaginable genetic structures called telomeres
39:10which protect the ends of our chromosomes from fraying
39:15as we age our telomeres shorten. What is interesting
39:19is stress, by way of stress hormones
39:22can accelerate the shortening of telomeres, so the assumption is for
39:26the exact same aged guys
39:28if you're a low-ranking guy who's just marinating in stress hormones
39:32your telomeres are going to be shorter. So how does this formidable finding apply
39:38to us
39:38San Rafael California
39:42once a week Janet Lawson keeps a very important appointment.
39:47She joined other mothers who share circumstances that produce chronic
39:52unremitting stress. So... but she looses her balance and that's the scary part
39:56so we just went out actually last night and bought a new helmet just for fun
39:59She's getting older and wanting more independence, it's getting harder.
40:03Each of these women is mother to a disabled child
40:07For us my son's only 8 and and there's enough I can handle and I don't allow
40:11myself to go
40:12too much out, i can't. I had a friend recently who said to me
40:16you know I think you really should consider putting Lexie at a home and
40:20that was really stressful in and of itself to think
40:24wahou so...
40:28so it's like how can you
40:32even say that? She is, you know a little girlfriend
40:35she's, even though she can't really communicate
40:40she loves
40:45she loves
40:50These remarkable women came to the attention of biologist
40:53doctor Elizabeth Blackburn. I didn't directly know the individuals
40:58but I know the stories and I am a mother myself and so when I heard about this
41:02cohort
41:03I really thought it was worthwhile finding out
41:06what really is happening at the heart of the cells in
41:10these mothers who are doing such a difficult thing for such a long time.
41:15Doctor Blackburn is a leader in the field of telomere research.
41:20We have 46 chromosomes and they are capped off
41:24at each end by telomeres. Nobody knew in humans
41:28wether telomeres and their fraying down over life
41:32would be affected by chronic stress, and so,
41:35we decided we would look at this cohort of
41:38chronically stressed mothers. And we decided to ask what's happening to their
41:44telomeres and to the maintenance of their telomeres.
41:47What we found was the length of the telomeres
41:50directly relates to the amount of stress
41:54somebody is under, and the number of years
41:57that they've been under the stress. Such stressed mothers became the focus of a
42:02study by doctor Blackburn's colleague,
42:04psychologist Elissa Epel.
42:07Mothers of young children are a highly stressed group.
42:11They are often balancing competing demands like work
42:14and child rearing, and often don't have time to take care of themselves.
42:19So, if you add on top of that, the extra burden of caring
42:22for a child with special needs, it can be overwhelming.
42:27It can tax the very reserves that sustain people,
42:31and if they're stressed, if they report stress, they tend to die earlier.
42:34These women have shortened telomeres, decreased activity of this enzyme,
42:40and a very very rough number for every year you were taking care of a chronically
42:44ill child,
42:45you got roughly six years worth of aging.
42:48This is real, this is not just somebody whining...
42:51this is real, medically serious
42:55aging going on, and we can see that it is actually caused
43:00by the chronic stress.
43:03But there is hope. Doctor Blackburn co-discovered an
43:07enzyme, telomerase, that can repair the damage.
43:10It is what I always call the threat of hope... That's good. That's good... Yes.
43:15Preliminary data
43:19suggests that a meeting of minds, such as this, may actually have a health benefit,
43:24by stimulating the healing effects of telomerase.
43:27And laugh and laugh, if you don't laugh, forget it, you can't handle it... It's...
43:32What I found is that the humor is something...
43:37there's a certain level of black humor that we have about our kids
43:41that only we appreciate, we're the only ones who get the jokes, and
43:45in a way we are the only ones who are allowed to laugh at the jokes.
43:48One of the questions in the stress field is, you know, what are the active ingredients
43:53that reduce stress and that promote longevity?
43:57And compassion and and caring for others
44:01maybe one of those most important ingredients. So, those maybe the factors
44:06that promote longevity and increase telomerase,
44:08and keep our cells rejuvenating and regenerating.
44:12So, perhaps connecting with and helping others
44:18can help us to mend ourselves, and maybe even live longer,
44:22healthier lives.
44:26Twenty years ago, Robert got a shocking preview of this idea.
44:30The first troop he ever studied, the baboons he felt closest to
44:35and had written books about, suffered a calamity.
44:39It would have a profound effect on his research.
44:43The Keekorok troop is the one I started with thirty years ago,
44:49and they were your basic old baboon troop at the time, and which means
44:54males were aggressive, and society was highly stratified, and
44:57females took a lot of grief, in your basic off the rack baboon troop.
45:01And then about, by now almost twenty years ago
45:05something horrific and scientifically very interesting happened to that troop.
45:12The Keekorok troop took to foraging for food in the garbage dump of a popular
45:17tourist lodge.
45:20it was a fatal move. The trash included meat
45:24tainted with tuberculosis.
45:27The result was that nearly half the males in the troop died.
45:34Not unreasonably, I got depressed as hell and pretty damn angry about what
45:39happened.
45:40You know, when you are 30 years old, you can afford to expend a lot of emotion on
45:45a baboon troop, and
45:46there was a lot of emotion there.
45:50For Robert, a decade of research appeared to have been lost.
45:54But then he made a curious observation
45:58about who had died and who had survived.
46:02It wasn't random who died. In that troop,
46:05if you were aggressive, and if you were not particularly socially connected,
46:10socially affiliative, you didn't spend your time grooming and hanging out,
46:13if you were that kind of male you died .
46:17Every alpha male was gone. The Keekorok troop
46:21had been transformed. And what you were left with was
46:26twice as many females as males. And the males who were remaining were,
46:30you know, just to use scientific jargon, they were good guys.
46:33They were not aggressive jerks, they were nice to the females, they were very
46:37socially affiliative, it completely transformed the atmosphere in the troop.
46:41When male baboons reach adolescence,
46:46they typically leave their home troop and roam,
46:49eventually finding a new troop.
46:53And when new adolescent males would join the troop, they'd come in just as jerky as any
46:58adolescent males elsewhere on this planet,
47:00and it would take them about six months to learn... we're not like that in this troop.
47:04We don't do stuff like that. We're not that aggressive. We spend more time
47:07grooming each other. Males are calmer with each other. You do not dump on a
47:11female if you're in a bad mood.
47:13And it takes these new guys about six months, and
47:16they assimilate this style, and you have baboon culture. And this particular troop
47:21has a culture of
47:22of very low levels of aggression, and high levels of social affiliation, they're
47:27doing that twenty years later.
47:28And so the tragedy had provided Robert with a fundamental lesson,
47:34not just about cells, but how the
47:37absence of stress could impact society. Do these guys have the same problems
47:42with high blood pressure?
47:43No. Do these guys have the same problems with brain chemistry related
47:48to anxiety stress hormone levels? Not at all.
47:51It's not just your rank,
47:53it is what your rank means in your society. And the same is true for humans,
47:58with only a slight variation. We belong to multiple hierarchies,
48:02and you may have the worst job in your corporation, and no autonomy and control
48:08and predictability,
48:09but you're the captain of the company softball team that year.
48:12And you better bet you are going to have all sorts of psychological means to
48:16decide
48:16it's just a job, 9 to 5, that's not what the world is about, what the world is
48:20about is
48:21softball, I am the head of my team, people look up to me
48:25and you come out of that deciding you are on top of the hierarchy that matters to you.
48:36Well, that worked... and lots of baboon excrement.
48:40Which,
48:44under the right circumstances, with the right season's experiment is a gold mine.
48:50Unfortunately, this time around it is just
48:54a cage that I have to clean now.
49:02I am studying stress for thirty years now, and I even
49:06tell people how they should live differently, so presumably I should
49:09have incorporated all of this, and the reality is,
49:11like, I am unbelievably stressed, and type A, and
49:15poorly coping, and why else would I study the stuff 80 hours a week?
49:19No doubt everything I advises could lose all its credibility if i keel over dead
49:24from a heart attack in my early 50s.
49:26I'm not good at dealing with stress.
49:30You know, one thing that works to my advantage is I love my work and I love
49:34every aspect of it, so that's good...
49:36Nonetheless, this is pretty clearly a different place
49:40than the savannah in East Africa.
49:43You can do science here that's very different and
49:47more interesting in some ways, you can have hot showers on a more regular basis
49:51That is a more
49:52interesting, varied world in lots of ways
49:55but there is a lot out there that you sure miss.
50:07There is a pretty miraculous place, where
50:10every meal tastes good, and your are
50:14ten times more aware of every sensation. This is a hard place to
50:21come to year after year without getting, I think, a very
50:24different metabolism and temperament.
50:27I am more extroverted here, I am more,
50:31more happy...
50:34It is a hard place not to be happy.
50:42So one
50:45antidote to stress may be finding a place where we have control
50:49but how do we reckon with all the time we spend at work
50:53I would say what we've learned from
50:57the Whitehall study, from the studies of non-human primates
51:01is the conditions in which people live and work
51:05are absolutely vital for the health
51:08Senior civil servant Sara Woodhall
51:11enjoys the benefits of control. I don't
51:15think I suffer from stress I don't work a 100 hours a week
51:19I control the amount of work that I do to make sure that
51:23I can continue to deliver long-term
51:27Control... the amount of control is intimately related
51:31to where you are in the occupational hierarchy
51:34and what we have found is in general
51:38people report to us that things have got worse.
51:41That the amount of work stress has gone up.
51:44Their illness rates go up. Where people report to us that they got more control
51:49they're being treated more fairly at work, there is more justice
51:53in the amount of treatment, so things are getting better,
51:57the amount of illness goes down. I've been very lucky I
52:01I have never experienced any problems with my health. But not everyone is so lucky.
52:06So is there a prescription for the vast majority of us
52:10who aren't at the top? Give people more involvement in the work give them more say in
52:15what they're doing
52:16give them more reward for the amount of efforts they put out
52:20and it might well be you have not just a healthier workplace
52:23but a more productive workplace as well.
52:29I've managed to achieve a degree of control
52:32at the moment I'm in a very good position this is the first time were I feel
52:36I have had
52:37a boss who appreciates me. He doesn't dominate team meetings he sits back
52:41he invites people to contribute, he lets other people chair
52:45He's a real manager and he, from the start when I returned of my latest sick
52:50leave just six months ago
52:51he was so positive I think I feel sufficiently
52:54empowered
52:58Who would have imagined
53:02that Robert's baboons would point us humans
53:05towards a stress-free utopia. This may sound
53:10a little fanciful but I think what we're trying to create
53:15is a better society. The implications both of the baboons
53:20and of the British civil services is how can we create
53:23a society that has the conditions that will allow people to flourish.
53:29And that's where this is heading to create
53:32a better society that promotes human flourishing
53:39So what does the baboons teach the average person in there
53:42don't bite somebody because you're having a bad day
53:46don't just displace on them in any sort of manner, social affiliation is a remarkably
53:51powerful thing and
53:52that said by somebody who lives in a world where ambition and drive and type A things
53:57and all of that sort of things dominates
54:00those things are really important and one of the greatest forms of sociality
54:05is giving rather than receiving and
54:08all those things make for a better world
54:14Another one of the things that baboons teach us
54:17is if they are able to, in one generation transform what are supposed
54:22to be
54:22textbooks social systems, sort of engraved in stone,
54:26we don't have an excuse when we say they're certain inevitabilities about
54:30human social systems
54:34And so, the haunting question that endures from Robert's life work
54:39are we brave enough to learn from a baboon?
54:43The Kikarak troop didn't just survive without stress
54:48they thrived.
54:52Can we?

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