National Geographic: Stress: Portrait of a Killer

At this moment I am stressed with all the trimmings, including irony. I just took copious notes on the first fifteen minutes of a National Geographic presentation. I worked hard on getting names spelled right and linking and making it worthy of posting. Then I pushed a button and it disappeared. The film is called Stress: Portrait of a killer. What follows are my notes as I continue to take in the picture. This covers 38 minutes of the 56 minute film.

The gist of the start of the film is that there's this very chilled scientist named Robert Sapolsky who's been studying baboons for over 30 years (of peripheral interest to me is that according to Wikipedia he grew up in a "devout Orthodox Jewish home" and is now an atheist. He got a McArthur fellowship, know as the genius grant when he was young and went to work studying stress in baboons in Africa. He found that stress is mostly about hierarchy. The haves are not stressed and the have nots are stressed. He has clear proof from their blood that the stressed ones are less healthy; they have higher blood pressure, faster heart rates, issues with depression, reproduction, and more. The main ingredient to stress for those who rank low is that they have very limited control.

For forty years Michael Marmot was at the helm of a study involving 28,000 people, named and connected to Whitehall - (because Her Majesty's Civil Service is an institution where hierarchy is of utmost import) in Britain about how rank affects people. Kevin Brooks who was part of the study tells the tale of how as a low ranking (level seven) government lawyer he failed to dot an i (so to speak). He was called into a superior's office where he was admonished and threatened with no opening to answer. When the lashing was done he went to his office, closed the door, and broke down crying.

A woman who was part of the study, Sarah Woodal (also featured in this article) is a happy, senior civil servant. Marmot says that it's clear that the lower you rank the higher your risk of heart related and other disease. To him this means that once you move down from the top spot each person in the chain at at a higher risk than the ones above. He notes that this applies to office jobs, non physical labor, but the setting is quite secondary to the ranking. Woodal has never needed a day off due to health, has had no problems relating to health. The low ranking fellow says his work is "tainted" because in the last year years he had to miss (rachmanah litzlan) about half his work time due to health.

The two studies match.

The film addresses ulcers and how it was always assumed they were caused by stress. Then in the eighties it was decided that it was not stress but bacteria. Doctors no longer had to look patients in the eye and ask what was happening in their lives. Now they prescribed pills and done. Then it was discovered that these bacteria are common, two thirds of the world's population have them. Yet, not everyone has ulcers. It was discovered that when the body is stressed it shuts the immune system, because it shuts down everything it considers non-essential. Once the immune system is shut via stress then the bacteria can have its way and cause ulcers.

Studies with macaque baboons have shown that subordinates have more stress and thus more plaque in their artery walls. It's a fact that stress today leads to extreme affects.

Sapolsky and his mentor learned via a study that memory is affected by chronic stress - we lose memory. Also, acute stress affects the ability to get out information you know well.

Carol Shively found that pleasure, brought about via dopamine, is affected by stress. The dominant monkeys had more dopamine, the subordinates had dull brains. If you're low ranking everything is duller, and you feel low. And society stresses the point and stresses out the have nots.

Jeffrey Ritterman, cardiologist, treats people from different neighborhoods. Where the social status is higher the health is better. Emanuel Johnson is a guidance counselor in a dangerous neighborhood. He had a heart attack and is a diabetic, feels the stress after 20 years on the job. The Whitehall study found a link relevant to Emanuel. Not only is status related to stress, but the two relate to how you put on weight. They found that people who are lower in the hierarchy put on their weight primarily in their center, their gut. Carol Shively looked into it regarding monkeys and found that subordinates are more likely to have their fat focused in their abdomen. Shively considers this discovery, the most bizarre and fascinating of all she learned in her study - the fact that you can affect via stress how fat is distributed in your body. These scientists agree that stress plays a major role in today's obesity epidemic and more-so that the fat brought on by stress is dangerous fat. Fat carried in the abdomen is worse for a person than fat stored elsewhere in the body.

Shively says that not only does our society not value stress reduction, we celebrate stress. We admire someone that has two balls in the air at once, and we idolize someone with five balls in the air at once even more. She pleads with our society to start valuing balance more and over achieving less.

The film then goes back to Holland, late 1944: the Dutch Hunger Winter. Those who survived that occupation and starvation remain traumatized today. Dutch researcher Tessa Roseboom studied the affect of the stress of famine on fetuses of the women who survived this time. The Dutch kept meticulous records and her team was able to look into over 2400 people born during and after the famine. They concluded that the stress in fetal life affected these people and the damage is still there 60 years later. Many of them are alive today and they have higher risk of heart disease, higher cholesterol, etc. Their sensitivity to stress is more acute and their health is worse than people born before or after the famine. It seems that stress hormones from the mother's blood affected the fetus' nervous system as it struggled with starvation. Years later this first encounter with stress reverberates. The brain chemistry and general adaptation to hard times are all affected. Two of the people, now in their sixties, who were born during that famine speak on camera about their difficult issues. The researchers believe that the atmosphere surrounding birth, pre-birth affects the way a person will react to stress throughout their life.