Radiolab - Stress

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Stress can give your body a boost - raising adrenaline levels, pumping blood to the muscles, heightening our senses. And those sudden superpowers can be a boon when you’re running from a lion. But repeatedly dipping into that well can make you sick, even kill you. Since it feels like there’s been an extra bit of stress going around lately, we decided to replay this episode, originally aired back in 2005, which takes a long hard look at the body's system for getting out of trouble. And how in our modern, hyper-connected world, that system misfires and takes us from the frying pan, right into another, albeit entirely different, frying pan. Stanford University neurologist (and part-time "baboonologist") Dr. Robert Sapolsky takes us through what happens on our insides when we stand in the wrong line at the supermarket, and offers a few coping strategies: gnawing on wood, beating the crap out of somebody, and having friends. Plus: the story of a singer who lost her voice, and an author stuck in a body that never grew up. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.     Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!

Wait, you're listening to radio lab from WNYC. Hey it's lots of how are you sleeping? And then if you are getting sleep, you still feel unexhausted. Maybe your ears have been ringing or your short of breath before a big moment at work. Maybe you're gripped with an encompassing sense of doom that your very life depends on this presentation to a group of five people in a conference room.

These are familiar feelings, especially today, but what exactly are they? Where do they come from? Are they good or bad for us? On this classic episode of Radio Lab, originally aired in one of our first seasons and the aptly named stress, we examine those questions. Take a breather, take a listen, enjoy, take care of yourself. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad Abumron.

We're going to start today's program with a brief diversion to Midtown Manhattan. At the office of a neuropsychologist, Cameron Falibor, a well-dressed man with a calm voice, calming presence and uncanny ability to calm others, which is why we're here. Are you going to be the volunteer? Uh, yeah. He walks me over to a small machine and asks for my left hand. Okay, what we're doing right now, we're just putting a couple of sensors that measure basically the flow of electrons between two fingers here.

That would be my index and middle fingers. And there are electrons going between my fingers? Oh, absolutely. Well, there are salts and minerals that are going to enable a very tiny electrical charge to travel from one finger to the other one. And he explains the more anxious I am, the more sparks fly between my fingers. In other words, this is a stress test. Okay, so I'm going to start it and I'm going to feel something. No, I think you're not going to feel anything.

But I will hear something that wind in the background. So if this goes up, it means that you are more stressed. So let me just make a couple of sounds here. You stress me out, man. OK, did you see that? Yeah, I got. Only with a couple of snaps near your ear. I got all the way to the top.

Yes. That's not good. Well, that means that you need to relax and you need to bring it down. Techn need to bring it down. Techniques to bring stress down. That is what Cameron Valipore has promised us. His theory is if you can hear your stress, you can control it. Okay, so what I like you to do is just to sit back.

And when you're ready, just go ahead and close your eyes. And for now I'm going to actually get rid of the tone here for you, and you can monitor from here. And I want you to just get as comfortable as you can get right now. And gradually start to take the slow breaths through your abdomen. Okay, and continue to breathe slowly and perhaps make your exhalations a little bit longer and more sustain. And perhaps you can notice as you continue to breathe slowly, but perhaps with each breath,

you feel a little bit more relaxed. A little bit more comfortable. Relax, relax, relax, relax, relax, relax. And for now there is nothing needed to worry about. It's in the phone rings. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that appropriate? While you're trying to de-stress, make your life a little better?

The phone rings. Roons it all. One fell swoop. Like life really. At any moment, a dirty bomb could go off you now. This you could get downsized, dumped, dented by a mad stroller pusher as you cross the street. A street already swimming with naked hostility

and fist-sized deviant flu-bugs. The point is, the phone could ring at any time. A phone call. That's not... I can't really get more stressed. It's like, I can't stop. We can't control stress, but what we can do is understand it. That's today on Radio Lab conversations and stories about stress.

From many different perspectives, starting with the science, when you are stressed out, these things inside you. Like just reproduction, growth rose or heart rate. Change drastically, and a leading researcher will explain exactly how. And later in the program, a very famous and perplexing case of stage fright. It feels like somebody's, you know, strangling you from the inside. I'm Chad Abumrod, writing shotgun with me is Mr. Robert Crowwich. Who, by the way, ain't that with me is Mr. Robert Crowich. Oh, by the way, that would be me.

Yes. Immediately say that I think we should correct a prejudice here. You seem to be anxious about stress. Well, maybe a little bit. Stress is your friend. We need it. Yes. In midterms and eighth grade, if you didn't have a stress,

you wouldn't have gotten to ninth grade. You shouldn't. I just say, oh God, let's have less of it. Sometimes you want it to kick you in the butt. All right, I think our first story gets at what you're saying. It comes from a guy named Colby Hall. Colby, tell me what you had for breakfast so I can set the levels. All right, this morning I had two hard boiled eggs.

I met Colby Hall at a party, actually overheard him telling the story you're about to hear. It's an amazing story. So I asked him to come in and tell to us in the studio. Now, if you are squeamish, you may want to consider turning the radio down for about seven minutes. That's good to me. And in your headphones? Good. Alright, Kobe, let me start by asking you.

At what point in the story did you realize you were in big trouble that your life was changing. When someone said get a tourniquet. Fourth of July weekend, up in Vermont, doubles tennis, foothills of the Green Mountains, barbecues, beer, lake. It was perfect in every single way. And we just said, let's go water skiing. So we load up the boat with towels and we all get on there sort of excited to, you know, killing an hour and a half on a beautiful lake

on just a gorgeous, gorgeous day. And just as we're sort of loading up the boat, a canoe comes up to the dock. And the canoe is this family, these mother and father and their two little children, and they were staying in the house. And so we said, well, do you guys want to join us? Sure. So the two little kids get in the boat and the father gets this family, these mother and father and their two little children, and they were staying in the house, and so we said, well, do you guys want to join us? Sure.

So the two little kids get in the boat, and the father gets in the boat, and we pull out from the dock, and we get about 30 yards away from the dock, and the boat driver stops. I have my little water ski-seisted devices belt on, and it's kind of old-school type, and I jump off the side of the boat,

and the force of me getting in the water, the water ski belt falls off of me getting in the water, the water ski belt falls off of me. No big deal, I'm just going to swim over and I look up and the boat is closer to me than I had thought and was actually moving towards me. I guess what the driver had done is he may have thought that he put it in neutral but in fact he put it in very slight reverse and he didn't know that I was behind it. He was dealing with the rope. And so I'm in the water buckling the water belt. And I look up and I notice, and it's about 10 feet away

from me. So I yell, hey, stop the boat. But it's a big boat, and the wind is blowing. And your head is like sort of at the level of the water. So no one really heard me. I couldn't move out of the way. And it literally just came right up to me. So I put my hands out to protect myself,

and immediately, I feel like these punches on my legs, which was the boat propeller. People say living in the moment like you, it's amazing to me how many complex thoughts you have in a split second. Wait, is this happening? Oh my god, it's happening. Wow, this is cutting my legs. I'm trapped. I need to get out of this situation. I'm going to push up. I'm going to go under the boat and let it go over me.

Like that all happened in a split second. And at the same time, you're thinking like, maybe this will just be a bad injury. Or maybe I'll lose the use of one leg. There's all these sort of weird deals that you make in your head. Like, I don't wanna die. So I'll just, you know, be in a wheelchair

or maybe I'll just be really, really injured. Or maybe I'll never be able to be basketball again Maybe I'll just always walk with a limp. You know the other side this all happened one month to the day of my wedding He had planned this really I mean it was small but beautiful wedding upstate and You know, I wanted to walk down the aisle. I wanted to have the first dance And it sounds odd to Explain that you're having all those thoughts in that time that you are. So I come up on the other side of the boat and sort of gasped for air and I say,

I'm hurt. It doesn't really hurt like you would think. That was the weird thing. Like, it didn't hurt. It just, I mean, I feel it. Trading water in my legs are kind of numb. I look up and my fiancé is on the boat, and she gets up, and she sees me, and she can see the ring of blood surrounding me.

And the water up there is so clear that she could see through the water, she could see deep red tissue on my legs, and big flaps of skin sort of hanging off my legs, floating with the motion of the water. And it was at that point that she, you know, look on her face. And it's funny, like, sometimes you don't recognize, like, how bad something is until you see it in the eyes of someone next to you. And so when she freaked out and had the look of absolute terror in her eyes, And so when she freaked out and had the look of absolute terror in her eyes, I kind of just took over the situation because I was 10 seconds ahead of everyone else. So I yelled to the wife of the boat operator, whose name is Marie, and I said,

in a very stern, serious calm voice, like, Marie, turn off the boat. She turned the boat off, and I realized that there were two little kids on the boat, and the first lot that came to my mind was This is something that those kids shouldn't see Before I came up I said Marine these kids should not see this you should hide their eyes you should distract them so she took the kids to the front of the boat and I'm not a real strong person. I don't know how I got like sudden upper body strength But I was able to just pull my full body away.

I'm like, and I weigh like 210 and 15 pounds, and I just pulled myself up into the back of the boat, and there were my legs. Layers of fat, I see muscle tissue. I mean, it's hard to describe. Like, my legs were wide open. There were big hunks of flesh that have hanging off my leg, and the muscles just sort of, they're exposed to the air.

The cuts went down to my bone. It's like you're at a fish market and you see someone cut into a fish, you just see the insides like very, very clearly. And that's when, John says, get a tourniquet because the injuries on my legs really looked like it warranted a tourniquet. And if I were to ask you to make a tourniquet, right now, what would you do?

I have no idea. Who knows how to make a tourniquet, right? There's no boy scouts on the boat. So, I'm gonna take a little shirt off and wrap it around my leg and I said, look, get those towels. And so, they wrap the towels around my leg. And...

What's happening between you and your fiancee at that point? My fiance thought that I was about to die and she was, you know, doing all that she could kind of keep it together. And I remember looking to her and rubbing her arm and saying, this is going to be okay. Now is the time for us to be really brave. This will be okay. Now is the time for us to be really brave. This will be okay. If for nothing else, I just wanted to pretend that that was the case, because I didn't really know.

My name is Colby Hall, and I survived a fight with a boat propeller. So he survived. It turns out the cuts he got were so clean and so deep that it allowed him to heal more quickly. And as an aside, driving up to Vermont that weekend, we had stopped at the florist and had this big debate. My wife and I were like, she was my fiancee at the time about the color of tablecloths. You would have thought on the drive up that the single biggest issue in the time about the color of tablecloths. You would have thought on the drive up

that the single biggest issue in our lives was the color of tablecloths at the wedding. It was that significant. The drive back from Vermont after this accident, we felt so lucky. Kobe Hall is a video producer for MTV and this is Radio Lab. Today's topic is stress.

Why, why? What a story. It happens that inside that story you've got a classic example of what always happens in a traumatic situation. I learned this from one of the leading experts on stress, Robert Sapolsky. Do you want me to incorporate your question into my answer? Is this wrong? Regular conversation, so you can do whatever you want. Who teaches at Stanford University, who pointed out to me that in any situation your body is taken over really by stress hormones. That's that sort of alert tunnel vision, time passage feels different, the eight seconds feel like it took for hours afterward.

That's the stress hormones and that's mostly a adrenaline doing that. So if you're, you know, flailing in the water and hit by a propeller from the boat and your leg is severed, my imagination, there's two people in the duck, oh my god, oh my god. But you say, all right, let's call the police. You somehow are the calm one. Is that part of this thing? Often that's the case, and that's another piece of the stress response. You shut down pain perception.

It doesn't really hurt, like you would think. That was the weird thing, like it didn't hurt. Pain is a very subjective state, and if it's the right setting, you blunt it, and it's not just guys in battle, you've been grievously injured, and they think the blood has been spattered on them from the guy, and the stump is just kind of tingling, and then they suddenly discover it. But that's exactly what you do with pain perception when you twist your

ankle in the company softball game, and you hardly even notice it. So in the face of a major physical stressor, not only is there this tunnel clarity and sensory whatever, there's also blocking of pain, this in the momentness. And you know, we all experience at some point or other where were you when you heard that Winif-Palcho would name your child Apple, that sort of thing, you know, those moments that just define our lives. And there's a physiology of it. define our lives and there's a physiology of it. I know exactly where I was. Where were you?

Does he have any idea where that physiology came from? I think he does. He thinks all mammals have these things in us that we've got from evolution. So imagine, say, or your an Impala. What's an impala? It's an antelope kind of. So you're bounding across the sedentary. You're chased by a tiger. But you don't want this tiger to get anywhere near you.

So your insides have to work hard to keep your outsides alive. You're running for your life. The predators coming after you. Certain stuff happens. First thing you need energy. Not energy tucked away in your fat cells for some building project next spring. Energy right now to go to whichever muscles you're going to save your life. You're adrenaline, other hormones go to your fat cells,

pour out all this stored energy, feed it to your thigh muscles. In addition, you want to deliver this left as fast as possible, so you increase your heart rate. Another thing you do is you shut down everything that's not essential. Right now, this is no time to worry about ovulating, this is no time to worry about growing antlers, this is no time to digest about ovulating, this is no time to worry about growing antlers, this is no time to digest breakfast, you shut down digestion, you shut down growth, you shut down reproduction, we all know for example that the digestive end, the first step of that, you get nervous, your mouth gets dry. Everyone has to

six brain. You go to, you have to make a presentation in front of a large number of people, standing there and you're going, this is a bird. Ladies and gentlemen, you know those are, you can't, if you say the word dog, your tongue would get stuck up at the top of your mouth because you got nothing going on wet in your mouth. Your digestive system is shutting down and the first step is those fluids that would help you digest upstream being air anymore. This is like the antelope. In addition, you void your bowels, you void your bladder as well, get rid of the dead weight.

That's why people are executed in diapers typically. You shut down all these on essentials. So if you end up all this stuff, if you say, okay, I'm not growing and I'm thinking faster and my heart is pacing so I can get all this stuff and all these things are going on simultaneously. This is not a bad thing at all. This is a great thing. It's a great thing if you're stressed like a normal mammal. So when people talk about stress or stress diseases or being overstressed or the stressfulness of modern life. What does that mean? Well, almost certainly it means it's got absolutely nothing to do with it

and with an Impala running for its life. Very few parking spot fights are settled with axes. We don't have to wrestle people for canned food items and bond out supermarkets, our boss. Well, you haven't been to certain people for canned food items and bond out supermarkets our boss Well, you haven't been to certain Rashes of New York lately. I love you anyway When you're actually getting stressed in the way that we talk about in every day sense We're not being physically menaced what we're doing is turning on the stress response in anticipation of a stressor

You mean this literally like you're sitting there in the bed thinking, oh god, oh god, oh god, I had the sales meeting tomorrow. And you're clushing to your body are the same stress hormones and everything else that would be clushing to the impala dashing being chased by a lion or you mean sort of like that. Yeah, actually, you know, here's one of these triad at home exercises. Lion bed, when you're nice and sleepy and relaxed in your heart's beating nice and slow, very carefully think, you know that heart isn't going to beat forever. And most likely, you're going to turn on the exact same stress responses if you were running

for your life. Same hormone, same physiological changes, same all of that. Just think about, oh my god, I'm going to die. If it really has the right impact on you and the punch line of the entire field is, that's not what the system evolved for. So if you're a human being and you're a nervous one and you forget scared in the nights, in your body, what's going on that will eventually make you sick? Exactly the same thing. And all you have to do is that sprint across the savanna kind of writ large and out of it pops a whole bunch of diseases.

If you're constantly mobilizing energy for those thigh muscles that are preparing to run you across the savanna as you wonder, is social security going to be there in 30 years? If you're constantly doing that. you've got a really nervous president. Yes. Well, I study this subject. It's not by chance. Okay.

I believe you. I believe you. It's a coin toss. I worry about being ethnically cleansed by Serbian, you know, roads. That sort of thing. And I'm sitting here in Palo Alto. You know, if you constantly mobilize energy, you don't store it. And for really complex reasons, you're more at risk for this disease, adult onset diabetes. This is one of those great diseases that are great, great grandparents never heard of.

A much more accessible version is, you know, increase your blood pressure out the wazoo to run for your life. This is not a big deal for three minutes. Increase it chronically every time you come to work and stress induced hypertension, you're going to damage the walls of your blood vessels. Now not everybody in the world reacts to everything as though they were nanteloping chased across the Savannah. I mean some people can handle all kinds of stress and get through the day and other

people succumb. And that's where we ought to go next. Coming up, a particular piece of furniture, and its remarkable impact on public health. In a heartwarming tale of a baboon who changed his ways and in the process, discovered the secret to longer life and lower stress. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad, I'm Ron, Robert Crowich and I will continue in a moment. Chad here, this is WNYC's Radio Lab. Prior to the station ID, we were listening to a conversation between two Roberts.

Robert number one is right here with me, Mr. Crowich. And Robert two is, well we're here from a more than a moment, Robert Spolski. Stanford University professor, the topic of that conversation and of our show is stress, stress then and stress now. As we heard stress then, would count as something like being chased across the savannah by a saber tooth tiger. Stress now, standing in the wrong line at the supermarket,

very different kinds of stress separated by thousands of years of human experience but to the body, they are the same. And too many false tiger alerts will make you sick. Now that right there, the connection between stress and sickness, how that connection was made, is an interesting story, which involves lots of people, but let's start with one. Dr. Paul J. Rosh, I'm president of the American Institute of Stress, and I've been involved in stress research for well over 50 years.

And it was around 50 years ago that Dr. Rosh and a few colleagues made an interesting discovery. They took a bunch of rodents and did some well, not so nice things to them. Like sewing back the eyelids of mice and shining lights in their eyes and deafening noises. We put them on treadmills, we left them out on the roof of the medical school in the cold, wintry, Canadian blizzards. We throw the animals into water so they would have to constantly swim. You would do that for hours or days until they were too weak and then measure their hormonal

secretion. Anything that would be a severely notchous threat or challenge. If there is any justice in the world, this guy is going to rat hell. There's going to be some rodent named Alice stitching his eyeballs. But let's go on. But in the name of science, what Russian company noticed is that every different type of cruel torture technique they did to these poor rodents resulted in the same outcome. They got sick and sick in the same way, sort of flu-like symptoms.

Furthermore, we quickly learned that it wasn't necessary to do these horrible things to get almost the same effect. No, they could get the same effect by merely frustrating the rats, put their food out, and then before the rats get it, take it away, then put it out again, and then, ooh, thought you had it, take it away again. Just by doing that over and over, that would make some of the rats sick. And some of them could cope. And some of them could cope. Yeah. Well, this is Robert Soposki. The professor has been helping us along, says that human beings break down pretty much the same categories. There are some people who can be challenged by all the daily experiences, and they

just kind of glide through it. And there are other people like you you. Look at furious, just furious. The key thing really is the hostility. It's the hostility. And it's a particular style that may seem very familiar to our New York metropolitan area listening ship. And I say this as a native New Yorker. But it's the style called toxic hostility. We're just everything in the world around you confirms.

They're out to get you, they're out to get you preferentially. Every elevator door that closes before you get there is proof the person inside who could have stopped it, but chose not to is out to stab you in the back. And this is a really, really hostile world out there. And this is a way of life. This is to which everyone says, it is, it's true. That is how the world is. And some people have this,

in a dire sort of way. In a dire sort of way. And the supposed point is that the people who do have it in a dire sort of way gets sick. Yeah, there's a kind of anger and style that is so bad for your nervous system. That's like worse than smoking. I mean, literally, it was like, this is what it's famously called type A behavior.

Type A was first described by these two cardiologists, Friedman and Rosenman. That's Meyer Friedman, Ray Rosenman, and they came up with this idea in the 1950s. Their original version was your hostile, time pressured, impatient, low self-esteem, joyless striving, all you live for is to check things off your to-do list. And this is what they were originally saying greatly increases your risk of heart disease. And cardiologists hated these guys.

For the simple reason, you're some like Ozzy and Harriet, Eisenhower, or a cardiologist, and all you think about is like heart valves and blood lipids. And here's these guys saying, no, you've got to sit down in your patients and talk to them and find out if they've picked the wrong line in the supermarket, do they go berserk at that point? And it took decades for it to become clear that this really is for real. We're here at two cardiologists proposing that you are more likely to get a heart attack, not based on the size of your veins or whatever is passing through your blood, but on the kind

of guy or kind of gal you are. Exactly. How did they come to this peculiar insight? Okay, this is where this great story comes from, and I wouldn't have believed it except it was told to me by Friedman himself and appropriately, sheepishly. So this is back in the 50s and they've got this cardiology practice and everything's going great. Except apparently they had this one problem which they were having to spend a fortune re-apolstering the armchairs in their office. In their waiting room?

In their waiting room. What's this about? They had no idea. They paid no attention to, and it's part of the overhead. They have this pollster who comes every month, got to fix a couple of chairs every month. Every month, yes. So one month, the pollster is out on vacation. Replacement of pollster who comes in takes one look at the chairs and discovers type A personality. Presenting great moments in American upholstery. He says, what the hell is wrong with your patience?

Nobody wears out chairs this way. And the guys absolutely right, they still have one chair, which I hope they're going to give to the Smithsonian. And what it is is the front two inches of the seat cushion and the front two inches of the armrests are totally shredded and the rest of the chair is fine. But my shredded is like ripped. That's where the tears are. It's not evenly distributed.

You do it at being in your nails and doing it or something. Well, basically what you've got there is the Taipei profile, the person literally sitting on the edge of their seat and squirming and fussing with the arm chairs and clawing and none of this wear on the chair distributed over the entire but range of weight displacement of it. People are sitting there on the edge of their seats. So the ifpulster says to the cardiologist there's something wrong with the people in your waiting room? Exactly. And what's supposed to happen at this point this is supposed to be this epiphanyl moment and one of these are winds up in the textbooks.

If like midnight conferences between a pollster and cardiologist, or like they do these huge surveys in young, idealistic, a pollster's sweep across America and discovery, you know, you don't see chairs like these in a pediatrist's office, only in the cardiop… That's what supposed to happen. Here's where Friedman says, get this guy out of my face. I need to see patients. I'm this important guy. Give him his damn check. He was too type-at-a. Listen to the god. So he truly opposed the rough. So Rosie, we're given this check. Get him out of here in five years later. They're

doing these studies with these psychologists. It's an outpops the type-a profile and they say, oh my god, the up upholster He was right to this day. They have no idea who the man was and I'm willing to bet that like there's this 95-year-old upholster a guy and some bar in San Francisco right now who's droning on about how he discovered Taipei personality And it's absolutely true An intense mission wide search has yet to reveal the identity of that replacement opposed to it. This story has been brought to you by the American Opostry Association, dedicated to find clock, find furniture, and a healthier America. My name is Charles Young, and I do Op healthier America. My name is Charles Young and I do a post-free.

I'm doing a rocker. It's a nice chair actually. They wore the seat all the way down to the wood. Sometimes the things are so bad that they said, please cover it before you take it. Because I don't want people in the building to know how bad my furniture is. But I'm saying, how could you live like this in your own house?

It's a mess. It's a mess. It's a mess. We couldn't find the guy, the type A guy. But in the process of looking at Grannacross, Charles Young. And in this messy stressful world, his Lower East Side Studio is a window onto calmer times. A long time ago, there was straw inside of the old stuff. Oh, let me see if it's in there.

Let me see if it's enough. Let me see if it's enough. Let me see if it's enough. This is the photograph of an old chair that was made about 100 years ago. I don't know if you can see that, but there's straw inside there. The old stuff is such a class to it. You know, mine working on it.

The new stuff is not that way. The new stuff is all badly put together, stapled together so we can't fix it. Because everything we do, we throw away and go buy new. It's not the glamorous job in the world, but it's a job. job in the world but it's a job. People don't want to let that go up all straight. It's a day and hour.

So I don't know what they gonna do. You want to know about a poultry? Visit Charles Young, owner of CY Pulse Tree Company on the Lower East Side. He's been doing it for decades. My best customers are dogs and cats. They chop people furniture which is absolutely wonderful. Charlie spoke with producer Ellen Warren. You got a dog. Chad here with Robert Crowich today on Radio Lab. We are looking at stress, the effects of stress on chairs and on us. To get back to our bodies for just a second, remember before we said that when you get scared and you're going to make a presentation, your mouth goes dry because your digestive system is beginning to shut down. It's also true that if you're very, very nervous, so you wouldn't know this,

you stop growing. And this is even for a very little bit of time, a short spurred of panic will create a short spururt of non-growth. That's on one end. But since Professor Robert Saposki is supposedly exposed someone to a lot of continuing stress. And at an extreme, you get one of the truly bizarre outposts in medicine, this disease of kids who stop growing for reasons of psychological stress.

Meaning they're so nervous about whatever it is that their system doesn't, it spends all the time pumping and palpitating and doing all this in a no growing. Saying, grow tomorrow, grow tomorrow, grow tomorrow. This is no time for it. And it's well documented. This is not a fourth grade teacher who is mean and yells at the kids.

This is like nightmare police and the social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, sort of nightmare stuff. And amazingly amazingly you get the kids out of those settings and often they will start growing again. Okay so you read up a lot about this and there's this weird pattern I had noted and a lot of these unreadable chapters which is they would make reference to Peter Pan. They would start with a quote from Peter Pan or some slide comments about Tinkerbell, and I'd seen this for years, I had no idea what this was about, to one day I finally found the explanation.

Eight-year-old kid growing up in Victorian England, one day he sees his beloved 12-year-old brother killed in front of them, horrible accident. This destroys the family. And this was the mother's favorite child who dies. Takes to her bed in this Victorian swoon for the next 10 years, totally ignoring this child, growing up in this emotional isolation. These horrible scenes, the boy comes in with a tray of food for his mother, and she's going on, oh, David,

David, is that you, David, have you come to me, David, the dead son? So the second son has left standing in the door, she's like, gee, it's only me. It's me, it's me, sorry, I'm not David, sorry, I'm not David. Sorry, it wasn't me instead of him. Only thing she apparently ever spoke to him about was this crazy idea she grabbed onto,

which was if David had to die, at least he was still a boy, he's not one of these boys who grows up and doesn't need his mother anymore. He'll always be my perfect little boy because he didn't grow up. He didn't grow up and he didn't grow up. This kid hears this with a vengeance and stops growing at that point. He lives to be 60 years old under five-foot-all, unconsumated marriage, complete maturational

arrest. Did he have puberty? He did. He grew facial hair, but most indications are not a whole lot of other secondary sexual characteristics. And as an adult, this was the author of the Much Beloved Children's Classic Peter Pan. This was J. M. Barry, the guy who wrote Peter Pan.

Really? Who was a very, very troubled man, who, among other things, just endlessly turned out in plays and novels and whatever's about boys who die and come back as a ghost and marry their mothers and all sorts of edible stuff like that, sadomasochistic fantasy stuff with little boys all through his writings, his private writings. This was a very, very troubled man who did not deal very well with the consequences of this for the rest of his life. Coming up, the therapeutic benefits of screaming,

gnawing, and beating the crap out of someone. This is Radio Lab, I'm Chad Havan-R, Robert Crowwich and I will continue in a moment. I'm Chad Havomrod here with Robert Crowwich, this is Radio Lab. Today's topic is stress. From your point of view and from your body's point of view. Usually you and your body are on the same side. You stomach grumbles That means your body wants you to eat so you do Your foot hurts

That means your body wants you not to step on that foot so it can heal and so you don't The interesting and sometimes tragic thing about stress and stress disorders is that you and your body finds yourself on opposing sides Your body's just trying to protect you thing about stress and stress disorders is that you and your body finds yourself on opposing sides. Your body's just trying to protect you, but that's not the way it works out. Consider this story about folk singer Linda Thompson. She was part of a late 60s scene that included everyone from James Taylor, to Paul Simon, Nick Drake, even Bob Dylan. Well, he's just amazing musicians. Sometimes I think, cool that's part of the problem. If I had hung out with mediocre musicians, I wouldn't be

half so worried about what I was gonna sound like. Linda Thompson spoke with our producer Ellen Horn. I remember the first time I heard your voice I was in college. I was at my friend Chris's house and we're all sitting on the floor around the record player listening to I want to see the bright lights tonight. For weeks we tried to learn to play those songs. Your voice sounds so pure and so angelic. Oh, and then that's what it means. It's just hard to imagine that voice struggling in any way.

It's really horrible. It's just awful. But you get through it. The trouble started in the studio. It feels like somebody's, you know, strangling you from the inside. That's what it feels like. Linda would step to the mic, open her mouth to sing. And instead of it coming out, you know, you kind of go, some kind of squeak or constriction happens first. She was recording her sixth album with husband Richard Thompson. They were one of those mythic rock and roll couples. He wrote songs for her to sing with titles like, Withered and Died and Downward the Drunkard's

Role. Dark songs about betrayal and loss. They played together for a decade. By that time, there were problems in my marriage which I'm kind of fond of saying I didn't know about, but on a subliminal level one does know these things, you know. It was 1982 and Linda had just delivered their third child. Her throat hurt all the time. You know, it got, it was pretty bad and then, I mean, I just come out of hospital.

I just had a baby, so, you know, I mean, he'd stuck around until the baby was born. But as soon as she was born, a couple of weeks, a week, I don't know. He told me I've met somebody else. I don't know if I've ever told anybody this, but the first thing I said was, can she sing? I mean, what normal person would say, can she sing? She was heartbroken when Richard laughed. And without explanation, her voice went with him. I just flew away.

Like someone had left the cage door open. That was really awful. And that kind of... It put the singing into perspective of it. She was mute. She was mute. I came to you where no one could hear me. At home with a newborn and two young children, she was totally isolated.

It's a nightmare. She couldn't make a sound when she picked up the phone. Strangers looked at her, puzzled as she gestured. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. I went to this guy and he said, said oh you've got hysterical dysphonia and You know on one hand it was it was great to know The tip that that they had a name on the other hand, you know

Even though I'm a layman I could understand the hysterical dysphonia meant that there was something wrong with my brain rather than my Throat for months her brain toyed with her throat with my brain rather than my throat. For months her brain toyed with her throat. Sometimes it was totally fine. Other days, nothing. Dry gurgles would barely escape. Ironically, when she was at her worst, that album she'd had such trouble recording came out,

and the critics loved it. She got some of her best reviews. The label expected them to promote the album. Rich had, and my manager didn't want me to do the tour. I mean Rich has said, you know, we're not together anymore and I don't think you should do the tour and my manager, that time our manager said, you mustn't do the tour and you're not well enough, you've just had a baby

and you're crazy and you mustn't do the tour. Because think about what touring meant. Richard wrote their songs, many about heartbreak. Night after night, she'd have to walk on stage and sing their sad story from his perspective. And I said, forget it, I am absolutely doing the talk. And I was very glad I did, because something miraculous happened.

Because I was so broken-hearted, my dysphonia, I mean for whatever reason I didn't have it nice sang really well Anger had returned her gift. This tour is legendary. Absolutely. I stole a car in Canada and got arrested. It's slept with too many people, took too many drugs and drank too much stuff. There's this story that you smashing up a dressing room? I did. I smashed up a dressing room and the guys at the club said, we had the sex pistols last week and they were, they were nowhere near as bad as you. And I said, oh, thank you.

I'm worse than those ex-pistols. But I wasn't actually trashing the dressing room. I was throwing things at Richard. You know, it's like every time he passed me, I'd lorbed something out of him. And when he passed me on stage, I tripped him up on stage. I mean, it was insane. Poor Richard. When they played LA, where Richard's new girlfriend lived, Linda Ronstadt consoled her.

Yeah, she pulled me out of the gutter outside the Roxy, where I was lying surrounded by champagne bottles. She pulled me out of the gutter and took me back to her house, and where I was ill for days and days and days. But at least her voice was back. And singing, she says, felt good. It didn't stay for long, I must say. It didn't stay for long. When the tour ended, the voice took off. It left as mysteriously as it had returned.

I couldn't speak when there was any peripheral noise. Like if I was in a restaurant, I would just say to the waiter, I've lost my voice. I never went into the hut, you know, with anybody, you know, I've got this thing, this dysphonia and blah, blah, blah, blah, I mean please. She's never entirely recovered. The battle between brain and voice has continued for two decades. I can't seem to speak. My hypnotism, that didn't work. Therapy and voice therapy and speech therapy and all sorts of things.

If somebody had said to me, if you have a heroin injection every day, you'll be fine, I would have done it. Absolutely would have done it. Absolutely would have done it. Because it's just so boring not to be able to sing. It's boring. It really is boring having this kind of tight throat. And then I suddenly said, I'm not going to do any more. I'm just not going to sing.

And that's what I did. I didn't sing for a long, long time. That's the only big difference from when we played it. And after the instrumental coming straight in. Exactly, that's the only big difference. This is Linda back in the studio after 17 years. Sometimes I couldn't sing, so I would come back the next day and sing. So that's how I got started again with the minimum pressure. And the critics are raving about our voice again.

To me, it sounds like it always did. Clean, vulnerable, ethereal. But there is a difference. I think I'm learning to let go a little. I did a live vocal, and some of it's shaky, but I'm leaving it all in. And I wouldn't have been able to do that a few years ago. I would have just winceed. Here's to the mind. No, I don't care. able to do that a few years ago. I would have just winceed.

No, I don't care. I just wanted to feel right. I do care, but I care a little less. It's probably the only good thing about impending old age. And she added in that bleak tone, I recognized from her songs. There's absolutely nothing else to recommend it, I can tell you. Alan Horn is a producer for this program for more on Linda Thompson and her music and for more on hysterical dysphonia, check our website, radiolab.org is the address. I'm Chad Abel-Moran.

This is radio lab, me and Rosarapura Crowwich. Today we're talking about stress. Robert, let me ask you a question based on what we just heard. Mm-hmm. Bleak, bleak, bleak. That's how that last piece ended. And that basically describes the world we live in. How do you cope?

I don't, I don't cope at all. I hate, I hate deeply, and I hate well. You rage, floridly. I do, and hate deeply, and I hate well. You rage. Flourately. I do, and as you know, I'm working with the air moments when I went to Kill Yo. That's all. It works for me. Yes, yes. But it also works for rats. I know this from Robert Spolski because he wrote an essay about

this, and I asked him about it. You have a very interesting description of work with rats in which rats are put into very tense situations, but there are four or five ways in which they alleviate their pain. It's beautiful stuff because it essentially gets at the core of this issue, you know, most of us cope. Basic scenario in those studies, you got two cages side by side, a rat in each cage, each or which can get a shock, and whenever one of them gets a shock, the other does.

Same intensity, same duration, same everything. Soul difference is, the rat in cage one just gets the shock, the rat in cage two gets the psychological manipulation. Meaning if you wanted to be one of these rats, another, you would, you'd want to be the second rat, number two, because number one just gets zapped. Number two gets little fixes. Here are four fixes he's gonna describe. Let's start with number one.

First version that will help the second rat. Every time it gets one of those shocks, it could run over to the other side of the cage where there's another rat it could sit down next to and bite the crap at. And you know what, that rat's gonna do just fine. He's not gonna get an ulcer because he's giving somebody else an ulcer. He has an outlet for his frustration.

If they're like Mike Tyson approach. Yes. If I get hit, you get it. Exactly. And it's documented by science. It makes you feel better, which is why sort of the first sound bite they've got to do with you in stress management is don't reduce your risk of an ulcer by giving it to somebody else make sure your outlets are not abusive ones because they feel great they're very effective.

Now to scenario number two. Next version, this time the rat's getting the shocks and now can go over to the other side of the cage and naw on a bar of wood or this counts as a relaxing hobby for a lab rat. Once again, you know, gets out the tensions, gets out the frustration, it's an outlet. I like that actually better than beating up on the other rats. Nice, nice or world if we all nod on wood instead of invading countries and things like that. Number three.

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday raised the national terror alert to orange. Orange or high alert, we are taking strong precautions. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Third version.

In this version, the second rat knows when the next shock is coming. The little warning light comes on 10 seconds before it gets predictive information. And for the same physical reality, you're less likely to get a stress-related disease if you get predictability when is it coming, how bad is it going to be, how long is it going to last? Oh, that makes a difference. If you see, get ready, get set. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly, because you scrunch up and you tighten your button, you close your eyes and you think about that Hawaii vacation or whatever it is. And this is what we're doing when we're sitting in the dentist chair and say, are we almost done? Give me some predictability here. And finally, scenario number four. The last factor is this one of if the rat thinks it has control, it's not going to get the stress-related disease.

Let it press a lever. It's been trained to press this lever to decrease the chances of a shock. The lever is doing squat today. It's a placebo. It's disconnected. But the rat's pounding away the lever, thinking this is great. Imagine how many shocks I've been getting otherwise, it has a sense of control. Control makes stressors less stressful. ["Making Stressor's Less Stressful." ["Making Stressor's Less Stressful." So moving along, beating up on another rat, or a person in our case, not a piece of wood,

having a sense of control, even if it's false, these seem to be helpful stress-related techniques. What about the yoga? What about therapy? They try and talk to the rats. You would of course figure that a professor at Stanford would come up with something parapier. He did, actually.

No, good. This wasn't with rats. It was with his real field expertise, which is baboons. What Robert Sapolsky does is he goes to East Africa and he spends time with baboon troops, particular families of baboons, and he just hangs with them for really long periods of time. Years even, and then writes stories,

and he observes things. And one of the things he observed was a therapeutic kind of stress resolution. In this case involving friendship. Okay. Here's what, here's what, how it went. Every baboon troop has an alpha baboon. That baboon beats up all the other baboons and is the guy who gets all the girls

because he's the strongest one. But in the life of every alpha baboon, there's gonna come a moment where some lesser ranked baboon is gonna beat you up and you lose your crown. In baboon life life when you stop being the number one. Do you follow the bottom? Well, you what happens is the other baboons remember how cool you were as an alpha and they take it out on you. The other ones that are up above you. Above you. Yeah, so number two beat you up. The number three starts to beat you up. The number four

takes you on. He tries to beat you up. The number five and you're you up the number four takes you on he tries to beat you up the number five And you're dropping down the chain. That doesn't seem fair by the way Did they go all the way to the bottom? Well, I don't know whether there might be like 34 there 19 so they're not the very very Bob who decides whoever gets beat up so I know but I mean you beat up the alpha guy He does he does he then have to fight everybody else to reestablish his I think yeah It's like a bird pecking on everybody fights with it. It's like one of those bar room things where everybody looks at each other and they all slug it out and they arrange themselves in standing order afterwards. Oh, I see. I sit next to Tom because I beat up Tom, but he beat up Fred.

At least I can still beat up Tom. Yeah. Okay. It's not a happy thing to be an aging former champ Bebun, not at all. Most of the time, if you are one of these X, if you wait, what do you do? Well that's the question. What you often do, what you do about half the time, is you pick up and you move to a different troop.

You transfer to a different troop. Even though you don't know anybody, you just start all over and out. Which is great. You're gonna be incredibly low ranking there because you're this broken down old male, but at least you're gonna be anonymous. And what you often see are these old broken battle scarred males who show up from out of nowhere and join a troop and he's some sweet old

poop and you feel horrible watching the juvenile's haslama. And almost certainly he was one son of a bitch in the western Serengeti about five years before and the guys basically seeking political asylum. Are there old guys who used to be out of us who stick around? That's the thing, only about half the old guys leave. So one of the studies I did was trying to figure out who leaves and who stays is that the ones who were more brutal back when is the ones who are getting more grief now, none of

that. The ones who stay are the ones who've actually managed to get friendships. This is for real. These are smart enough animals that they have social-affiliative relationships that are stable over time with females, if you're an adult male. What do bad boom guys and girls do when they're just friends? Like, they don't go to the movies or anything, so.

They hang out. They sit next to each other. They sit in physical contact. They groom each other. Can you groom a lady and not get her boyfriend the alpha of the moment angry? Well, the alpha is only interested in her if she's at the peak of her ovulatory cycle. This is the rest of the way she's not hot, then you can go sit around and chat about things. And what you find is very often females at the peak of their cycle are in the middle of all this tumult with numbers one through three and sort of all this male, androgen musk, shorts an acre, crap. And once it's all over with, she goes back and spends the rest of her month hanging out

with this somewhat aged guy who's her buddy. So the baboon who had a little room in his life for friendship, not just conking and sex, but friendship. Winds in the end. Not only do they win in this heartwarming, like old guys sitting in the savanna sort of picture, but also win in the Darwinian sense what's been a revolution in the field in recent years is the recognition that these guys who do the nice guy Allen Alde affiliate of stuff reproduce a whole lot Because it turns out a lot of the time even during the peak swelling while number one and number two were

Tussling the female runs over to the bush and mates with the Allen Alde guy because she prefers him Amazingly enough because the guy is actually nice to her. Now do you know this or just your brother? This is real you counted how do you know like or is this just your prayer? This is real. You counted, how do you know that the, that the, that the Allenle the guy had what babies did in the Schwarzenegger guy? Because people now do paternity tests. You can do stuff like get hair samples from your wild primates when they go through the bushes and some thorns and pulls off some, and you go do genetic analysis.

And amazingly enough from from a genetic, Darwinian, bloody, and tooth and claw standpoint, nice guys do not finish last. Robert Sapolsky is the author of many, many books and essays, including why Zebras don't get ulcers and my absolute favorite a primates memoir. I spoke with him in his office in Palo Alto, California.

That about does it for us. Check our website radiolab.org. More information on anything that you heard tonight. While you're there, communicate with us. Radiolab at wnyc.org is our email address. I'm Chad Abomrod, Robert Crowe, tonight, or signing off. I'm Chad Abumrod, Robert Crowe tonight, or signing off. Bye, thank you. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Blue Moon Lair and Lutip Nasser are our co-host. Susie Lektemberg is our executive producer. Feeling Keith is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Kusik, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindrion Asambandum, Matt Kielte, Ann McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sara Kari, Anna Rosquit Paz, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sandbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibow. This is Nicole from Corning, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org.

Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. you