Stress relief

Because I’m always interested learning about health, I watched a four-year-old National Geographic Special, Stress: Portrait of a Killer. The documentary touched on primate research being conducted by several scientists, but drew extensively on the work of a neuroendocrinologist and teacher at Stanford, Robert Sapolsky. The man’s credentials are impressive, and his honors include the MacArthur Genius Grant.

He has been traveling to Kenya yearly, for over thirty years, to study stress in various Baboon troops. Baboons, it turns out, are really mean to each other. The alpha males show their domination by striking out often and capriciously, and that aggressiveness marches right down, from the most to the least powerful members of the community. Essentially, says Sapolsky, all the animals who are not alpha males are stressed.

Sapolsky admitted that he didn’t much like the breed. And from what I saw of them at a Great Adventure Safari, I agree. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a female baboon. For one thing, they take heaps of abuse, for another, their red butts are hideous.

Baboon bottom from Eversostrange.com

As everybody in the world must know by now, stress is at the root of most, if not all of our problems, both physical and mental, by way of the damage it does to our immune systems. Sapolsky found out that stress was making the baboons fat, dull, depressed, and sickly; in fact, stress was sending them to an earlier than might be expected demise, just like it does with humans.

For me, the most exciting and important part of the documentary came when Sapolsky told about returning to Africa to check out a troop of baboons he’d been studying for ten years, and felt he knew. He found that all of the aggressive alpha males had died, as a result of eating meat tainted with tuberculosis. They had stolen the meat from a competing baboon troop– a mission that only the most aggressive males had undertaken.

An excited Sapolsky, visiting the troop later, described a profound change in the troop culture. Gone was the nasty, aggressive behavior passed down from the alpha males. Gone were life-threatening levels of stress in the community. Instead, they flourished in a decidedly non-aggressive way. And young new males joining the troop had to conform to the new rules: no meanness to the females, youngsters and nice guys.

Sapolsky pointed to the troop as evidence that cultures can change. I waited, but he never mentioned what I thought was the logical next step: get rid of the alpha males everywhere!

I’d start with the military, then do congress. This is only a purge of aggressive alpha males, mind you. The good guys, if any, could stay. Then I’d move on to lawyers and CEOs like Jamie Dimon….