Are you feeling stressed? You are not alone. In the 21st-century world, stress is an inherent aspect of life. Stress is bound to affect you at some point during your day or week.

Stress can have a negative effect on your health. Western diseases that get us sick are worsened by stress. Repeated instances of stress can cause chronic illnesses like rheumatism and depression. How well we live depends on how well we cope with stress.

Take it easy. Once you understand the inner workings of our stress response system and its inextricable links to all aspects of your personal health, you will find yourself in possession of powerful knowledge that will help you understand and better deal with this common aspect of your busy life.

There is one of the world’s foremost researchers on stress and neurobiology. Your body and stress. The course guides you through the psychological and psychosocial stress that is a central part of everyday life in Western society. The stress-response system and its various effects on your body can be explored with the guidance of Dr. Robert Sapolsky, one of our most popular professors.

What is stress?

The stress-response system is a highly adaptive survival system. Imagine you are a zebra and you are being chased by a lion. If you recognize the threat, your stress-response system will divert energy from storage sites throughout your body to your muscles, which will allow you to flee faster from danger.

When animals escape danger, their bodies and minds return to a balanced state. There is rarely a return for humans under chronic stress.

Why? The stress response for humans isn’t triggered by life-or-death situations but by psychological reasons.

• traffic tie-ups that double the time it takes for you to get to work;
• complicated home repairs you haven’t gotten around to making;
• troublesome thoughts and recurring memories; and
• worries about the economy, the environment, and international events.

Chronic stress can turn the stress response from a safety mechanism into a real problem for our physical and mental well-being.

Some pointed questions lie at the heart of any serious discussion of the impact of chronic stress on your body and mind.

• How does everyday stress affect the way your brain behaves?
• Why do some people adapt to stress more easily than others?
• What occurs at the neurological level during periods of emotional trauma?
• Why does stress not just impact your mind (where it’s rooted) but your body as well?
• Why does stress prompt you to do certain things, like eat and sleep more (or less)?

The science behind these and other questions is fascinating.

The biology of stress can be explored.

The same teaching skills that won him the Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in Teaching, Professor Sapolsky guides you through the specific systems of your body in the search for the biological effects of stress. He talks about how the stress response works for both humans and a hypothetical zebra, then talks about what happens when the stress response doesn’t shut down.

You explore the specific organ systems. Your body and stress. Are these?

• Cardiovascular system: When stress hits, your blood pressure and heart rate rise, and blood is diverted from nonessential areas (like your gut) to critical ones (such as your muscles). When activated chronically, however, the stress-response system can damage your heart muscles and blood vessels.
• Digestive system: Chronic stress can wreak havoc with your digestive system and can even shut it down. This can lead to debilitating diseases and problems with your digestion.
• Reproductive system: Not only is chronic stress directly related to problems with reproduction, it affects the reproductive systems of men and women in different ways. Sustained stress can decrease the likelihood of ovulation and increase erectile dysfunction. For both sexes, however, libido is often greatly impaired.
• Immune system: Your immune system is designed to protect you from all sorts of pathogens. Unfortunately, when hit repeatedly with stress, your immune defenses are often impaired, resulting in more frequent, prolonged, or severe cases of diseases ranging from mononucleosis to the common cold.

The systems approach helps you understand the science behind stress. It allows you to compare the effects of stress on individual systems of the body. Your entire body can become damaged by the effects of chronic stress, because stress doesn’t affect just one part of the body.

You will be able to explore the effects of stress on other parts of your health.

• physical growth and development,
• sleep cycle,
• memory and judgment, and
• pain threshold.

The psychology of stress.

The biology of stress is part of the puzzle. Your body and stress. The effects of stress are brought up close and personal. There are powerful psychological factors that affect how we respond to stress.

Professor Sapolsky explores psychological disorders and damaging behaviors.

• depression , the genetics of which are indelibly linked to the genetics of one’s vulnerability to stress;
• anxiety , which is rooted in the amygdala—a part of our brain that is extremely sensitive to one class of stress hormones; and
• addiction , which can be directly related to increased levels of stress hormones in the body, whether it’s an addiction to drugs or to new sensations.

A person’s place in society plays a key role in the creation and impact of stress. Towards the end of the course, you will be studying the relationship between stress levels and poor health.

It is possible to discover the key to change.

With. Your body and stress. You will be learning a lot from an engaging and insightful teacher. Professor Sapolsky knows how important it is to understand the workings of stress, but he also flavors his lectures with humor and practical tips for stress management that you can incorporate into your lifestyle.

The study of this topic is absolutely illuminating because of Professor Sapolsky’s unique teaching methods, in which profound insights, eye-opening concepts, and rigorous scientific support are intertwined with an informal delivery style.

He says it is possible for us to change. Your body and stress. . There is no free lunch. Change can happen.

A thorough knowledge of how and why stress works on your mind and body is the key to changing the impact of stress in your life. You will find all of this in these dynamic lectures.