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Stress Will Literally KILL You - FutureIQ

5,867 views Wait, is this logic right? • Sep 12, 2024
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Slog Reference: Stress Is Literally Killing You

Description

Is stress good or bad? We say it's lethal. And we have some good reasons to believe that. In this episode, let us explain to you the origins of stress, how it affects our physiology, and in what ways it can be dangerous to you. To do that, we need to understand what stress is and how it evolved in humans, why stress is useful to us or good for us in some cases and really bad for others. Let's dissect the stress to see our relationship with it.

Books:
Why Zebras don't get Ulcers: https://tapthe.link/ZebraUlcerBook

Sources:
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers - https://medium.com/@yubingzhang/book-summary-7-why-zebras-dont-get-ulcers-ca4a427c3666
Sympathetic Nervous System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_nervous_system
Parasympathetic Nervous System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system

MediumMedium

More videos for you:
Believing is Seeing: https://youtu.be/bxx-My8J_kM
System 1 vs System 2: https://youtu.be/DIVTMooO7o4
Stop watching news: https://youtu.be/YYr7qNnOPDg
The world is healing: https://youtu.be/2l0jnwf-2kA

you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Stress
00:34 What is stress?
02:30 Physical changes during stress
04:50 Wetting your pants
06:16 Why stress?
07:00 Anticipation & stress
10:58 Discovery of stress
14:40 Stress good or bad?
17:55 Why can’t we handle it?
19:34 How it affects human body?
21:53 Stress & junk food
23:00 Emotional vs physical stress
23:50 How to reduce stress?

#futureiq #stressHope

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Stress Is Literally Killing You

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Transcript

Shri Kant you seem stressed isn't everybody I mean I don't know of any person who's not stressed it's life you are actually that is not true okay there are lots of people who are not stressed and people who are stressed should know that stress is literally killing you literally do you mean figuratively no no I do mean literally so today's episode we are going to talk about the physical changes in the body not just shortterm but longterm that are slowly killing you that are caused by stress okay that is stressing me out okay so let me explain first what is stress okay okay let's start with the story as usual our story starts in the African Savana
there is a zebra we keep going back there every episode well almost every episode go on zebra Savana everything in life is connected to the African Savana where we evolved from as we've yes always established yes imagine you are a zebra in the African Savana suddenly a lion shows up in front of you okay you have to run for your life absolutely in a fraction of your second your body responds it does but let us think of what all is going on in your body to allow you to respond like this right okay to be able to run fast your body needs to use the big muscles a lot yes for that it needs a lot of energy for
that the body needs to send a whole lot of glucose m and a whole lot of oxygen yes and it is sent through the blood by the heart yeah so the heart starts beating faster correct it starts beating harder as in it starts pushing with more force and to get more oxygen your lungs start taking in more air faster so you breathe faster so your breathing rate goes up your heart rate goes up and your blood pressure goes up okay that is what saves your life okay yes right I mean it's like oh it's easy to say I just run fast but in reality so many different systems have to go into gear at just the
right time to be able to save your life and they have to go into gear literally instantly because you don't even have time to think you see a lion you run ex exactly yeah I mean our uh brain is funny right our thinking brain takes like almost 7 Seconds to react System One versus system two you've discussed this exactly and that would be too late so this is automatic process but before we get into that I want to talk about think of all the different physical changes in your body that are happening so that we are a perfect machine for running away from the lion okay okay we've discussed the heart beating faster the heart beating stronger and we've
discussed lungs taking in more air much more is happening okay let me tell you about all the different physical changes that are happening in your body in addition to just the heart and the L the lungs okay so one simple thing is that you don't have energy to waste on useless things okay right which means that if there is food in your stomach and your intestines that is being digested nobody has time to digest food dude right yeah when when you're when you're about to become food yourself the last thing you should be doing is digesting your food so digestion stops okay right that's why by the way stress is going to give you indigestion and all kinds of stomach uh
issues okay um right your senses become extra sharp right you want to hear every little sound you want to see clearly where to jump uh what branches to avoid and so on so your pupils dilate so you can see much more your hearing becomes much sharper right all the sensors are on high alert right okay blood needs to rush through the rest of your body also fast yeah so your veins are told to constrict which is going to increase the speed of blood going through them because the heart is pumping with greater force right and if you constrict something the speed increases right one important thing is that to send so much energy you need lots of blood you can't
have the volume of blood reducing corre on the other hand you know you're running your body needs to cool down so your sweating has increased so you're losing some fluid there that is going to reduce the amount of blood yeah so the body sends out messages everywhere saying anyone wasting fluid stop doing that right now okay now your intestines and your kidneys which were trying to extract fluid from your food and send it out as urine they are told stop stop stop oh okay okay so now all of that fluid is being retained in your body so that it becomes blood but we've always seen that in situations like these you tend to wet your pants yes that's a very
fascinating aspect of our body Okay so there is this barrier right there is the kidney which is two-way it can send fluid out or fluid that's going out it can pull it back in saying no no no I need this right but once it is in your bladder that is one way now fluid that is in the bladder is only going to go out it can't be brought back in okay now imagine you are being chased by a lion and you have like this liter of water sloshing around there slowing you down what's the best thing to do with it yeah that pretty much explains it let it flow let no no that's no no please don't ruin
the song for me because my child actually likes it but uh yeah so many uh so many systems working in tandem but that also explains why your mouth goes dry when you're uh stressed oh very important Point your mouth goes dry all fluid is being withdrawn correct so saliva production is reduced mucus production in uh your nose is reduced not just that but also the fluid near your skin is also being withdrawn right so that's why your skin feels a little tingly dry yeah oh okay okay right so the point I'm trying to make is that throughout the system there is a state of General alert and every part of your body is doing something towards this war
effort makes absolute sense and all of these things are affected what they are doing is that they are helping with this process of Escaping The Lion which means they have stopped their regular work right your stomach isn't digesting stuff anymore your mouth isn't producing saliva anymore right your eyes are taking it a lot more light than they need your ears are hearing a lot more than they should etc etc there's a small flaw in this entire story of yours connecting to the topic that we started with which is I have not been chased by a lion in I don't know how many years but I'm continuously stressed all the time correct well here is the funny
thing about our body okay right just a lion attack doesn't cause stress okay even anticipation of a lion attack causes stress right true in general a stressor causes the stress response anticipation of a stressor causes a stress response and that's a good thing because we are ready for the stress before the stress even comes to us right now here is the connection okay what the scientists have found that the stress response you get heartbeat heart rate lungs breathing eyes dilation all of that you get that even if it is a social stress Like This Time Imagine baboons in Africa okay okay it's a whole herd of baboons okay there's a bunch of males and they
fighting for dominance okay as they do as they do now here is what happens right one is that at any time one of the dominant males can be attacked by another male with the intention of taking over as the dominant meal and if that happens now it's an attack and you have to fight and to fight what you need you need muscles to move you need energy you need blood to flow all the same response it's a stress response essentially the other thing about baboons is that if there is a baboon who is not dominant he's sitting there minding his own business and the dominant baboon gets angry over something he just comes and thrashes up
the other baboon for no good reason this is very very common and as a result the baboon who's not dominant and who's just sitting around minding his own business has to constantly be on the lookout for the dominant baboons the dominant baboons turns towards him and this guy gets what stress stress response suddenly heartbeat goes up blood pressure goes up all the exact same things happen because he has to be ready to escape from the dominant baboon's thrashing yeah right now I want you to imagine your boss as a baboon dominant one and you as the baboon minding your own business and your boss walks past stress not difficult to imagine at all right not just that forget your boss
doesn't even have to walk past he sends an email your Gmail pops up like this you my heart rate just went up like by five BPM but it still went up so what is happening here is the following right I mean your brain which evolved in the African Savana and it does nothing about emails and modern work for salary right it thinks okay this baboon is going to beat me up the only place is where you can call your boss of baboon and get away with it future IQ go on right so here is the fundamental problem with most of us right that we have brains which evolved in prehistoric times we have institutions which are from the
Medieval ages and we have Godlike technology okay that's a quote by EO Wilson explains so much of modern life but the problem is that your body does not understand that an email from a boss is not going to result ever in a situation where you have to get up and run fast for your life it's not a life or death situation very literally life or death situation your brain still thinks it is because it thinks oh my God either that guy is going to trash me or I'm going to be kicked out of the tribe and then I'm going to starve to death right so all of those is what is causing stress for you okay okay all right how
did researchers even discover this stress response amongst baboons were they needling baboons very nice story okay let's go one step back to Lab Rats okay okay so there was this researcher Cel he was just trying to understand the response of rats to a particular hormone the details of that are not important but as a part of that his job was to go and give rats injections of that hormone every day and and he was bad at his job okay he would go he would try to catch a rat and he was bad at catching rats so then he would spend like half an hour chasing them around then he would manage to catch a rat and then while trying to
give the injection the rat would slip out run out again and so on okay and just it was went on and on like this okay by the end of his research I don't know what happened to his original research okay but he noticed that these rats had peptic ulcers they had swollen adrenal glands and they have shrunken immune tissues oh okay so this is three very important things okay ulcers in the stomach second is adrenal glands are swollen which means the rats are desperately producing lots of adrenaline okay and third is immune tissues are shrunken which means their immune system is not working very well okay and he was wondering what what happened happened right so he thought that the hormone
that he was injecting the rats with has all of these effects huh but he was a good scientist so he did a what a randomized control trial absolutely right so he did the same thing with two sets of rats okay one set of rats he injected them with that hormone the other set of rats he injected them with just regular saline water and at the end of the research he was expecting that the test group would show all these problems and the other group wouldn't but he was still clumsy in both cases he was clumsy in both cases and he saw that both sets of rats had the same problems okay he was a terrible rat Handler but a
good scientist so he did another experiment in which he handled rats badly in one set and Dent for the other and realized that him chasing rats around and giving them injections badly and just making their life hell was causing those changes oh okay then he said oh let me find out what else causes changes right he came up with the word stress to represent all these different things okay and he did things like okay keep some Rats on the cold roof in Winter keep some rats in the hot Boiler Room during summer ke some rats are being forced to do too much exercise some rats are given surgical procedures too many for no good reason and in all
cases he noticed the same things what he realized is that stress was causing all these problems digestion gone for a toss peptic ulcers adrenaline flowing through your body and causing all sorts of issues Sol and adrenal glands immune system gone for a toss causing other problems literally this is going to shorten your life but why is a stress response causing these problems because stress response is momentary and things should go back to normal right after a while that's a very good question right because fundamentally when you think about it the stress response saves your life correct right it is saving the zebra from The Lion it is saving the rat from this monster which was trying to
catch it and so on right like you said this would be all normal and fine if the body went back to normal quickly okay okay normally that happens right we have a system in the body called the parasympathetic nervous system whose job is to calm us down after the stress response corre the sympathetic nervous system is in charge of the stress response and making everything fast parasympathetic nervous system calm you down correct problem is that if you keep getting stressed again and again again and again again and again without giving enough time for the parasympathetic nervous system to recover exactly then your body is in that high intensity high alert State at all times oh okay here is
the problem with this if you are permanently in a state of stress right now think of the changes that are happening in your body for stress right one important thing is that your body has decided that running away from this Predator is the most important thing so example okay you have an infection your immune system is fighting the infection right in about two or 3 days it will have killed the infection and saved your life correct if it doesn't in 7 days you'll be dead right thank you for painting that Rosy picture but go on yeah problem is that you are being attacked right now by a lion okay 3 Days Later surviving is not important right
now surviving the next 2 minutes is important so immune system is told stop fighting okay focus on this first I see now if you are in stress all the time the immune system never goes back to normal to fight infections corre now suddenly your immune response is all subdued and you get many more infections you get sick faster and you die faster right similarly digestion slows down you don't digest things properly you don't build muscles properly you don't store energy properly for long term because you know you're just sending all your energy to the muscles yeah so imagine this is what is happening imagine if you were a country right and the stress response is like assuming that your
neighboring country is going to attack you at any moment so now you spend all your money on your Army on the weapon system on the ammunition and so on you have stopped spending money on education you have stopped spending money on your health care system on your infrastructure stop spending money on infrastructure except on the border right so in the short term you might survive an attack from your neighbor in the long term your country is dead right that is what stress is doing to your body and your country as very clearly established yes so stress on a longer time scale without giving your parasympathetic nervous system enough time to recover is what is the killer as
you're saying chronic stress right now why didn't we evolve to handle this yeah because in the African Savana there was no chronic stress right when a lion attacks 5 minutes later either the stress is no more or you are no more what a way to put it B that comes from the book why zebras don't get ulcers by Robert spolski link is there um in fact most of the material of this episode is from that book but you see the problem right there everything was shortterm yeah there were no long-term stressors like you didn't have Jas don't have a 40h hour a week job where a lion comes and attacks them every few minutes or
sends them an email every few minutes corre or a slack message so that is the problem and uh the analogy I gave of healthcare system shutting down and infrastructure shutting down it's literally happening to your body in the following right your circulatory system is affected and you get heart diseases the biggest killer u in Modern Life like we've literally laid out all of the organ systems that are involved in stress so imagine what happens when those systems are constantly under stress right in fact I just realized that these explanations are a very good uh portrayal of what anxiety disorders are like anxiety is when you're constantly feeling under stress so your body is also constantly fighting that
stress so anybody who has a an anxiety disorder is essentially bringing this or getting this happening to them all the time yeah so what I do want to do right now is to make sure people understand what all are the important systems that go out of whack because of stress right I already said the blood circulatory and heart system right causing heart diseases of various kind cardiovascular the energy storage no point storing energy for the long term it is needed in the short term right that ends up in things like diabetes right okay and obesity yeah because energy is basically glucose and correct all of reproduction is a long-term activity that shuts so stress is going to reduce that so that
results in things like infertility uh right immune system we already talked about that is going to be subdued and that will cause all kinds of uh problems so the end result of all of this is that you either get diseases uh like actual infections or chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes and uh heart disease and more importantly what happens is that you age very very badly right and faster also I'm imagining absolutely your your your organ systems are taking on the stress of a lifetime in a very short span of time exactly so this episode was just an overview of what stress does to your body physically okay we will do other episodes which explain individual
systems in more detail and uh how you should take care of those systems yeah but I'm thinking there are also good stresses right like exercising is a good stress well see that is like a military exercise right it is teaching your military how to respond to stress quickly and also teaching how to calm down quickly yeah the parasympathetic nervous system does get into action after the exercise right both fast response and fast slowdown correct right both of these are happening and you're learning how to do those right correct in reality when you are actually stressed when there is you're forced to do exercise Way Beyond Your Capacity then your body gets stressed your parasympathetic doesn't get involved and
then you get all the problems of continuous stress right I I'll tell you why I brought up exercise I was basically thinking of ways to continue eating junk food so if I can exercise and if I can find ways to relax does that mean I can eat junk food to my heart's contain no unfortunately bad Health rests on three pillars right one is physical issues right so unhealthy food lack of exercise that is one pillar okay second is genetic inherited genes which allow you to deal with some problems and not be able to deal with other problems and the third is emotional right which which is how relaxed you are whether you have a shoulder to cry on whether you can
reduce your stress whether your parasympathetic nervous system works well or not right yeah that's where usually the burger helps correct the problem is that stress is never the root cause of a problem right but it just makes all the problems worse by slowing down the systems that are supposed to deal with the problems right stress doesn't give you an infection stress will make your infection much worse because your immune system is suppressed that way right okay but uh should we really be putting emotional stress on the same level as physical stress yes like I explained in this episode that stress emotions in your brain actually have an impact physical impact on your body okay there is research showing that
during top chess tournaments right the grandmaster's metabolism is at the same level as the metabolism of Olympic athletes oh okay so the brain working over time has that kind of an effect on the body so yeah emotional can have actual physical impact on your body so this episode has been a lot of stress literally figuratively physically emotionally I don't want you dying I want you to reduce your stress thank you everyone knows how to reduce stress okay quit smoking minimal alcohol use increase your exercise have a normal body weight okay very very important is to have social connections right a warm stable marriage is going to reduce your stress quite a lot of course unstable
one will increase the stress but friends family community all of these sharing caring having a shoulder to cry on these reduce your stress they give you mature resilient coping styles to deal with stress okay religion and spirituality also help with stress quite a lot right another thing that you can do to reduce your stress is to only get stressed or anxious about the things you can control and not get stressed about things that are out of your control en Serenity Prayer correct and focus on positives meditation helps okay all of this everybody knows the point of this episode is for you to realize that you really really need to do these things because if you don't do them the stress
is killing you literally but don't take stress about that chill calm down that's the message of this episode not that you have to do these things or else you'll be stressed yes more like you should do these things or stress will affect you really badly yes uh I know this episode has been a lot more stressful than our previous episodes but uh we are planning a couple more episodes on the same topic because stress is an important thing in our current lives and we need to be aware of it and we need to also be aware of of how we can reduce it we are not going to turn into a life coaching Channel or a happiness coaching channel
that much is for sure but knowledge is power Francis B I am Shri Kant he's naven this is future IQ if you like this episode and you want to reduce your stress check out our episodes one is stop watching the news that will reduce your stress and the other is the world is improving so all the stress you have about the future of the world is unfounded