Very nice article about stress, well said Meditation and relaxation is the best way to keep ourselves stress free.
It could be possible that education towards self care and stress management is more important to the wealthy. Many people with great wealth have multiple responsibilities and therefore may have more stress but just handle it better because they were educated on how to handle it or they seek education on how to handle it.
If the people at the bottom of the pecking order are the ones with the most stress, why are graduate students relatively healthy? Is it simply that graduate students are typically young?
Then again being a graduate student right now is not all that bad. I work long hours for little pay doing things that I'm not particularly excited to be doing, but at least I still have a pay check (unlike my I-banking colleagues). Maybe graduate school isn't all that stressful.
This reminds me of a study I heard about in undergrad. Three sets of rats in three separate cages. One set was the control group (nothing was done with them). The second set was given some kind of unpleasant stimulus (a shock or something maybe?) at regular intervals (not sure about this part) and that they could stop by pushing a lever. The third was given the same stimulus but had no way to predict or control it. The second group actually fared better health-wise than the control group but, predictably, the third group was a mess. The moral of the story is: stress is healthy if you have some control over the stressors, which would go hand in hand with wealth and power.
I still want to know why Zebras don't get ulcers!
There is more than health care at work, and more than stress: Living environment, for example. In Europe, poor people still live in worse parts of town, with higher pollution, etc. Education: the better your education, the more education about health issues sticks. Healthier lifestyles: believing that you have no future leads many to self-destructive lifestyles. Self-destructive lifestyles also lead to poverty, so there is a reverse causality as well. Drug addicts become poor and unhealthy. Better Food: Poor in Europe still eat their version of fast food, leading to worse health.
In short, stress seems like a good causal factor, but there are many others, too. Good health care only is operative when things have already gone wrong.
The moral of the story is: stress is healthy if you have some control over the stressors, which would go hand in hand with wealth and power.
I think we need to make a distinction here that you have brought into the front. Just because there is stress in your life (via whatever), does not mean that you are stressed. By having control over the stressor, the rats may actually be able to avoid being stressed by it. When the phone bill comes, but you know you can pay it with no worries, does it really stress you?
As such, I'm not sure this shows that stress is healthy per se, so much as perhaps having control in one's life is healthy. And isn't that something the poor do not have, whereas the wealthy do to some degree? Perhaps, it is having a feeling of control over our lives (or at least things in our lives) that is really best for us.
One of the greatest areas of stress in a given person's life is money (wish I could remember that Newsweek article I read recently, but the same thing is stated in various places, by various sources). The wealthy obviously have less worry about paying bills on time, and staying out of debt, whereas Middle America has become a society of debtors. The poor are even worse off when it comes to financial security. It's no surprise that their stress levels are higher.
I read Sapolsky's book (as well as his equally compelling Monkey Luv) and was convinced by its arguments.
"As such, I'm not sure this shows that stress is healthy per se, so much as perhaps having control in one's life is healthy."
I might qualify your statement as "having control over the stressors in one's life," and then we'd be in total agreement. I do see your point about the phone bill not "stressing out" someone wealthy, but there will still be sources of stress, sources of stress that don't "stress you out" as much precisely because you can control them.
So, we'd certainly have to clarify what we meant by "stressor." If you define stressor as something that, subjectively, "stresses you out," then by definition I think you've got the third group of rats. The problem with calling the second group of rats "not stressed at all" is that you can't equate them with the control group of rats. The second group fared better than the first group.
And finally, even if I could turn off an electric shock (or some similarly unpleasant stimulus), I think I'd find it stressful to be shocked in the first place. I'm not sure why it's problematic to call these rats "subjected to stress."
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Either you're bating me (which is my job, so cut it out) or you're just confused. We are already in agreement.
I'm not precisely sure where you're getting the "not stressed at all", but I think the issue is that I couched my phone bill sentence in more common language. We usually use "stress" in day-to-day language in cases of greater severity; thus "stressed out" is more severe than "bothered", but both would be considered instances of stress in psychology. Sure, paying bills probably "bothers" most of us to some degree, but do we really "stress about it" when we know it's easily covered? I don't think we would say that.
Zebras don't get ulcers because their mothers don't expose them to fecal matter infected with Helobacter Pyro. Zebra mothers are obviously much better at hand washing.
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