Dr. Stan Kutcher, Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health, discusses the difference between regular stress vs. toxic stress.
05:18 min
CLEAR ALL
Why do humans and their primate cousins get more stress-related diseases than any other member of the animal kingdom? The answer, says Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, is that people, apes and monkeys are highly intelligent, social creatures with far too much spare time on their hands.
As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear—and the ones that plague us now—are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer.