Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.: The pervasive effect of stress - is it killing you?

You look at the quarter poorest places on Earth, and indeed, people there don't live very long and are miserable. But once you get past sort of the subsistence level, there's not a great relationship between the wealth of a country... and levels of happiness or life expectancy.

For every neuron that a fruit fly has, we have a hundred million ... With enough quantity, you invent quality.

It turns out the optimal amount of glucocorticoids, something that is moderately stressful, in other words, something stimulating, does great stuff to your hippocampus. It increases blood delivery there, glucose, oxygen, and makes the synapses, the connections between neurons, more excitable ... A little bit of arousal and alertness is a good thing for learning and memory.

When you look at the source of variability and health among humans on this planet, socioeconomic differences, differences in absolute levels, difference in degrees of inequality within cultures and within communities... is an enormous predictor of health.

I actually don't think stress kills you outright very often, but it sure makes other things that kill you more effective at doing it.

We don't hate stress; we hate the wrong amount of stress. When it's the right amount, we love it.

We are simultaneously the most miserably violent species on Earth and the most altruistic, cooperative, and empathic.

The actual evidence for a role of stress in causing cancer, bringing it out of remission, accelerating tumor growth is very, very minimal.

What your childhood is like has a lot to do with what sort of adult you're going to wind up being...

It turns out, if you have elevated glucocorticoid levels while you're asleep, you have less delta sleep time.