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    Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
    Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
    Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
    Audiobook17 hours

    Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

    Written by Robert M. Sapolsky

    Narrated by Peter Berkrot

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Now in a third edition, Robert M. Sapolsky's acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.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. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way-through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us literally sick.Combining cutting-edge research with a healthy dose of good humor and practical advice, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers explains how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. It also provides essential guidance to controlling our stress responses. This new edition promises to be the most comprehensive and engaging one yet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 31, 2012
    ISBN9781452681412
    Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
    Author

    Robert M. Sapolsky

    Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Determined, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. His book Behave was a New York Times bestseller and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. He and his wife live in San Francisco.

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    Reviews for Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

    4.5/5

    125 ratings15 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Finally finished this book, audiobook format. Well- (if not over-) written but with humour and lots of life analogies to help cut through the enormous amount of medical-ese. This unabridged audiobook was long - 15 discs - and the reader (Peter Berkrot) was excellent. But I think Sapolsky could have made a case for a good book in half the amount of pages (discs) than he did. I did find myself skipping ahead so as not to have to listen to yet another study because after awhile, it became overkill. Bottom line, stress can cause all sorts of nasty problems to a human body. Different personality types, the way a person was raised, and the way a person responds to stress can influence health. Certain personality types can also be more prone to the adverse effects of stress. In other words, no easy answers.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I truly enjoyed this book. The author is knowledgeable and thorough in his explanations. He covers the effects of stress on the body systems and also looks at holisticaly. I would suggest this book to anyone who has a body and gets stressed.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Brilliant. One of the better popular science books I've read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      For the record, the reading of this book was excellent. The narrator has a nice course, a good cadence, and a little bit of an East Coast accent that I enjoyed.

      The book itself I didn’t find particularly helpful. Too much jargon and explanation of lab rats, perhaps. Honestly, I would say read/listen to the last two chapters and call it good. I suppose I’m mostly frustrated because I didn’t get new information, or the new information I got was about the medical studies done - interesting, but not helpful.

      Perhaps this is just not a book written for the likes of me.

      (Also… you will be anxious while reading/listening.)
    • 4/5
      If you have any interest in popular science, or are curious about what exactly stress does to the human body (and why), then make a beeline to this book. It's funny, intelligent, very approachable, extremely well researched, and brilliantly well written. Somewhere between Oliver Sacks/Robert Winston and VS Ramachandran in style, with the accessibility and enthusiasm of the former meeting the erudition of the latter. Strongly recommended for curious minds everywhere!
    • 5/5
      Full of great insight and information. Stay present and try to relax. It finished quoting the serenity prayer.
    • 4/5
      Once again a very good non-fiction book recommended by my brother. The idea is that humans bodies react to psychological stressors (paying mortgages, dealing with a boss, spousal arguments) the same way zebras bodies react to being chased by a tiger. Our bodies generate the same type of hormones and close down the long-term mainteance areas to escape from the tiger. Obviously, the zebra doesn't do this day after day and at some point is eaten. So what does all this stress do to our bodies? A lot! It is kind of overwhelming as he spends 90% of the book saying how stress exacerberates and leads to many chronic diseases. Then the last 10% are general things to calm your body/mind so you don't generate the high stress reactors. To me this was very scientific...maybe if you majored in biology you wouldn't think so. I liked all the detailed science of it though as it shows important it is to manage stress since it definitely affects way more than the mind. The portions about poverty or feeling poor and how it impacts people was really interesting too.
    • 4/5
      This is a scary, scary book, no kidding. Stress is caused by everything and is going to end up killing you!~ Sapolsky has done a ton of research about how stress affects health, and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is a good break-down for the non-science crowd about how a lot of it works. He does throw around technical terms sometimes; don't get bogged down in them. And try not to stress about how to avoid stress after reading this :-)
    • 5/5
      Incredible book on stress and the stupendous complexity of the human body and mind presented with humour, wit and clarity of the likes I’ve never seen.
    • 5/5
      Amazing book! Recommended to everyone who is interested in an encompassing review on stress and its effects. Timely research examples delivered by the witty and knowledgeable Robert Sapolsky.
    • 5/5
      In this humorous and informative book, Robert Sapolsky explains how and why stress affects our bodies. The premise is that prey animals like zebras use a stress response in an evolutionary sensible way by upping certain hormones while they are being hunted, but then the zebras' stress levels drop again when they escape. Humans (and at some level baboons) have the same bodily changes, only our stress tends to be small amounts for long periods of time, meaning the effects on the nervous system (lower digestion, higher blood pressure, reduced growth, etc.) remain continuously activated. Therefore, human stress is not sensible from an evolutionary standpoint. Each chapter in Sapolsky's book covers a different bodily system and explains in detail how and why stress affects it. He ends with a rather lengthy description of how lower socio-economic status affects our bodies. Although this section was interesting, it seemed a bit lengthy and out of place from the rest of the book. The subject could be a book all on its own. One thing I loved about this book is it's approachability. It was easy to read and made me laugh several times each chapter. Sapolsky has an excellent dry sense of humor. He also included a picture of baboons smack in the middle of his book for seemingly no reason. That made me laugh. I was listening to his companion set of lectures Stress and Your Body concurrently, though I dropped behind and still have several lectures yet to finish of the course. You can see some details of the information covered in the book and lectures if you check out the above link. In hindsight, although both were enjoyable, only one or the other was necessary as most of the material was exactly the same - even to the wording. This is a very stressful book to read, so watch out if you are prone to stress.
    • 4/5
      An in-depth look at the nature of stress and the effects that it has on our bodies. The main idea here is that our reaction to stress evolved to be useful in a particular kind of acute, fight-or-flight situation, but the biological responses that are very helpful when you're spending ten minutes running away from a lion can be anything but helpful when you're sitting around all day fretting about how you're going to pay your mortgage. Actually, just reading this book can be pretty stressful, with its endless litany of horrible things that your worrying is probably doing to your body right this minute, although the author does at least try to end things on a comforting and hopeful note.This is definitely for people who are interested in the biological details of what happens in our bodies under stress: which hormones are released when, what they do, how they interact with each other, and how they have the effects they have. It was, perhaps, sometimes a little more detail than I really wanted, but Sapolsky leavens it all with humor and a pleasantly informal style, and does a good job of not insulting the reader's intelligence while being entertainingly sympathetic about how confusing some of it is.The version I have is the third edition, published in 2004, which apparently is significantly revised and contains a couple of new chapters, including one on sleep and stress, a topic that is particularly relevant to me as a shift-worker.
    • 3/5
      So, "why zebras don't get ulcers?" The primary reason is that stress endured tends to be short lived, while humans frequently experience prolonged stress.Dr. Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology, peppers this book with humor as he explains how prolonged stress causes or exacerbates a variety of physical and mental illnesses and disorders including depression, coronary heart disease, ulcers, etc. He also provides research which detail which coping mechanisms buffers some from the negative effects of prolonged stress and not others. The book made more enjoyable by segregating the details of the research at the end of the book
    • 4/5
      Good book if you want to know more about how stress works and its effects on the body.

      **This book is not about managing stress.**

      Author included lots of mentions to scientific studies and real life cases to make the point clearer.

      Very scientific about explaining how stress affects the body. Did not like the audiobook narrator, personal preference.
    • 4/5
      Excellent! Sapolsky covers the waterfront on stress providing understandable summaries for complex physiological explanations, humorous (lots of cartoons), photo's etc. Get's my A+ for footnotes, notes and references. Must be great to have grad student's help.