5 ms·

> Researchers have found that the more people are bothered by noise, the greater the health risks they face from it. This is due to stress. I have wondered for

> Researchers have found that the more people are bothered by noise, the greater the health risks they face from it. This is due to stress. I have wondered for a long time how increased education contributes to cardio vascular risk as we are learning things to avoid and when we encounter them cortisol spikes. This could be red meat or sugar or UV rays or lack of sleep or lack of exercise or in this case too much noise etc.

pen2l 3y ago
The average homo sapiens about a thousand generations ago faced greater adversity than what almost any of us has faced, particularly in raw nature where predators roamed. What were the cortisol levels like for that average homo sapiens? We were always tribal and social animals, so I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role in moderating stress and building resilience.
- ekanes 3y ago
  Sort of. Now your cortisol could spike because of all kinds of things, none of which you can SEE. That's usually called anxiety. Back thousands of generations ago, if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe. Carrying this forward, we humans will have to work on better systems, because it's about to get worse/weirder. Our brains aren't designed to be good at detecting lies visually -- we have mental processes for speech, but visually, what you saw was always real. Now with AI in the mix, it's gonna get... messy.
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    >if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe. But you also knew that you had to go on the hunt again tomorrow.
    - just-ok 3y ago
      So do you: it’s called a job. And you still have to worry about traffic/accidents, performing well, getting fired or laid off, getting berated by customers/clients/bosses, plus any number of additional anxiety-inducing events. Most of us would probably still take that trade, though: at least sitting all day kills you slowly relative to a mountain lion.
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      Hunt? More likely gathering.
- kekebo 3y ago
  From what I understand a key difference from then to now were short term stressors that appeared solvable by direct (group-) action as opposed to modern day long term stressors that can appear abstract and outside of our own radius of action, resulting in paralysis and psychological/physiological harm over long periods of time. Don't have a source on hand though, may have come from a book by Robert Sapolsky
  - noahchumsky 3y ago
    Why zebras don’t get ulcers!
    - culi 3y ago
      for anyone unaware, this is a book by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers The book is about stress and the impact of glucocorticoids on the body. The chemical stress response used in "the wild" by animals is actually the same as the stress response we have when worrying about losing our job, not being able to complete a paper for school, dealing with poverty, etc. It's a partial explanation for why modern humans have so many chronic diseases that are rarely seen in other animals (or even archeological/anthropological evidence of non-industrial societies but he doesn't really go there much in the book) I also highly recommend Sapolsky's Human Behavior Biology course which he taught for Stanford but published on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
  - RC_ITR 3y ago
    Sure but we’ve always known about dying, the ultimate insolvable problem.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  There's an interesting question whether it makes a difference that as human societies have modernized (through the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions) the causes of stress have become progressively more detached from physical or existential adversity and the physical stress related to those threats (adrenaline, exertion, starvation, etc).
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  short term stress vs. cronic stress if you can, read Sapolsky's book about it "Why zebras don't get ulcers"
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  They lived an average of how long? Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > They lived an average of how long? If they made it to at least 15, then probably on average somewhere between the 40s and late 50s from estimates I’ve seen. (1,000 generations being probably < 30kya; there appears to have been a fairly radical expandsion in lifespan around 30kya, before that most estimates I've seen would have adults, by thrbsame definition, averaging sonewhere in the mid-30s or so.)
  - PuppyTailWags 3y ago
    > Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that. Huh? Humans can live upwards of 3 generations worth of humans. It's not uncommon for humans to remain functional enough to raise their grandchildren!
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Who is to say that our ancestors coped with stressors? Evolution doesn't care about much other than your ability to reproduce.
- sasas 3y ago
  Peter Attia has an interview with Robert Sapolsky that was recently “rebroadcasted” - “ The impact of stress on our physical and emotional health” [1] Highly recommended listening. As a neuroendocrinology researcher, much Robert Sapolsky’s life work revolves around the questions your pondering on. He has spent years studying wild baboons in Kenya, “ .. specifically, Sapolsky studies the cortisol levels between the alpha male and female and the subordinates to determine stress level.” [2] [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889 https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
- culi 3y ago
  > What were the cortisol levels like for that average homo sapiens? Much much lower actually. We use the same stress response for seeing a lion that we do to stress about making a mortgage payment. That's why we get ulcers and zebras don't On top of that Homo sapiens also just had much more freetime and the median lifespans were actually not too far off from what they are today (~72 years[0]). Yes there was a huge dip in lifespans in (some) agricultural societies and when the industrial revolution started and there's definitely a lot of variation in difficulties faced but overall on average prehistoric peoples were healthier and much less stressed out than the average American is today. Also peoples that lived on islands and certain other ecosystems didn't really have to deal with predators at all. Predators are very unlikely to be the biggest source of stress in general as even the most dangerous of all predators, big cats, are very unlikely to attack a group of humans. As long as you're with your tribe you generally don't have much to fear. [0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
  - theGnuMe 3y ago
    ulcers are not caused by stress rather h pylori.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role You... wonder? It's a well known fact that tribal societies are hypersocial. Rugged individualism and loneliness are very modern things.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Research shows that being knowledgable about health risks is “the new smoking” Friendly health experts still insist that 97% of the population still don’t eat enough cauliflower
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  >Friendly health experts still insist that 97% of the population still don’t eat enough cauliflower So that's why they've put it in pizza crusts now...
gabereiser 3y ago
What about the colloquial increased education = increased stress. I’m not talking about the stress of trying to pay your bills on a welders salary, but the stress of running enterprise projects, teams, or being the top neuroscientist in your field. The stress from that is a different kind. It’s a continual stress especially for those that suffer from impostor syndrome. Anyway, interesting theory about cortisol spikes. Where can I read more?
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Lower socioeconomic status is on average far more stressful than high SES. Sure, it's possible to be relaxed about your lower status, but it's way easier to be relaxed about being richer: e.g., look at your coworkers who are quietly working for 4 hours and then going out biking in the middle of the day. There's a cultural narrative that in some ways, richer people have it harder than poorer ones. It's responsible for underpinning the moral legitimacy of our class system, but I don't think it's actually true on average. The thing is, no matter where you land you're going to find people who are unhappy or are struggling with their problems, but that's just because humans in general struggle with things.
  - woooooo 3y ago
    Getting a chance to productively and quietly work for 4 hours is pretty unusual for a lot of us.
    - airstrike 3y ago
      Personally I am able to find that more often doing chores around the house than actually doing work in the office... which must be why I love doing the dishes
    - asdfman123 3y ago
      You have that option though if you really seek it out.
mrkrabs 3y ago
Have you found any notable stories where someone genetically prone to stress has meaningfully overcome it? I tend to worry and control my environment but never quite find a sweet spot between knowledge and ignorance.
graeme 3y ago
In my experience people don't generally believe noise is bad for health beyond being annoying. Do you have any evidence for your belief the health effects are merely due to stress rather than being real? (Or that noise isn't causing physiological stress) You can find all kinds of rat studies where noise worsens rat health. The rats surely haven't been reading media articles about the effects of noise.

pen2l 3y ago

The average homo sapiens about a thousand generations ago faced greater adversity than what almost any of us has faced, particularly in raw nature where predators roamed. What were the cortisol levels like for that average homo sapiens? We were always tribal and social animals, so I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role in moderating stress and building resilience.

ekanes 3y ago
Sort of. Now your cortisol could spike because of all kinds of things, none of which you can SEE. That's usually called anxiety. Back thousands of generations ago, if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe. Carrying this forward, we humans will have to work on better systems, because it's about to get worse/weirder. Our brains aren't designed to be good at detecting lies visually -- we have mental processes for speech, but visually, what you saw was always real. Now with AI in the mix, it's gonna get... messy.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  >if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe. But you also knew that you had to go on the hunt again tomorrow.
  - just-ok 3y ago
    So do you: it’s called a job. And you still have to worry about traffic/accidents, performing well, getting fired or laid off, getting berated by customers/clients/bosses, plus any number of additional anxiety-inducing events. Most of us would probably still take that trade, though: at least sitting all day kills you slowly relative to a mountain lion.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    Hunt? More likely gathering.
kekebo 3y ago
From what I understand a key difference from then to now were short term stressors that appeared solvable by direct (group-) action as opposed to modern day long term stressors that can appear abstract and outside of our own radius of action, resulting in paralysis and psychological/physiological harm over long periods of time. Don't have a source on hand though, may have come from a book by Robert Sapolsky
- noahchumsky 3y ago
  Why zebras don’t get ulcers!
  - culi 3y ago
    for anyone unaware, this is a book by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers The book is about stress and the impact of glucocorticoids on the body. The chemical stress response used in "the wild" by animals is actually the same as the stress response we have when worrying about losing our job, not being able to complete a paper for school, dealing with poverty, etc. It's a partial explanation for why modern humans have so many chronic diseases that are rarely seen in other animals (or even archeological/anthropological evidence of non-industrial societies but he doesn't really go there much in the book) I also highly recommend Sapolsky's Human Behavior Biology course which he taught for Stanford but published on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  Sure but we’ve always known about dying, the ultimate insolvable problem.
InitialLastName 3y ago
There's an interesting question whether it makes a difference that as human societies have modernized (through the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions) the causes of stress have become progressively more detached from physical or existential adversity and the physical stress related to those threats (adrenaline, exertion, starvation, etc).
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
short term stress vs. cronic stress if you can, read Sapolsky's book about it "Why zebras don't get ulcers"
lr4444lr 3y ago
They lived an average of how long? Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > They lived an average of how long? If they made it to at least 15, then probably on average somewhere between the 40s and late 50s from estimates I’ve seen. (1,000 generations being probably < 30kya; there appears to have been a fairly radical expandsion in lifespan around 30kya, before that most estimates I've seen would have adults, by thrbsame definition, averaging sonewhere in the mid-30s or so.)
- PuppyTailWags 3y ago
  > Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that. Huh? Humans can live upwards of 3 generations worth of humans. It's not uncommon for humans to remain functional enough to raise their grandchildren!
faeriechangling 3y ago
Who is to say that our ancestors coped with stressors? Evolution doesn't care about much other than your ability to reproduce.
sasas 3y ago
Peter Attia has an interview with Robert Sapolsky that was recently “rebroadcasted” - “ The impact of stress on our physical and emotional health” [1] Highly recommended listening. As a neuroendocrinology researcher, much Robert Sapolsky’s life work revolves around the questions your pondering on. He has spent years studying wild baboons in Kenya, “ .. specifically, Sapolsky studies the cortisol levels between the alpha male and female and the subordinates to determine stress level.” [2] [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889 https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
culi 3y ago
> What were the cortisol levels like for that average homo sapiens? Much much lower actually. We use the same stress response for seeing a lion that we do to stress about making a mortgage payment. That's why we get ulcers and zebras don't On top of that Homo sapiens also just had much more freetime and the median lifespans were actually not too far off from what they are today (~72 years[0]). Yes there was a huge dip in lifespans in (some) agricultural societies and when the industrial revolution started and there's definitely a lot of variation in difficulties faced but overall on average prehistoric peoples were healthier and much less stressed out than the average American is today. Also peoples that lived on islands and certain other ecosystems didn't really have to deal with predators at all. Predators are very unlikely to be the biggest source of stress in general as even the most dangerous of all predators, big cats, are very unlikely to attack a group of humans. As long as you're with your tribe you generally don't have much to fear. [0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-ancient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  ulcers are not caused by stress rather h pylori.
goodpoint 3y ago
> I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role You... wonder? It's a well known fact that tribal societies are hypersocial. Rugged individualism and loneliness are very modern things.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Research shows that being knowledgable about health risks is “the new smoking” Friendly health experts still insist that 97% of the population still don’t eat enough cauliflower

theGnuMe 3y ago
>Friendly health experts still insist that 97% of the population still don’t eat enough cauliflower So that's why they've put it in pizza crusts now...

gabereiser 3y ago

What about the colloquial increased education = increased stress. I’m not talking about the stress of trying to pay your bills on a welders salary, but the stress of running enterprise projects, teams, or being the top neuroscientist in your field. The stress from that is a different kind. It’s a continual stress especially for those that suffer from impostor syndrome. Anyway, interesting theory about cortisol spikes. Where can I read more?

asdfman123 3y ago
Lower socioeconomic status is on average far more stressful than high SES. Sure, it's possible to be relaxed about your lower status, but it's way easier to be relaxed about being richer: e.g., look at your coworkers who are quietly working for 4 hours and then going out biking in the middle of the day. There's a cultural narrative that in some ways, richer people have it harder than poorer ones. It's responsible for underpinning the moral legitimacy of our class system, but I don't think it's actually true on average. The thing is, no matter where you land you're going to find people who are unhappy or are struggling with their problems, but that's just because humans in general struggle with things.
- woooooo 3y ago
  Getting a chance to productively and quietly work for 4 hours is pretty unusual for a lot of us.
  - airstrike 3y ago
    Personally I am able to find that more often doing chores around the house than actually doing work in the office... which must be why I love doing the dishes
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    You have that option though if you really seek it out.

mrkrabs 3y ago

Have you found any notable stories where someone genetically prone to stress has meaningfully overcome it? I tend to worry and control my environment but never quite find a sweet spot between knowledge and ignorance.

graeme 3y ago

In my experience people don't generally believe noise is bad for health beyond being annoying. Do you have any evidence for your belief the health effects are merely due to stress rather than being real? (Or that noise isn't causing physiological stress) You can find all kinds of rat studies where noise worsens rat health. The rats surely haven't been reading media articles about the effects of noise.