Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

People Do! Why?

By

William Sommers

Emotional stress, among other factors, contributes to our physical and mental health. Robert Sapolsky wrote the book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, in the late 90s. As a brain researcher, he researched the effects of negative stress.  For the record about 80% of our health is a combination of  five things: diet, sleep, drinking alcohol or using drugs in excess, exercise, and stress. Our personality and how we handle stress are factors in having a healthy body and healthy mind.

Common stressors for humans are work issues, personal relationships, worrying about money, deadlines, traffic, etc.  Humans are equipped to deal with life events; however, sometimes the events overload our capacity to process and ability to respond. Humans, like zebras, will first respond to immediate threats which are either real or imagined. Zebras are mostly concerned with staying safe and eating; secondary concerns are running and being in a herd are secondary concerns.

The major point of Sapolsky’s book is “if you are a zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are very  adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies.”

Where humans differ from zebras is when we sit around, worry, and ruminate about stressful things. We worry about the past and the future while having emotional reactions in the present. The past and the future generate the same physiological responses as an immediate threat.  Many studies suggests that chronic and/or life-threatening diseases are stress-related because they lower our immune system, exhaust our mental and physical systems, and activate a state for responding to immediate physical emergencies whether real or imagined.

As adults, we get in an uproar about events over which we have no control. Examples may be meetings, command-and-control leaders, little or no appreciation for work accomplished, psychologically unsafe organizations, high guilt-and-shame cultures, etc. You get the idea.  See Amy Edmondson work for psychological safety, The Fearless Organization and the Right Kind of Wrong. Psychological safety is important for creative cultures of innovation and learning.

“Success tells you nothing.  Failure is interesting – It’s part of making progress.

You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure”

James Dyson

I heard the following quote in a presentation forty years ago.

“Children Need Models More Than Critics”

French Proverb

The problem with this quote, is we become exhausted in the stressful kind of environment at home or work. Yes, work on solutions to problems. Constant pressure will deplete your energy, good thinking, and time constraints adds more restrictions.  Being under constant pressure results in narrowing our focus, causing us to miss options, and limits our creative ability. This might suggest some of the reasons, based on a recent article in Forbes, said that 20% of principals and superintendents are considering leaving education.  Time is spent on political issues taking away important discussions about learning.

Stress may help reacting in the short-term. However, in long-term and high-stress situations, there is reduced cognitive and sensory skills.  What is immediate and adaptable can become a blocker in high stress organizations. “It is with prolonged stress that one enters the third stage, which Hans Selye termed “exhaustion,” where stress-related diseases emerge” This is where the stress response becomes damaging to individuals, relationships, and work environments. As stress increases for humans, so do the risks of getting sick. Your defenses get overwhelmed by the stress and the result is stress-related disease.

Sapolsky’s points out many more connections to the brain and the effects of stress on our body’s system of health. Unpredictability makes stressors much more stressful.

When there is a loss of predictability, a stress-response is initiated.  Working in a predictable environment, being able to count on colleagues, and having family support help reduce negative stress.

Be watchful for signs of ‘learned helplessness.’  Andy Hargreaves told me that overload of demands and having fewer resources contribute to side effects of stress. He added, what really makes it harder is exerting tremendous efforts and seeing no positive results. People can sustain heavy workloads if they see their efforts make a difference.  When nothing they do makes the situation better, exhaustion and helplessness contribute to give up. See the work of Martin Seligman for more on this concept.

If a teacher is at a critical point in education, or a loved one is at a critical point of emotional development, or someone is frequently exposed to his or her own specialized uncontrollable stressors, they may grow up with distorted beliefs about what cannot be learned or made to believe they are unlikely to be loved.  In one chilling demonstration of this, some psychologists studied inner-city school kids with severe reading problems.  Were they intellectually incapable of reading?  Apparently not.  The psychologists circumvented the students’ resistance to learning to read by teaching them. The psychologist used real strategies of making learning relevant to their own lives which engaged the students.

Having a large repertoire of strategies to teach and the flexibility to use that repertoire are demonstrated by the two statements below. Great messages, that inspire people, help people remember these words of wisdom when dealing with stress.

In the face of strong winds, let me be a blade of grass.

In the face of strong walls, let me be a gale of wind.

Another useful phrase comes from Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

 and wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity Prayer

Sapolsky said, “We are uniquely smart enough to have invented these stressors and uniquely foolish enough to have let them, too often, dominate our lives.  Surely, we have the potential wisdom to banish their stressful hold.”

My final comments is,  DON’T DO THIS ALONE.  This is why community is so important whether it be friends, colleagues, learning partners, etc.  Angeles Arrien, at a workshop I attended asked, “do you hang with people who sap you or people who zap and energize you.”   I prefer to be zapped constantly by great teachers, mentors, and thought leaders.

References:

Edmondson, Amy. (2019). The Fearless Organization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons

Edmondson, Amy. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong:  The Science of Failing Well.

New York:  Atria

Maté, Gabor, MD with Maté, Daniel. (2022). The Myth of Normal.  New York:

Penguin Random House.

Sapolsky, Robert M.  (1998).  Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. 

New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.

Seligman, Martin.  (1990).  Learned optimism.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Seligman, Martin. (2011). Flourish.  New York:  Free Press