Robert Sapolsky Quotes

“A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.”

“Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.”

“Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) — their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds.

To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, 'Are you crazy? That’s stressful'. Throughout hominid history, if you’re running 26 miles in a day, you’re either very intent on eating someone or someone’s very intent on eating you.”

“Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.”

“If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a 'genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets'.”

“If you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with.

When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses — but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”

“In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.”

“It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.”

“Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale.”

“Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. Marathon runners are exceptions to this.”

“On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.”

“Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless — we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.”

“When doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm – because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.”