The Zebra and the Lion
Why Man Stresses Out and Animals Don’t (As Much)
I took a MOOC at EdX some months back, titled “Becoming a Resilient Person: The Science of Stress Management and Promoting Wellbeing”. I wanted to try MOOCs and I thought this subject would be an interesting one to test the process and software without putting too much stress (heh!) on myself, since this is somewhat of a light workload course in comparison to others I might be interested in.
To illustrate Man’s response to stress, Clayton Cook, the instructor for this course, gave us an image which he borrowed from Robert Sapolsky. Let me retell this story here:
Imagine a zebra grazing in the Serengeti Plains. Comes a lion, the zebra goes under stress and starts to run away. When it has put itself out of reach of the lion, it goes back to grazing as if nothing had ever happened. Basically, the zebra, after activating a normal stress response, in this case flight — out of three possible stress responses freeze, flight or fight — , goes back to homeostasis, a balanced and regulated state of body and mind. The lion is the stressor, when the stressor is gone, everything is back to normal and grazing can resume. If you or I were grazing in those same plains and the lion came, our response (flight) would probably be the same, but we’d probably end up a few miles away skirting across the savana, looking over our shoulder, anticipating a lion behind every bush. In short, it is not so sure that we would go back to grazing happily ever after once the lion is gone.
Why is that? (One of ) The difference(s) between a zebra and a human being, is that the human brain allows us to think more deeply than other animals. This has something to do with our frontal lobe being the seat of our “why make things simple when they can be complicated” reactions, or in better words, the part of our brain where rational decisions happen. Long story short, this part of our brain allows us to anticipate what might happen in the future and prolong what has happened in the past. Very helpful when we’re anticipating possible danger and change course accordingly, or when we’re excited at the prospect of a fun birthday party, also good when we feel gratitude towards things we have been granted in the past. The downside is, we can also carry the stressors with us although they are long gone (prolongation), or be afraid to move at all because we think something terrible is going to happen (anticipation).
Since I’ve heard that story, when I am stressed out, I try to assess how present the source of my stress actually is. Is it something that’s really here and now or is it something I am carrying along unnecessarily, or dreading without real reason? Even if finding the answer proves difficult, sometimes just asking myself the question helps me add enough perspective to reduce the stress level. My new motto: be a zebra.
