p.3 This book is a primer about stress, stress-related disease, and the mechanisms
of coping with stress.
p.4 Perhaps the best way to begin is by making a mental list of the sorts of things we find stressful...
the most upsetting things in life are acute physical crises... These are extremely stressful events, and they demand
immediate physiological adaptations if you are going to live... An organism can also be plagued by chronic physical
challenges... Critical to this book is a third category of ways to get upset - psychological and social disruptions.
p.5 Two people can sit facing each other, doing nothing more physically strenuous than moving little
pieces of wood now and then, yet this can be an emotionally taxing event: chess grand masters, during their tournaments,
can place metabolic demands on their bodies that begin to approach those of athletes during the peak of a competitive event.
[JLJ - we see here that humans interpret a game such as chess with the engagement of the stress response]
p.6 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.
p.6 A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance
[the state in which all sorts of physiological measures are being kept at the optimal level] , and the stress response
is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis... A stressor can also be the anticipation of that happening.
p.8 What [early stress researcher Hans] Selye did was to formalize the concept with two ideas:
- The body has a surprisingly similar set of responses (which he called the general adaptation syndrome, but
which we now call the stress-response) to a broad array of stressors.
- If stressors go on for too long, they can make you sick.
p.10 A final feature of allostatic thinking dovetails beautifully with thinking about stressed humans. The
body doesn't pull off all this regulatory complexity only to correct some set point that has gone awry. It can
also make allostatic changes in anticipation of a set point that is likely to go awry... We activate the
stress-response in anticipation of challenges, and typically those challenges are... purely psychological and social
p.10 a stressor can be defined as anything that throws your body out of allostatic balance and the
stress-response is the body's attempt to restore allostasis.
p.49 The preceding sections demonstrate how chronic stress will gradually damage the cardiovascular system,
with each succeeding stressor making the system even more vulnerable.
p.260 Predictive information lets us know what internal coping strategy is likely to work best during [the
experiencing of] a stressor.
p.284 in chapter 16, we'll see how dopamine signals the anticipation of reward more than it signals reward
itself
p.337-339 As we saw in chapter 14, the brain contains a pleasure pathway that makes heavy use of the neurotransmitter
dopamine... The relationship between dopamine and pleasure is subtle and critical... Some brilliant studies by Wolfram Schultz
of the University in Fribourg in Switzerland showed something more interesting. Yes, frontal neurons became excited in response
to reward. But the biggest response comes earlier, around the time of the bell sounding and the task commencing... The pleasure
is in the anticipation of a reward; from the standpoint of dopamine, the reward is almost an afterthought. Psychologists
refer to the period of anticipation, of expectation, of working for reward as the "appetitive" stage, one filled with appetite,
and call the stage that commences with reward the "consummatory" stage. What Schultz's findings show is that if you know your
appetite is going to be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating... the dopamine and it's associated
sense of pleasurable anticipation fuels the work needed to get that reward.
p.364 If you want to see an example of chronic stress, study poverty. Being poor involves lots of physical
stressors.
p.514 The notion of the right coping style for the right stressor dominated the work of the
late Richard Lazarus of the University of California, Berkeley.
