We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out - that sort of thing.

Until you appreciate something crucial - It is incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an Us, who as a Them.

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.)

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.