Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Robert Sapolsky.

Thank you so much, Robert, for joining us today.

Why, it's glad to be here. I want to return to a topic that is near and dear to your heart,

which is stress. What is the difference between short and long-term stress in terms of their

benefits and their drawback? How should we conceptualize stress?

Basically, sort of two graphs that one would draw. The first one is just all sorts of beneficial effects of stress short term. And then once we get into chronicity, it's just

downhill from there. The sorts of chronic stressors that most people deal with are just undeniably in the

chronic range, like having spent the last 20 years, daily traffic jams or abusive boss

or some such thing.

The other curve that's sort of perpendicular to this is dealing with the fact that

sometimes stress is a great thing. Like our goal is not to cure people of stress because if it's

a right kind, we love it. We pay good money to be stressed that way by a scary movie or roller coaster ride.

What you wanted to see is when it's the right amount of stress, it's what we call stimulation.

One thing that's really striking to me is how physiologically the stress response looks so much like the excitement response to a

positive event.

But is there anything else that we know about the biology that reveals to us, you know,

what really creates this thing we call valence, that an experience can be terrible or feel awful or it can feel wonderful

depending on this somewhat subjective feature we call valence.

On a really mechanical level, if you're in a circumstance that is requiring that your heart

races and your breathing is fast and you're using your muscles and

...