Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, a podcast from the team at Lifehacker.com, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of Lifehacker.

And I'm Andy Yorne, an editor at Lifehacker.

And April is Stress Awareness Month.

So today we're talking about stress and anxiety with scientist Daniel Keating.

Dan is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, where he focuses on developmental differences, whether they be cognitive, social, or emotional in physical and mental health.

His new book is called Born Anxious, The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity and How to

Break the Cycle. We're very happy to have Daniel Keating with us today.

Hi, Dan. Hey, Dan. Hi, there. Thanks for having me.

I'm so glad to have you.

So in Born Anxious, you talk about a stress epidemic.

What evidence is there for a stress epidemic in society today?

Well, there are three main lines of evidence that we have.

One is that in a series of annual surveys that the American Psychological Association

does, we've seen an increase in what people say about their levels of stress. The other thing we can

look at is the rate of stress-related disorders and diseases, and the Center for Disease Control has

been tracking this for quite a long time.

And when we look at those things, and that includes things like metabolic disorders,

obesity, diabetes, those sorts of things, sleep disorders that are associated with that.

We see a very substantial increase over the last three decades or so.

And then the final one is some very recent work that some researchers have done.

You can, in fact, measure the sorts of things that chemicals that are in your body that you can measure as indicators of a kind of a stress load index on your body. And these are things that are

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