Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated

By: Robert Sapolsky

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 17 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Now in a third edition, Robert M. Sapolsky's acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.

As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear - and the ones that plague us now - are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way - through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us literally sick. Combining cutting-edge research with a healthy dose of good humor and practical advice, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers explains how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. It also provides essential guidance to controlling our stress responses. This new edition promises to be the most comprehensive and engaging one yet.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2004 Robert M. Sapolsky (P)2012 Tantor

A real insightful read.

It's really long and some time dry but the narrator make it well worth it.
I highly recommend this book.

Content Good, Narrator Not So Much

The information in this book was helpful. But there were lots of "moreover"s, "whereas"s, "therefore"s....so, in other words, pretty technical rather than a book crafted by a wordsmith. Pretty redundant and tangential. I was simultaneously reading (the old fashioned way) The Body Keeps the Score, and I found it to be more succinct while presenting much of the same information. The most laborious aspect of getting through this audio-book was the narrator. I would not purchase another audio-book with this narrator. Passages that were meant to be clinical and objective sounded biased, sarcastic, or cynical due to the narrator's style of reading. His narrating style, in my opinion, was just plain annoying.

Mostly Enjoyable and Informative

What made the experience of listening to Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers the most enjoyable?

Robert Sapolsky writes with a light, cheeky, irreverent tone that makes even information about glucocorticoids and stress responses funny and interesting. The book contains a lot of new information about stress, some of which runs counter to popular wisdom (e.g. the link between stress and cancer), and was reassuring in some ways and disturbing in others.

Any additional comments?

I think that this book is best read as a regular book and not an audiobook. Sapolsky uses a lot of scientific terminology, and without being able to flip back to earlier sections or a glossary, I ended up missing out on some of what he wrote. Also, one thing that I did find off-putting about this book is Sapolsky's smug, dismissive attitude toward doctors. I get that classically-trained doctors may not always take enough of a holistic approach to medicine, but Sapolsky really makes them sound like a bunch of narrow-minded idiots who can't accept anything other than throwing drugs at their patients.

Enlightening!

The author puts it into layman's terms what happens in the body when we stress and why it is so bad for us.
A must read for anyone not living on a remote, tropical island.

Narrator does not enunciate

Narrator could enunciate better and hard to distinguish certain words if I was not reading along.

Ack! Now I'm stressed about how stressed I am!

No, really, this book was extremely well narrated and very interesting. Makes what could be boring medical stuff fun to listen to. Some of us handle the stressors in our modern lives better than others and the author does give tips in the last chapter on how these people do it.

Great information - just too much of it!

This is a very in depth book on stress. You will leave it knowing the precise chemical and neurological responses caused by stress and their impacts on the body. Unfortunately, it was really too much information for me. I would recommend listening to an abridged version.

Excellent read of long, meaty book on stress

CONTENT is very good...just a *lot* of it...maybe a bit too much. The book is 90% "why you don't want stress" followed by 10% "what to do about stress". Lots of medical terms and leaves you amazed at the way our bodies adapt and are brilliantly designed.

NARRATOR is exceptionally good (i.e. great)! Reader delivers jokes with tonal inflection and perfect timing. No mispronunciation. Great voice. Peter Berkrot has done an amazing job here and actually helped me make through the many, many hours!

Keep calm and read this book

This book is a very good discussion on the effect chronic stress has in our modern society, and explains very well the mechanisms behind our bodies and why it makes sense (for our ancestors) for our body to do what it does.

I find this sort of thing fascinating, but I very much recognize that its style is not for everyone. This isn't just a 'top-level here's what you need to know'. This takes some deep dives into chemical mechanisms at times. So it's not just an 'anti-stress self help' book. But if you want to really understand the current science of a huge part of our bodies, and are willing to put in the attention, this is a great book.

Incredible insight to stress and the body.

Any additional comments?

I was assigned this book as a text for one of my college classes. In that class we did not read the entire text, cover to cover, but as odd as it sounds, I enjoyed emmensly the knowledge gained from what we did read. So much so that as the semester commenced, I've read the book through simply in pleasure and self-help. A wonderful book to educate the effects of stress and guide through various methods of coping. The author did an amazing job of keeping the book in basic english that was easy to understand and comprehend.