In occasion of going through Stanford Human Behavioral Biology series:
– Time spending with your pets can be one of major anti-stress agent (backed by Sapolsky’s work :)) ) Time spends with your boss can cause a lot of turbulence and damages to your health, at molecular level :)) , make you less healthy, shorten your life, and if you spend enough time with your boss you’ll get ulcer :)) When I think back about my dad, he was always a very strong person from my perspective. But I grew up seeing him struggle with his chronic ulcer, and recently I noticed I’ve reached his age (as I knew him) and I have no ulcer yet :-) Quite an achievement :-)
– :)) You have quite a non-stressful life. A lot of people suffers chronic stress and their body responds to that in someway… but look at my boss, he has no ulcer until now :))
– There are couple of things influence your stress level. Social ranking is one, and this might help your boss reduces some stress: the lower rank you are (if you’re a baboon) the more you get spanked by higher rank baboons and that causes a lot of stress. So you want higher rank, but not too high, like if you’re a king, everyone is trying to overthrow you and that causes you stress too. And if you can’t get a good images if yourself from the office, pick up a hobby, or pick something you’re good at, and do that, it boosts your mood, less stress. Get some friends, having friends is a very good anti-stress. Get some pets, time spending with them are very beneficial for your health and mind.
There’s this experiment: put a hamster in a cage, use electricity to stress him out, he will develop ulcer. If you do the same thing but you put another (maybe smaller and more submissive) hamster in the cage, so when you electric shock the hamster he can go bite/vent the stress on the other hamster, he will NOT develop ulcer. Does this help to explain why your boss doesn’t have ulcer yet? :))
– Ya, maybe :))
– That’s one popular way to reduce stress, so… please keep the disclaimer in mind, otherwise next time we get stress we will have to immediately look for someone to vent on :))
– :)) we both know it works, it’s just a matter of morality if you do it or not :))
– we do that, but the thing we should remember and think hard before we do things is reality is much more complex, and there are many mechanisms, many genes, many factors,… involved
– ya
– we will soon learn go stop doing that if the other hamster is big and muscular :)) some hamster, if you give him a warning, like a light, at the right time before the shock, the hamster also won’t develop ulcer. He has predictive information, he is more prepared. Or if you put in a lever, and when he puts the lever he gets shock, he won’t get ulcer, he feels he has control :))
– :))) I can see it’s quite a savage experiment
– yes, I hate it when people use “public safety” to justify draconian actions by government, but can we do all these in the name of science and knowledge? :-? I’ll be okay if we do these on humans, with the consent of the subjects
– Ya but I guess too little people consent to do that, to make a proper experiment. Or it will not be random people but let’s say most of them are masochistic :)) that will also distort the result.
– I guess all of us consent to take stress to exchange for money :)) that’s called work
– but not electric shock
– woudn’t you rather take a controlled amount of electric shock that only stress you out for a while than go to work and fight a person? :))
– No I’d rather work for X :))
– I’d check voltage first, and I can see that there’s more chance I’ll take the electric than X, at least I feel some sense of control, there must be some sort of limit on this (like when you go into a cage, you can quit any time, or you have a referee who will interfere if you can’t take it anymore), for X these things are uncertain :))
– :)) you can always quit a job, no. And remember Stanford prison experiment, no electric shock involved but I still rather take X :))
– another spoiler: the guy who sort of discovered this mechanism (stress caused ulcer) found it out because he did an experiment, he injected something in one group of hamsters, and injected saline into another group, then he found…. both groups all got ulcer :)))
– :))))
– they got ulcer because of the stress they got from him handling them, maybe the way he injected shit… into them…
– poor hamsters
– I think what justify our experiments on others is they do experiment on us too :)) they do crazy things on us, created different enzymes, poison, blah bluh, to break us down :D consume and digest us. there’s this worm that parasites on grasshopper and when they mature they go to the grasshopper’s brain and manipulate it so the grasshopper… suicide :-? by jumping into water and die, and the parasite leaves :D there are things like that they do on us too. Covid is the new product from Virus scientist lab :D
