Dr. Tabatha Barber explains why your brain treats imagined worries the same as real danger, triggering stress hormones meant for immediate threats. Unlike zebras, which relax after escaping a predator, humans ruminate and keep the stress response running, flooding the body with cortisol and damaging the brain, joints, and heart.
The brain, this really good research that shows that the human brain does not have the capacity to discern between something that's actually happening in real time and something that we're just remembering or imagining. So it doesn't even have to be something that has actually happened. It can be something that we're just worrying about or ruminating about. Your brain can't tell the difference between those things. There's this story, this guy wrote a book called why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And the idea is that when the zebra is out grazing on the Serengeti and the lion jumps out of the bushes and chases them, the zebra has an appropriate fight or flight response and runs away. And if he's fast enough, eventually the line gets tired and stops chasing him. And the zebra goes on and finally stops running and just immediately starts eating grass again. Right? Just goes back to what they were doing. The zebra does not go and try to find the lion to get closure on understanding why the lion was so mean to him. Right? The lion doesn't. The zebra doesn't go and try to go to a counselor and try to figure out why there's. Why he's this unique zebra that the lion wanted to eat. Like the. The zebra just goes back to what they were doing before. Because the zebra doesn't have this ability that humans have to imagine things that might be happening or have happened in the past. Humans have this unique ability to switch from one thought process to another and to engage in ruminating behavior. And nobody else that God created has that. So, like, when the. The way your body's wired, right, to respond to a real threat is to release cortisol and stimulate your adrenal glands and get your fight or flight reflex engaged and run away or keep yourself away from the threat. But you're not designed to experience a high cortisol stress state all the time. And so while the zebra goes back to grazing, we keep ourselves in that loop all the time and our cortisol stays high. And that, as you know, has tremendous harmful effects on the ph. Physiology of the rest of our body. Breaks your brain down, breaks your joints down, breaks your cardiovascular system down, like staying in a high cortisol stress state is tremendously harmful for your body.
