Stress and Your Body by Robert Sapolsky
Feb. 14th, 2021 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsStress and Your Body by Robert Sapolsky
4/5. This is not a book, but instead a set of Great Courses lectures packaged like an audiobook that I got from the library. Generally excellent (and disheartening, because wow, we are all so fucked). Weirdly, I found it easier to pay attention to this in lecture form than I would have as a professional narration of nonfiction. Something about the rhythms of natural speaking. Anyway, this has lectures on the effects of chronic stress on various bodily systems and functions – digestion, fetal growth, reproduction, immunity – and then turns to psychological systems and, a little bit at the end, to what we can do about it. It was uncomfortable for me, as a person under chronic occupational stress. I have a plan to deal with that, but that plan won't come together for several more years, and that plan won't address the chronic social stress of being queer and disabled. This book never came out and said deal with this now, but well, it's not hard to read between the lines.
Content notes: Mentions of child abuse as a stressor. Some transphobia of the form where someone discusses an animal species with different sex presentations from humans and goes on and on and on and on about how weird and bizarre this is, imagine a female organism with a thing that looks like a penis, so weird!
4/5. This is not a book, but instead a set of Great Courses lectures packaged like an audiobook that I got from the library. Generally excellent (and disheartening, because wow, we are all so fucked). Weirdly, I found it easier to pay attention to this in lecture form than I would have as a professional narration of nonfiction. Something about the rhythms of natural speaking. Anyway, this has lectures on the effects of chronic stress on various bodily systems and functions – digestion, fetal growth, reproduction, immunity – and then turns to psychological systems and, a little bit at the end, to what we can do about it. It was uncomfortable for me, as a person under chronic occupational stress. I have a plan to deal with that, but that plan won't come together for several more years, and that plan won't address the chronic social stress of being queer and disabled. This book never came out and said deal with this now, but well, it's not hard to read between the lines.
Content notes: Mentions of child abuse as a stressor. Some transphobia of the form where someone discusses an animal species with different sex presentations from humans and goes on and on and on and on about how weird and bizarre this is, imagine a female organism with a thing that looks like a penis, so weird!