Staff Day

[osprey_archer]

I'm listening to a "mental health awareness" Youtube for virtual staff day and the presenter is giving the "sabretooth tiger theory of stress": in ye olden days, we were stressed out by things like sabretooth tigers, and we could react to that stress by fighting or fleeing the threat, which would dissipate the adrenaline/cortisol so our stress levels quickly returned to normal. Nowadays we are chronically stressed out by things like "meetings with our boss" and "the healthcare system," which we can neither fight nor flee, so we're just sitting there! Stewing in stress! For which we are not designed!

I've read this description before, but today it occurred to me for the first time that... actually... didn't hunter-gatherers have a lot of chronic stress, too? True, hunter-gatherers didn't have to worry about being bankrupted by the healthcare system, because there was no healthcare system, but... there was no healthcare system! If you got a bad infection, you were gonna kick it. Open fracture? Death. Pneumonia? Adios! Diabetes? Deadly! If they really sat down to think about it, surely they could get just as stressed out about it as any modern person contemplating medical bankruptcy.

(Also, although I, like the sabretooth tiger people, am using the past tense, there are still hunter-gatherers today. "Do hunter-gatherers suffer chronic stress?" is definitely something we could study empirically.)

And true, hunter-gatherers don't have a boss in the same sense that we moderns have bosses, but generally there's a group leader, and surely there were long-term "my group leader and I don't get along" stresses. (I haven't read much about hunter-gatherer social dynamics, but I have read about primate & wolf dynamics, and being low-status in the group is a source of severe ongoing stress for the animals at the bottom of the heap. Like being the class outcast in high school.)

Also, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is feast or famine: sometimes the berries are ripe and the salmon are running, but sometimes supplies run low and you are at real risk of starving to death, possibly for months on end. Isn't that chronic stress?

Of course it's entirely possible that hunter-gatherers manage their long-term "we are out of food and nothing will be growing for months" stress differently than we manage our sources of stress. But "hunter-gatherers have no long-term stress so humans are just not built to deal with it!" seems at odds with actual hunter-gatherer life.

Comments

Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[gaudior]

That is a very good point, which I hadn't seen before!

I think that it makes sense to change the hunter-gatherer explanation to say that hunter-gatherers have both chronic stress and emergency-level-panic, and much more likely to have emergency-level panic than people who have spent thousands of years trying to make sure we can live a daily life without running into a tiger unless it's in a cage.

But the more important argument is: adrenaline-fueled panic-level-fight-or-flight can save your life in an emergency, and then you pass on your genes. Chronic stress can make you miserable, but not significantly likely to be taken instantaneously out of the gene pool. You are more likely to get ill if you're chronically stressed, but you can still pass on your genes. Evolution doesn't actually care what's good for you, just what keeps you from dying before you reproduce.

And I think you make a good point about the level of pain in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that much of it is about long-term things you're talking about. But there is in our high-tech lives a level of stress from decision fatigue-- there are a zillion things each of us could be doing, every second of the day, and most of them will turn out fine, but it's almost impossible to really know which is the best, and that is really quite exhausting. That's stress-- the chronic-anxiety inducing kind, the kind that comes from being frustrated and upset and feeling not-exactly-helpless-because-you-probably-could-do-more-but-have-no-promise-it-will-help. The thing about getting a bad fracture and knowing you're just going to die is that it is sad and scary, but if you don't have options, then you just feel the pain and are upset, not worried.

IMO. Thank you, this is definitely a more nuanced look at it for the next time I use that analogy!

Re: Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[ancientreader]

And the epigenetic effects of stress. E.g., it's been demonstrated over and over in nonhuman animals that chronic maternal stress --> long exposure of fetuses to stress hormones --> increased reactivity and, IIRC, aggression in the offspring. I haven't looked into it lately to find out whether there's research on the effects of paternal stress, but it wouldn't surprise me, even if those effects are more attenuated because Dad doesn't bathe the kiddos in his hormones the way Mom does.

Re: Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[osprey_archer]

It also occurs to me that humans (or some humans, anyway) often rather enjoy emergency-level panic, at least when it turns out well: it's exhilarating when it happens and it makes a good story afterward. People might buy you a beer to hear about the time you walked away from a high-speed car crash, but no one wants to hear about months of low-key anxiety about paying for minor but necessary car repairs.