osprey_archer | Staff Day

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.