Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Third Edition: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping – Now Revised and Updated

hedonism is “the pursuit of pleasure,” anhedonia is “the inability to feel pleasure”

When it’s two-thirty on those mornings, I always have a brain tumor. These are very useful for that sort of terror, because you can attribute every conceivable nonspecific symptom to a brain tumor and justify your panic. Perhaps you do, too; or maybe you lie there thinking that you have cancer, or an ulcer, or that you’ve just had a stroke.

As a measure of how extraordinarily efficient this repeated bifurcation is in the circulatory system, no cell in your body is more than five cells away from a blood vessel—yet the circulatory system takes up only 3 percent of body mass

The first step in the road to stress-related disease is developing hypertension, chronically elevated blood pressure.* This one seems obvious: if stress causes your blood pressure to go up, then chronic stress causes your blood pressure to go up chronically. Task accomplished, you’ve got hypertension

That the stress-response itself can become harmful makes a certain sense when you examine the things that occur in reaction to stress.

A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance, and the stress-response is what your body does to reestablish homeostasis.

When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically

You will fatigue more rapidly, and your risk of developing a form of diabetes will even increase.

If stressors go on for too long, they can make you sick.

stress-response can be mobilized not only in response to physical or psychological insults, but also in expectation of them