Robert Sapolsky's Stress: Portrait Of A Killer

During my viewing of Stress: Portrait of a Killer, I was astonished by how social ranking in one’s community/world, specifically within baboons, can have such a tremendous impact on stress in a positive or negative manner. I have read a lot of literature about the impact of stress on humans, but the research conducted by Robert Sapolsky on baboons citing how aggressive, dominant males within a baboon troop showed lower stress levels compared to submissive and lower social ranking baboons, who showed considerable increases in their level of stress, was truly amazing. If there is one thing that, prior to this video, that I nor the public were aware of about stress would be the wide-ranging effects high stress levels can have on not only the body

While the public is aware of some of the basic effects that stress can have through educational and medical exposure, but there is still plenty of information that the general population is missing. Part of the reasoning for why the general population may not have wide spread knowledge concerning stress and its fatal effects is the lack of attention stress is given in educational and medical settings, medical professionals for many people across the world don’t educate and check their patients on the stress they may be experiencing, schools also do a poor job of educating their students on the topic of stress and essentially ignore students who may be undergoing tremendous amounts of stress from school, extracurricular activities within or outside of school, issues at home or with friends, etc. Another issue concerning the lack of knowledge about stress among the general population is the idea that communicating about stress with family, friends, health professionals is