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hum
status, and you reduce his hypertension.134   Primatologist Robert Sapolsky of
Stanford University studied the level of glucocorticoids--stress
hormones--among baboons in Kenya's Masai Game Reserve.  He discovered
that the hormone level was low in males who had a high social position.  But
stress hormones were alarmingly high in males who were low in the pecking
order.  The bottom-ranking males stooped when they walked, had
bedraggled fur, showed signs of emotional misery, and were in abysmal
health.  These baboon lackeys were suffering from a pecking order slump
like the one that is overtaking America.135
Stress is not a product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary.  From
1979 to 1982, researchers at the University of Chicago attempted to discover
the differences between high-pressure executives who become sick and those
who do not.  The low-illness executives turned out to be strong in three
areas: commitment, control and challenge.136  In other words, humans need to
vigorously pursue goals, to wrestle with problems and to master them.  They
need much of what has been popularly interpreted as stress.
No wonder Dr. Hans Selye, the pioneering scientist who almost
single-handedly put stress on the map, says, "Stress is not something to be
avoided. ...Complete freedom from stress is death."137
Excessive relaxation is a slow form of suicide.  Take the most primitive,
physical level.  If you fail to use your organs, your body begins to dispose of
them.  The phenomenon shows up clearly among women who don't bother
to exercise.  Internal mechanisms slow the deposit of fresh calcium in the
skeletal structure.  The result: women who haven't exercised their skeletal
frame begin to lose it.  In their sixties, these women actually begin to
shrink.138
As we saw earlier, unused muscles atrophy and shrivel away.
The consequences of inactivity are worst for infants.  When babies--be
they chimps, mice or humans--do not receive sufficient sensory stimulation,
their neural circuitry fails to develop.  Their brains should be thickly meshed
  ans, for example, is low position in a social order.  Raise a human's
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