Essentials: Science of Stress, Testosterone, Aggression & Motivation | Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Thank you so much, Robert, for joining us today.

Well, it's glad to be here. I want to return to a topic that is near and dear to your heart, which is stress. What is the difference between short and long-term stress in terms of their benefits and their drawback? How should we conceptualize stress? Basically, sort of two graphs that one would draw.

The first one is just all sorts of beneficial effects of stress, short-term. And then once we get into chronicity, it's just downhill from there. The sorts of chronic stressors that most people deal with are just undeniably in the chronic range, like having spent the last 20 years, daily traffic jams or abusive boss or some such thing. The other curve that's sort of perpendicular to this is dealing with the fact that Sometimes stress is a great thing.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (37 minutes, 5,837 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.