Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist, on chronic stress: “Whatever was great is never going to be enough”

When we’re stressed, we’re experiencing a natural reaction that’s hard-wired into humans as a crucial, short-term survival instinct. However, as a leading expert in biology and neurology explains on the podcast Modern Wisdom, it’s a response that can work against us: our intelligence as a species allows us to maintain this supposedly temporary state of tension over excessively long periods of time.

“Few other primates are smart enough to get sick from psychological stress,” says Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky, the author of the 2017 book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

“An incredibly ancient piece of our wiring”

Stress is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation” - a reaction that “prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives”. But the WHO cautions: “Too much stress can cause physical and mental health problems.”

Sapolsky agrees, noting that when our bodies secrete stress hormones, we undergo internal changes that were only designed to help us negotiate very brief crises. “You’re increasing heart rate, blood pressure, you’re turning off everything non-essential,” he told Modern Wisdom, adding: “[You deactivate] growth, tissue repair, immune surveillance, reproduction, all of that.”

This, Sapolsky explains, is an age-old process harnessed by all animals when their survival is at stake. “If you went back 100 million years, and some twerpy little dinosaur was being chased by something terrifying, that dinosaur would be secreting the precise same molecules that you do [...],“ he says. “It’s an incredibly ancient piece of our wiring.”

Sapolsky continues: “For most beasts, [the state of stress] is either over with after three minutes, or you’re over with. But we’re capable of doing this for months, years on end. And that’s not what the system evolved for.”

When we suffer from high levels of stress over prolonged periods, that’s what’s known as chronic stress. According to the mental-health specialists Better Help, there are numerous major causes of chronic stress among humans. They include: work, school, parenting, relationships, financial problems, and mental-health conditions.

And, judging by the results of major recent surveys, regular stress is a widespread problem. In Gallup’s State of the World’s Emotional Health report for 2025, 37% of adults said they had experienced “a lot of stress” the previous day.

Meanwhile, in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) 2025 Stress in America study, 33% of respondents rated their average daily stress level at 7 out of 10 or higher (where 10 is “a great deal of stress” and 1 is “little or no stress”). When asked by the APA about particular reasons for feeling stress, 69% cited work as a “significant” cause, with 66% saying likewise about money.

Major stress “does crummy things to your brain”, Sapolsky says. “The worst is that it makes you less empathic,” he told Modern Wisdom. “It makes you less tolerant. It makes you less willing to take somebody else’s perspective. It narrows your tunnel of concerns, and I think what we see is in a world full of stress, people are crummier to each other on the average.”

The flip side of the ‘dopamine rush’

According to Sapolsky, our mental well-being can be harmed not only by stress hormones, but also by our production of dopamine - the very chemical defined by Harvard Health as a “feel-good neurotransmitter”.

Dopamine is “involved in helping us feel pleasure as part of the brain’s reward system”, Harvard Health explains. Sapolsky warns, however, that the human system behind the ‘dopamine rush’ tends towards short-lived contentment that can quickly morph into dissatisfaction.

While less intelligent animals have a “fairly limited repertoire” of rewarding actions - such as eating when they’re hungry - humans’ greater brain power opens up a far wider variety of dopamine sources.

“We’ve got this range of potential pleasures and potential motivations like nobody else out there,” Sapolsky told Modern Wisdom. “The range varies: The [human dopamine] system has to accommodate smelling a nice flower and winning the lottery. And it’s using the same circuits, it’s using the same neurotransmitters to do this.

“What that means is, this is a system that has to reset really quickly, because it’s got to know: OK, OK, we just stopped doing winning the lottery, now we’re doing the smell of flowers.”

Sapolsky continues: “If this system resets so quickly, by definition whatever was a fantastic surprise and wonderful yesterday, is going to be what you feel entitled to today, and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow. And we get hungry again. And we just get hungry and hungry and hungry, and whatever was great is never going to be enough very quickly […]. This is this crappy, miserable thing we’re stuck in as a species.”

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