Darby Saxbe

It's hard to sample it accurately.

And then the way that you assay it in the lab, this gets kind of in the weeds.

But there are different ways to look at it.

And those ways don't always track well with each other.

Exactly.

We are filled with all these different inputs and we sort of glorify oxytocin.

Or I often hear as a cortisol research, people say, my cortisol is too high.

I have to treat my cortisol.

It's like, no, you want high cortisol in certain contexts.

And I think this is true with testosterone too.

You want to be flexible.

You want to have a biology that can adapt to your context.

And so there's no such thing as overly high this or overly low that.

It's like, how flexible are you?

Yeah, because we live in these complex worlds that don't reflect what we need to survive.

When I teach this to my undergrads, I always say, if I'm having a fight or flight response because I'm stuck in traffic, what am I going to do, like run across the freeway?

Not adaptive.

So it's like having all the blood go to my large muscles is not helping.

Yeah, yeah.

It makes me yell at the other drivers, but that's not super adaptive either.