Dr. Robert Waldinger

So if you think about it,

something really frustrating or angering happens to you today, hopefully you go home and you can talk about it, right?

And often when we talk about it, you can literally feel your body start to calm down.

100%.

Yeah, from the fight or flight response.

What we think happens is that people who are isolated or don't have anyone they can really trust to talk to,

that they stay in a kind of low-level fight-or-flight response.

So chronic inflammation, poor immune functioning, all of these things that the fight-or-flight response is meant to change in our bodies, but then we're meant to go back to baseline when the threat is gone or the frustration is gone.

And if we can't do that, then we think that gradually the body breaks down

Yeah.

We don't know.

I mean, there's some ideas that they can.

There's some studies that suggest that stress is implicated in cancer.

They haven't.

I can't say that they've really made definitive links, but there's a lot of sense that higher stress means... For example, there's a study I just read that showed that if you're having financial problems and you're...

undergoing treatment for cancer, your survival rate is lower than if you're not having financial problems.

I'm not sure about this study.

I have to read it further.

But that's the idea of a stressor, right?

And how a stressor might make your body less able to fight off illness.