Stressed? - You are not alone...

Humans seem to have a unique ability to suffer from stress – be it about health, job or money worries. However, now it appears that we are not alone.

According to new research from the US, we can take some comfort from that fact that baboons can suffer stress in similar ways.

Professor Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, and colleagues have been gathering behavioural and physiological field data on African baboons. Unhealthy baboons, they found - similar to unhealthy humans - have elevated levels of stress hormones and their immune responses and reproductive system are compromised.

“We’ve found that baboons have diseases that other social mammals generally don’t have,” Sapolsky said, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. “If you’re a gazelle, you don’t have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.”
These baboons have served a good model for understanding human behaviour as, like us, they don’t have real stressors. A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks an animal out of homeostatic balance.

“If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don’t mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop,” he explained. “They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines - they're getting done in by each other.”

However, they are not quite like us in every respect. Unlike baboons, humans can find different ways of coping with psychosocial stress. “We are capable of social supports that no other primate can even dream of,” Sapolsky said.