Stress, Cortisol, & Protecting Your Health

Stephanie: When we repeatedly activate our stress hormone, our HPA axis, over time—and there are lots of ways in which that comes about in terms of social stress, everyday stress, daily stress—when it's repeatedly activated over and over and over, we call this chronic stress. And it's really bad for us.

Brent: Welcome to the Life Lab by Death Clock. I'm your host, Brent Franson. The mission of Death Clock is to help 100 million people live ten years longer. Today, we speak with Doctor Stephanie Cook. Doctor Cook is an assistant professor in the departments of biostatistics and social and behavioral sciences at New York University, in the School of Global Public Health.

Brent: Her focus is on stress and cortisol, on what causes stress and how to alleviate it. It's a wide ranging conversation about how to think about stress. She's a wonderful guest. I hope you enjoy.

Brent: Stephanie Cook, welcome to the show.

Stephanie: Glad to be here.

Brent: So today we're going to talk about cortisol, which I think of as the stress hormone. You'll tell me if it's actually a hormone or not. But before we get into it, will you just give us a sense of your background and your day job?

Stephanie: I'm a professor of biostatistics and social behavioral sciences at NYU School of Global Public Health. A lot of what we do in my lab is focused on stress and health. My work looks at how stress gets under the skin, wear and tear on the body, and the hormones behind it. Most importantly, I look at how this is uneven across different people's lives and why that happens.

Brent: Can we first start just by defining how you define stress?

Stephanie: Yes. Stress generally when we use it in everyday terms is in non-physiological terms. It's just being overwhelmed or burned out, which some people conflate with anxiety. It comes in the form of daily stressors, such as daily financial stressors like how am I going to pay my bills, or the kids have another summer camp to pay for, or food.

Stephanie: And then there are larger stressors, such as the death of a loved one or a pet—things that happen over time. However, I study cortisol, which is associated with the ways in which we talk about stress in this general way, but cortisol is really an important stress hormone.

Stephanie: We must have it; it allows us to survive. It is very important if we ever come into a stressful situation where we have to fight or flight. In my classes, I always talk about hiking in Yosemite Park and coming across a bear, and being able to have the adrenaline and activation of our HPA axis to run, versus not having those stress or fight-or-flight hormones flush our bodies.

Stephanie: And so it's really important. What happens, and what I really study, is when we repeatedly activate our stress hormone and HPA axis over time. There are lots of ways in which that comes about in terms of social stress, everyday stress, daily stress, and stress from all kinds of factors in our lives. When it's repeatedly activated over and over and over...

Stephanie: ...we call this chronic stress, and it's really bad for us. It impacts our sleep and our blood pressure, and all of these things are associated with cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular health.

Brent: Before we get into that—because I want to talk about the difference between normal everyday stress and chronic stress—let's continue defining a few of these terms. Cortisol would be the hormone that we can measure in our blood that helps us understand how stress is showing up physiologically in a measurable, objective way. That would typically be done with an AM cortisol test, I believe.

Brent: So you'd go in and do it first thing in the morning. You can correct this in a second, but that's my understanding. Tell us how you think about what cortisol is, how we measure it, and what HPA is.

Stephanie: We measure cortisol in a lot of different ways. In science, we have stress protocols where we give someone a stressor and then map their cortisol reaction over a period of time. In my work, I do field-based research. Our stress protocols mean that we take samples when a person wakes up, 20 minutes after waking up, 30 to 45 minutes after waking up, and again at bedtime to see how they recover.

Stephanie: Because there's a basic curve to cortisol in terms of the HPA axis. The HPA axis is the larger system that runs from your brain receiving the signal that there's a threat. It starts the process that floods your body with the stress hormone cortisol and other responses when you encounter that threat.

Stephanie: So you can think of cortisol as the stress hormone. And then our HPA axis, like the bigger system that controls from the moment in which we experience this threat all the way through recovery from the stressor.

Brent: Okay. And then is the cortisol the cause of the uncomfortable feeling of stress or is it a response?

Stephanie: That's a really interesting question, and it depends on what you're talking about. In terms of cortisol, the ways people experience it and subjectively talk about it vary depending on their lived experience. But when we look at cortisol in relation to objectively testable metrics like sleep and blood pressure, we see a correlation showing cortisol directly affects how someone experiences life.

Brent: So cortisol is basically amping up the system. It's preparing it to deal with the stressor. And that amping up of the system is uncomfortable. But it puts us in a physiologic state that's just better prepared to deal with the bear that we just stumbled across.

Stephanie: Right. And I don't know if it's always uncomfortable. You get these releases when you need to perform an action, such as running from a bear. You get a surge of energy that allows you to run faster. So I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as uncomfortable, but if you're asking whether your body responds and whether you can feel that, yes.

Stephanie: And can you kind of feel that. Yes.

Brent: When you're studying the effect of stress on people, you mentioned giving them a stressor and measuring their cortisol. What is that stressor? When studying someone, how do you put them into a stress state?

Stephanie: There are two general protocols. One is lab protocols. There are different ways to stress a person, but a validated approach introduces a stress measurement after taking a baseline cortisol measurement while they sit quietly for 20 minutes.

Stephanie: Then we give them the test in various formats: they either sit and look at a screen displaying something stressful, or interact with a person. We measure their cortisol and recovery before and after the stressor. In my research, and in studies aiming to understand stress as lived in daily life, participants take home saliva collection kits to sample cortisol upon waking, 20 minutes post-waking...

Stephanie: ...and 30 to 40 minutes post-waking for at least five days. We can then observe their diurnal cortisol curve and understand features that inform how we analyze stress.

Brent: So I test myself at various points and journal what's happening, and you connect those data points. How should we think about different types of stressors? There seems to be a wide spectrum. On one end, there's temporary stress like running late to pick up a child from school, which resolves once completed.

Brent: On the other end is grief, such as losing a family member. That's a normal human experience we are equipped to process. Then there are chronic stressors, like job loss paired with eviction risk—situations that are persistent. How do you categorize stressors, and where is the line between normal life stress and chronic stress that impacts health?

Brent: I've lost my job and maybe I'm at risk of being evicted, or I've got something that is not that I'm not really equipped to deal with. Maybe like I am in the case of grief, just, I don't know, just as a human being or it's not something that's temporary and just goes away. How do you think about the buckets of stressors and where do we draw the line between, hey, this is just a normal part of stress that happens in life.

Brent: And no, no, no, this is chronic stress that is now going to be impacting your health.

Stephanie: That is a great question, and I want to be clear that any repeated stressor can accumulate into chronic stress. For example, if you are consistently late picking up your child for ten years and stressed about it, that can accumulate into a chronic stressor. Pinpointing why someone experiences chronic stress is more complex.

Stephanie: Broadly speaking, chronic stress means you are no longer able to produce a healthy physiological response to a stressor due to its persistence. We refer to this accumulated burden as allostatic load. A high load means your body is unable to function normally when encountering stressors or in general.

Stephanie: That is when sleep disruptions and other symptoms occur. Acute stress, like being late to pick up a child or short-term grief, is something our bodies are equipped to recover from. Even if experienced 20 times over a lifetime, we are built to recover from acute stressors.

Stephanie: The primary issue arises when we cannot recover. People often ask me when recovery stops, but that involves psychology and individual differences. For example, someone experiencing daily stressors continuously over 20 years will likely experience chronic stress effects.

Stephanie: However, if another person experiences those stressors for a shorter duration or fewer times, their recovery system may prevent the full impact of allostatic load. It's not only the nature of the stressor, but its intensity, frequency, and individual genetic differences.

Stephanie: That's really important to that. We're all we all are genetically built differently a little bit.

Brent: Are the secondary effects of stress what cause health issues? In other words, stress itself isn't inherently bad, but it disrupts sleep, or leads to poor diet, alcohol consumption, or lack of exercise.

Brent: Are those secondary behaviors what harm health, or does chronic stress directly impact health even if someone sleeps well, eats well, and exercises daily?

Stephanie: It's both. Beyond psychological effects that disrupt sleep, there are direct physiological and biological processes impacted by the HPA axis and cortisol specifically.

Stephanie: For example, during HPA axis recovery, elevated levels of C-reactive protein—a marker of inflammation—are present. Epidemiological literature confirms that elevated C-reactive protein correlates strongly with cardiovascular disease and overall mortality.

Stephanie: There are physical biological outcomes of allostatic load and chronic stress, particularly regarding heart health. Secondary behavioral effects are also significant: stress causes rumination, anxiety, and poor sleep, compounding those direct physiological impacts.

Stephanie: It causes rumination and it causes, you know, poor sleep because we're we're, you know, anxious and thinking about things in our brains that meaning we can't get to sleep, but it also does directly impact us in other ways that are really important for our health.

Brent: Consider a twin study scenario where two identical twins have identical genetic makeups and lifestyles—both sleep well, exercise, and eat well—but one experiences high stress while the other does not.

Brent: Would the twin with the high-stress life have worse heart health and higher C-reactive protein levels, even without secondary lifestyle factors?

Brent: You think if we were to wave our magic wand and look at those twins, the one with the stressful existence would have worse heart health, higher inflammation as measured through SC, reactive protein, etc. even though those secondary effects are the same across both of them.

Stephanie: Those are mitigating factors. Physical activity, quality sleep, and good nutrition serve as buffers against negative health impacts and mortality, even for highly stressed individuals.

Stephanie: And this is a really, really important factor, even if you're highly stressed. We know that these mitigating factors of physical activity, of eating well and sleeping well can still kind of help you not only de-stress, but, you know, tackle some of these effects later on associated with cardiovascular health.

Brent: It often feels counterintuitive. When stressed, people seek short-term relief through alcohol or other vices, when going to bed early, running, or eating well would actually buffer the stress.

Brent: How significant are these physiological effects on average? How does chronic stress manifest in measurable health metrics like cholesterol, blood pressure, or blood glucose?

Brent: We've talked about higher inflammation. I mean, how is this actually showing up in terms of the health measurements that we can that we can study?

Stephanie: Extensive research demonstrates that individuals with higher chronic stress perform worse across numerous long-term health outcomes.

Brent: No, no, it's fine, but it tends to be more, you know, higher, worse heart health. I would assume worse metabolic health. So higher blood glucose.

Stephanie: We see higher inflammation, elevated blood pressure, higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and increased risk of stroke. Some research also links stress to higher long-term cancer risk and all-cause mortality, though all-cause mortality can be confounded by risky behaviors associated with high stress.

Stephanie: So but the basic story is that stresses can be chronic, stress can be very bad for your health.

Brent: Which specific chronic stressors cause the most concern? Major categories seem to include relationship stress, such as divorce, and financial instability.

Brent: What are they? When we think about, okay, these are the chronic stressors that contribute most to bad health.

Stephanie: It's complicated because researchers operate in different domains. While we agree that chronic stress and allostatic load harm health, we differ on specifics. In psychology, evaluating a person's cognitive appraisal of their stress is essential to understanding its impact.

Stephanie: For instance, people have varying thresholds for relationship stress and divorce. Subjective appraisals heavily dictate physiological and mental health outcomes.

Stephanie: My work examines macro-level social stressors—income, racism, and discrimination—and their physiological impacts when outside an individual's control. We often find strong links between compounding financial stressors (like food insecurity or childcare costs) and poor health outcomes.

Stephanie: Yet we also observe individual differences rooted in appraisal and social support systems. Having family support, for example, can buffer daily burdens that would otherwise cause chronic stress.

Stephanie: While clear-cut answers are desirable, the field remains complex as we continue identifying effective interventions to reduce chronic stress and improve long-term health.

Brent: It seems there are two primary approaches: addressing the underlying stressor directly (e.g., leaving an unhealthy relationship), or altering psychological perception and processing to dampen its physiological impact.

Brent: And then the second way in which I can think about it is I can say, hey, this is something I can't change, but I'm going to change the way I think about it. I'm going to change the way that I process it. And so in that way, I'm going to dampen the impact of the stress. And so I could do both of those things.

Brent: Even if the external stressor cannot be removed immediately, changing your psychological response can make it less harmful. Is that how you view it?

Brent: I can make that healthier. And even though the underlying stressor might not change, I can be impacted by it less. Right? Or is that the way you would think about it?

Stephanie: That is a crucial point. I have a demanding career and young children, so I prioritize running, healthy eating, and sleeping seven hours a night. Promoting these health behaviors is central to my work because they reduce stress and buffer against long-term physiological damage.

Stephanie: Directly modifying systemic stressors is difficult and often requires long-term policy or community-level change outside an individual's direct control.

Stephanie: At the individual level, adopting practices like running, journaling, art, or meditation helps mitigate active chronic stress and its long-term health risks.

Brent: You hesitated slightly when I mentioned leaving an abusive relationship as a solution. Is that because removing oneself from such circumstances isn't always realistic or accessible?

Stephanie: One of my graduate students focuses on intimate partner violence, and her work highlights how extremely difficult it is to leave an abusive relationship, particularly when financial or power imbalances exist.

Stephanie: Her research seeks to identify coping mechanisms to help individuals manage stress while navigating a path out of those situations. That's why I noted it's a very difficult requirement.

Stephanie: So that's kind of why I was pushing back a little bit, just because I'm like, oh, that's a really hard asked.

Brent: Ideally, the goal is to remove the person from harm, but practically, it takes time. Providing actionable stress management tools is essential in the interim.

Stephanie: Exactly. Effective interventions vary based on an individual's specific context, resources, and relationship dynamics.

Brent: Yeah. Okay. So and then let's talk about some because it seems maybe there are there are three factors at play here. There's this new factor that I think will introduce talk about like the environment. It's like just the broader set of things that are happening that you might be able to change. We'd have to make some really serious life change.

Brent: Let's look at three dimensions of stress: broad environmental factors (like urban vs. rural living), immediate relational dynamics, and internal psychological responses. How do broader environmental factors influence stress levels?

Brent: And how does the world around me affect me? And so what are what are those and how are we thinking about their impact on stress.

Stephanie: This is why researchers focus on actionable interventions. Environmental and social pressures surround us constantly through social norms and expectations, making them difficult to alter directly.

Stephanie: In my activity-space research, I track where people go, how much time they spend in environments like public parks, and whether those environments reduce or induce stress.

Stephanie: For instance, moving from Michigan to New York City was a major stressor for me due to the fast pace, whereas others thrive in that environment.

Stephanie: Numerous environmental and social conditions impose stress. The goal is identifying for whom, where, and when environmental factors cross the threshold into chronic stress.

Stephanie: For example, organizing community park cleanups may be relaxing for some, but become a source of chronic frustration for a long-term volunteer upset by persistent litter.

Stephanie: And like you always visit the same park and it's like trash and you're like, why aren't these people cleaning up, right? So, you know, in that space, instead of becoming a space of like, calm, which it would be for maybe a person that enters it after they've after this group has already cleaned up, it becomes this place of chronic stress for this other and other individual or these other individuals.

Stephanie: Neighborhood stress research consistently shows that environmental and social contexts vary widely depending on individual characteristics and timing.

Brent: Personality traits play a role too; social interaction reduces stress for extroverts but can increase it for introverts. Is stress perception relative? Compared to ancestors from ten generations ago who faced high infant mortality and extreme poverty, modern life is objectively safer and richer.

Brent: But I want to come back to I want to, I want to I want to put a pin in the environmental piece, I want to talk about socio economic impact, etc. but before we do that, you know, you had made a comment about, hey, there's we just live lives where there's lots of stress. And that makes me think that stress is it's contextual, because if we were to go back ten generations, our, you know, ancestors of ten generations ago, they wouldn't think our lives are stressful at all.

Brent: Half of their kids are dying in childbirth. They're they're working in the farms, you know, or what? They're doing really hard labor. 90% of the globe isn't poverty. You know, a couple hundred years ago now, 90, you know, only 10%, 90% are literate. Couple hundred years ago now it's only 10% infant mortality, maternal mortality, etc.. And so is it just really the stress compared to the people around us?

Brent: Are we calibrating stress relative to those around us, or is human physiology adjusting stress responses based on whatever current conditions exist?

Stephanie: While historical comparison is difficult, environmental context clearly dictates physiological stress responses today.

Stephanie: Neighborhood studies show that low socioeconomic status areas with limited resources correlate with higher chronic stress, blunted cortisol curves, elevated inflammation, and HPA axis dysregulation.

Stephanie: So we know for a fact that environment and and the way, whatever ways stress is produced in environments is, is associated with physiological and biological mechanisms and levers of stress today.

Brent: Why do you hesitate to say people were more stressed in the past? It's 2026 now.

Stephanie: Comparing modern stress to historical stress is misleading because environmental eras differ fundamentally. While specific stressors change, individual cognitive appraisal of those stressors remains the primary driver of the physiological response.

Stephanie: And some of the things that were stressful then will still be stressful. Now. However, our appraisal of those stressors are also different. I find trying to figure out technology every day very stressful, and I know it's a first world problem, but if I was in a different context where that was just not on my mind, but there was something replaced by that, I don't understand why I wouldn't appraise that stressor in a similar way, even though it was completely different.

Stephanie: Rather than comparing across centuries, cross-cultural and cross-national studies comparing developed and developing nations offer more meaningful insights into environmental stress impacts.

Stephanie: Then I want to know that would be stressful for me, right. And I would want to know, does that lead to different kind of levels of, you know, health and well-being? But, you know, from the way back story, I am not convinced that, you know, just because there were different stressors that our level of responses were very different.

Brent: As parents, we recognize that losing a child is an unimaginable tragedy, yet centuries ago high infant mortality made it a common experience. Even as global wealth has risen and poverty has decreased, stress levels remain high.

Brent: I've got I've got young kids. And I'm sure the same is true for you as it is for me, that I can imagine nothing worse in my life than losing a child. I can't I'd rather you make me paralyze, torture me to death. I don't matter losing. I'll take that over. Losing a child. And a couple hundred years ago, 50% of children are not making it to adulthood.

Brent: So, you know, you're having more kids. And losing children is a normal part of life. You're also saying, and I want to I want to get to this in the contemporary context. And that socioeconomic status obviously matters. So when we have less money, we tend to we tend to experience more chronic stress. Well, the world's gotten a lot richer over the last couple hundred years.

This suggests human psychology calibrates stress relative to current baselines. Even as quality of life improves, reported stress remains significant.

Brent: So even as life gets a lot easier, and even as we eradicate disease and we bring more people out of poverty, that we're still experiencing lots of stress, there's something either wrong with that or there's something to learn from that. But it's a surprising finding I would have expected if we were playing like the SIM City and we're like, okay, we're going to take this planet from 1,090% of people in poverty to 10%.

Brent: There's going to be a lot less stress. And maybe what we're finding is that there isn't. And why is that the case? What does that say about us?

Stephanie: A major psychological component of stress is social comparison. Even in wealthier societies, widening income inequality and social disparities drive high stress levels.

Stephanie: International colleagues often wonder why people in wealthy Western nations experience high stress. Social comparison—desiring what others possess—creates significant psychological pressure.

Stephanie: And that is that can be very stressful. But I'm just mentioning one one kind of thing in psychology, we think about there are a lot of other things in personality and development that, you know, cause these differences. You're, you're talking about and stress. And then I, you know, I don't play in the field of, you know, the psychology where, oh, this is what happens when you have kids, but, you know, the psychology that shows how we change over time.

Stephanie: I oh my gosh, you know, the famous psychologist Bassett, he studies stress, too. Like, we have a lot we do not agree on a lot of things and a lot of people don't agree with them all that things. But basically there's also these kind of like genetic changes that happen over time too, that may be able to explain some of this.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Brent: How clearly does socioeconomic status correlate with chronic stress? Is it an inverse relationship where higher income strictly equates to lower stress?

Stephanie: Socioeconomic status encompasses income, education, and social standing. Epidemiological data generally shows higher chronic stress among lower socioeconomic groups.

Stephanie: At the granular level, community factors like social capital and mutual support can keep stress levels low even in lower-income areas.

Stephanie: But again, you have these other factors that are really important. And in this enclave you see social capital. You see people helping each other and supporting each other. So if the mom and dad didn't go to college and grandma didn't go to college, you still see this world in which stress is lower when it should be much higher.

Stephanie: However, self-reported well-being doesn't always translate to better physiological health, as predispositions to conditions like diabetes remain prevalent in certain populations.

Stephanie: So that's not always the answer. But you do see individual differences in communities that have these other kind of resources and rely on these kind of other types of community based resources to kind of mitigate the negative health of stress.

Brent: So high social cohesion in a lower-income neighborhood can offset chronic stress, whereas an isolated middle-income environment might yield higher stress. Is the general trend still higher status equaling lower stress?

Brent: Well, then you actually see less of an impact on chronic stress. But if you're in and maybe if you're in a place that's got it's in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum. But boy, there's no social cohesion. Nobody helps each other out. Well, maybe actually, from a chronic stress perspective, you're worse off, even though purely from a financial perspective you've got a little bit more.

Brent: And so basically it's it's complicated. But would it be directionally true that generally the higher the socioeconomic status, the less chronic stress, the lower the worse?

Stephanie: That is the general epidemiological trend, though notable exceptions exist across genders. For example, high-income men frequently report high levels of professional stress and burnout.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Brent: How do stress patterns differ between men and women on average?

Stephanie: Studies on married couples show that married men generally report lower stress levels than married women. Overall population trends regarding gender and chronic stress remain an active area of study.

Stephanie: I don't really think that we are the field is completely solid on an answer.

Brent: Public health guidance requires actionable recommendations: maintain strong relationships, exercise, sleep, and reduce toxic environments.

Brent: And I think what we lose in that is we're losing the playbook to give to people, which is, hey, look, if you're trying to reduce chronic stress in your life. I'm going to say a whole bunch of stuff that you'll probably be uncomfortable with because it's too it's it doesn't have that caveat, but it's like, I don't know, be married, have kids, get toxic relationships out of your life, exercise this much.

Brent: If you're in a neighborhood that's like, I don't know, it feels dangerous. Try to get out of it, you know, and like it's there is some recipe that we can find in the research that if we were like studying penguins, we'd be totally comfortable saying like, oh, the penguins that have this kind of setup on average longer. There's some exceptions, but they tend to do a little bit better than the penguins that have that set up.

Brent: But somehow when it comes to humans, we got to do like 900 caveats and we lose the message. We lose the like, hey, here's the kind of simple takeaway. Of course, it's not true for everybody, but in general, if you do this, you're going to have a little less chronic stress than if you have that. And so that's my only issue with it.

Stephanie: The core message from stress and cardiovascular researchers is clear: regular exercise, proper nutrition, and 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night significantly mitigate the health risks of stress.

Brent: How does race independently impact chronic stress when isolated from socioeconomic status?

Stephanie: Research indicates race independently predicts stress outcomes. Black individuals frequently exhibit blunted cortisol curves, reflecting impaired HPA axis recovery.

Stephanie: This dysregulation appears across age groups and is linked to the constant systemic presence of historical and contemporary discrimination.

Stephanie: Dr. Arlene Geronimus developed the "weathering hypothesis," demonstrating that chronic exposure to social and economic disadvantage accelerates physiological decline in marginalized populations regardless of income.

Stephanie: Weathering reflects systemic disparities encoded into bodily health over time.

Stephanie: While structural policy changes are needed to eliminate disparities, my research focuses on practical coping mechanisms individuals can use to protect their health.

Stephanie: But also, you know, like in another three years working with policymakers and stuff to see, you know, what we can do to like decrease the disparities. Yes. I hope that was better than it depends on in terms of an answer.

Brent: At a population level, race remains a significant independent factor alongside socioeconomic status in predicting chronic stress and physiological weathering.

Brent: Appalachia has more chronic stress than you know, I don't know, Tribeca, Jay-Z or a wealthy, wealthy black guy in Tribeca. But maybe I don't know, the wealthy white guy in Tribeca versus the wealthy black guy. The wealthy black guy has more chronic stress than the wealthy white guy because of these these issues that you're describing, or am I thinking about it in the wrong way?

Stephanie: Perception, social norms, and internalized expectations (such as feeling the need to work significantly harder) contribute to how stress is biological encoded across racial groups.

Stephanie: which disparities get kind of encoded into our bodies. And then it's this nature versus nurture thing. And so and, you know, like a lot of people don't talk about it. I don't talk about it in my work. It's not like a popular thing, but like, I really think we need to come back to this whole social comparison thing, because I think that that also has something to do with it, like, why can't I have that?

Stephanie: And I want to work hard to do that. Like I grew up knowing that I had to work three times harder to get the same thing as someone that didn't look like me. Right. And so even if it's not true, like it's stressful, that that is what we believe that we have to do. And that's just an example, right?

Stephanie: Combining lower socioeconomic status with racial discrimination compounds these health impacts significantly.

Stephanie: But when you put the two together. Yeah, that's a big effect. Yeah, that's a pretty big effect.

Brent: Social comparison and envy can induce strong stress responses even when one's objective quality of life is high.

Brent: He's been there for a couple of years. He's going to make some absurd amount of money. And I'm like tossing, like feeling really bad about myself that like, I'm not that person. And why isn't that me? And what I would be able to do if I were that person? And it's ridiculous because if I wake, if I look around, I've got a good life.

Brent: But, you know, here I am comparing and in this like, envy jealousy thing.

Stephanie: Social comparison is an important psychological lens for understanding individual variations in stress response.

Stephanie: And, you know, these are their circumstances. And, you know, if you really dig into it, you know, there is personality, there is genetics. But, you know, in terms of thinking more psychologically, I think social comparison is something we really need to take a look at. Right?

Brent: Social comparison likely served an evolutionary purpose in hierarchical competition, though it often causes unnecessary psychological strain today.

Brent: And so it does seem to make sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though it's fairly unnecessary today.

Stephanie: So is it unnecessary number one. And number two, evolutionary psychology. That was the word I was looking for.

Stephanie: No, you found it.

Brent: What emerging areas in stress research excite you most looking decades ahead?

Stephanie: My current research examines digital stress weathering—how online environments and algorithms induce stress that becomes biological encoded. This represents a key frontier in public health as technology and AI continue evolving.

Stephanie: And I think that in terms of stress research, this is kind of the next frontier. I am a proponent, I think that AI is here to stay. So in terms of, you know, researchers, we need to get on that bandwagon and kind of understand how it produces or reproduces or changes the ways in which people, different populations kind of experience stress.

Stephanie: And then what that means for our long term health and well-being.

Brent: Social media feeds frequently induce stress and social comparison, making that research highly relevant.

Brent: You know, like feeling bad about my life. Like, I don't need to. I don't need to. Who cares what's happening in Monaco? I don't need to see that. I've got my wife, I've got my kids.

Stephanie: Algorithmic content delivery amplifies these stress patterns continuously.

Brent: Doctor Stephanie Cook, thank you for sharing your expertise and time with us today.

Stephanie: Thank you so much.

Brent: The Life Lab by Death Clock is recorded in Boulder, Colorado, and San Francisco, California. Produced by Patrick Godinho, music by Patrick Lee, and hosted by Brent Franson, founder and CEO of Death Clock.