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    hum

    status, and you reduce his hypertension.134   Primatologist Robert Sapolsky of

    Stanford University studied the level of glucocorticoids--stress

    hormones--among baboons in Kenya's Masai Game Reserve.  He discovered

    that the hormone level was low in males who had a high social position.  But

    stress hormones were alarmingly high in males who were low in the pecking

    order.  The bottom-ranking males stooped when they walked, had

    bedraggled fur, showed signs of emotional misery, and were in abysmal

    health.  These baboon lackeys were suffering from a pecking order slump

    like the one that is overtaking America.135

    Stress is not a product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary.  From

    1979 to 1982, researchers at the University of Chicago attempted to discover

    the differences between high-pressure executives who become sick and those

    who do not.  The low-illness executives turned out to be strong in three

    areas: commitment, control and challenge.136  In other words, humans need to

    vigorously pursue goals, to wrestle with problems and to master them.  They

    need much of what has been popularly interpreted as stress.

    No wonder Dr. Hans Selye, the pioneering scientist who almost

    single-handedly put stress on the map, says, "Stress is not something to be

    avoided. ...Complete freedom from stress is death."137

    Excessive relaxation is a slow form of suicide.  Take the most primitive,

    physical level.  If you fail to use your organs, your body begins to dispose of

    them.  The phenomenon shows up clearly among women who don't bother

    to exercise.  Internal mechanisms slow the deposit of fresh calcium in the

    skeletal structure.  The result: women who haven't exercised their skeletal

    frame begin to lose it.  In their sixties, these women actually begin to

    shrink.138

    As we saw earlier, unused muscles atrophy and shrivel away.

    The consequences of inactivity are worst for infants.  When babies--be

    they chimps, mice or humans--do not receive sufficient sensory stimulation,

    their neural circuitry fails to develop.  Their brains should be thickly meshed

      ans, for example, is low position in a social order.  Raise a human's

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