Ch. 1 review PDF

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Chapter 1 review....

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Levi Moellering Chapter 1 1/27/15 Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Content: The author does a fine job at tying the reader into the story with the first chapter, he makes a lot of valid points that the reader can connect with. As I read this first chapter it got me interested to see what stress in my life causes, and I was able to relate to both a lion who is starving for food and with the zebra at times being chased. It was cool to see how anything and everything we do in our lives causing stress, and our body reacts to this internal change. I was surprised with that fact that most of the time we get sick is due to stress, I always knew I felt more weak but I didn’t know the affects that stress can actually do to your body. When the author tied stress with homeostasis I knew this was getting somewhere and going to relate to physiology. Our bodies often go through stress and create an acute physical crisis, or more so a psychological and social disruption. Although we cause this on ourselves, our body does however have a physiological response mechanism to fight back against this and to maintain homeostasis. Homeostasis in our body is composed of a stressor and a stress response, the stressor is anything that stops our body from being in homeostasis whereas the stress response is the bodies’ job to reestablish homeostasis. Even the aspect of anticipation can cause a change in homeostasis and cause our bodies to feel stressed. A good example the author used, was the zebra seeing a lion in the distance and the zebra begins to anticipate what will happen next. This anticipation starts getting the body ready for whatever is about to happen. Hans Selye was the first to begin to test stress and the factors of stress related disease. This man had some pretty interesting tests, he was not very neat with his work, most experiment he did was with mice. These mice would be dropped, kicked, running around the lab for most of the day, then Mr. Selye began to take note in the disease the rodents began to show, this was later termed stress related disease. Critical Analysis: The claims made by the author in the first chapter are correct and the physiologic information is accurate. I can experience for myself that the first couple pages are true, that late nights when you can’t sleep your mind begins to tell the rest of your body that it doesn’t feel good. This is seen as a common outlet to get out of something and a well-used excuse. When he writes about the stress response and ties it to the zebra running away from the hungry lion and how the response the zebra feels is able to give it a large amount of energy for rapid movement to escape. For a zebra to escape a lion’s reach they need to be able to think fast and move even faster, the stress response and anticipation can be accredited for this. When the author writes about the immune system and its correlation to homeostasis, he shares insight that I never thought of that way. He was correct when he said that the immune system is shut down then our body is stressed, since we need the energy elsewhere. This is why stress for long periods of time can cause us to be sick, like during finals weak when students are cramming and feeling stressed the immune system stops working and the energy is converted elsewhere to try and lower the stress. The immune system is not the only function that shuts down when our body is stressed, I thought he made a funny point when a zebra is running away from a lion the zebra does not need to be worrying

about digesting his breakfast or even thinking about reproducing, both of these functions during this time of stress response will shut down and convert all that energy into a rapid movement of energy for the zebra to out run the lion. These facts are all true and accurate. Another part that was accurate regarding physiological information the author said was in regards to pain levels. When you are in a stressed state of mind your body’s natural instinct is to numb the pain so your body can continue to function. The example he used was for military men, if someone was shot in battle, the soldier will keep moving forward and think nothing of it, if he saw the blood he would assume that the blood was from another person. In the battle field the soldier does not have time to react to being shot and go into shock in that moment, so the body to compensate will numb the pain until the body is no longer in shock. This is scene in many sports where an athlete doesn’t realize until after the game that his finger or leg is broken. Reflection: When I began to read this I was really bored and a little annoyed with the author. I was unable to at first follow his train of thought and where he was trying to get to, so I started to re-read it from the beginning a later day. Finally I was able to understand his references to the zebra and lion. I really found the facts about the stressor and stress response interesting, especially in correlation with the lions and zebras. Another point I thought about a lot was the immune system and other systems shutting down to cope with the stress and that is how are body maintains homeostasis. The reading only affected me on a knowledge level, nothing really I can change about myself about stress, I just now know more of what my body is doing internally. I know the side effects to stress, so controlling my stress is one thing I will be working on more after reading this chapter. This first chapter definitely caught my attention and I look forward to seeing what else there is to know about stress and maintaining homeostasis. I think it is great how our body does this without us even knowing it, the whole process is involuntary. For entire chapter there was never a point when I disagreed with the author, while I was reading I was fascinated with the correlation he made between the zebra and starving lion, that definitely kept my attention....