Back to a term, I guarantee you had an ninth grade biology with any look you have not thought about this word since then. Do you remember homeostasis? Homeostasis is having an ideal body temperature and ideal level of glucose in the bloodstream, having an ideal everything being in homeostatic balance. A stressor is anything in the outside world that knocks you out of homeostatic balance. You're some zebra and a lion is leapt out and ripped your stomach open and you're inner-dragging in the dust and you still need to get out of there. This counts as being out of homeostatic balance. Or you are that lion who's half starved to death and if you manage to chase something down to eat, you're not going to survive the night a short term physical crisis. The stress response is what you do with your body. You secrete adrenaline and 11-D other hormones I won't torture you with. The stress response reestablishes homeostatic balance. That's all you need to know about the subject if you're a zebra or a lion. If you're human though, you've got to expand the definition in a very critical way. Which is among us, some of the time we turn on the stress response because we've had a challenge at homeostatic balance and all of that sort of thing. But some of the time we turn on the stress response because we think we're just about to be stressed. If it turns out that you're right, hooray for you. Here comes the elephant. You don't have to wait to be stomped by it before increasing your blood pressure. You can have an anticipatory stress response which is great. On the other hand, if you think that way all the time and you're constantly assuming that there are stressors coming that do not really exist, we have technical terms for you. You're being neurotic as hell. You're being anxious. You're being paranoid. You're being hostile. You're being profoundly human. Sit down a pippo and try to describe what the prime lending rate is and just have no idea what you're talking about. But we do. And that's the central concept in the whole field. We cognitively, socially sophisticated primates turn on the exact same stress response as does that zebra running for its life or a lion running for a meal and we turn it on for purely psychological reasons. We turn it on with memories, with emotions, with thoughts. And the whole punchline is, is that's not what it evolved for. What stresses like for 99% of the beast on this planet is three minutes of screaming terror in the savannah, after which it's either over with or the euro for with. And what do we do? We turn on the identical stress response for 30-year mortgages. And that's where you begin to get the wear and terror in the system.