Look at animals in captivity in general. Even when all of their needs are taken with, many of them cannot deal with the stress of unusual environments.

Humans are not bad at dealing with stress. Humans create these scenarios that actually lead to us having a lot more stresses than most other animals come up and for the most part we deal with those scenarios fairly well. We are actually super adapted to dealing with stress compared to most organisms.

We are bad at dealing with the chronic stress of working/commuting every day, having not enough sleep every day, seeing scary news every day etc. We are good at dealing with the acute stress of dangerous situations that last for minutes, not weeks, months and years.

Hunter gathers probably spent a few hours a day hunting and/or gathering and the rest of their time sitting around a fire, processing their food, making and repairing clothes, telling each other what happened while they were out hunting, teaching kids how to make tools, and playing with dogs. They had to work very hard, and it wasn't idyllic, but it also wasn't constantly stressful. Facing down a charging mammoth or lion is something your stress response is perfectly equipped to handle. Going to your job every day and overworking yourself while you're sick because you can't afford to take time off and worrying about whether your paycheck will cover this month's rent and what you'll have to do if it doesn't is from an evolutionary perspective an outside context problem.

If you watch interviews with people that spent time with hunter gatherer tribes that still exist today, you'll see that they don't really have stress like we do. They are just happy people. They can't imagine why anyone would ever hurt themselves or unalive themselves. The reason we're all stressed is that we were not designed to worry about modern day problems.

Our stress response should be triggered for short periods. People who live in constant stress however, thats a significant issue.

Humans are very good at dealing with stress, especially when you compare to other animals. Looking at you, giraffe.

However, large parts of human society is actually built on the assumption that, by and large, humanity will rise to the challenge. We push everything to its limit, then pick up the pieces and make adjustments when it breaks. Why? Because that's what the previous winners did, and we are all descendants of winners.

Of course, some won bigger than others...

Humans are well adapted to short term stress aka fight or flight response. But we aren't evolved to deal with prolonged stress since reasons causing it don't exist in nature.

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