Get 80% off Stress and Your Body with our The Great Courses coupon

Stress is such an integral part of our lives. It seeps in from seemingly every direction; stress from work, stress from the kids, even stress from standing in line at the grocery store. Stress can even come from a good thing, like a child's baseball game, a movie, or a football game.

Some stress isn't just from our social environment. Stress, in it's physical form, can be from disease. Stress that your body goes under from having cancer, arthritis, COPD, or Sickle Cell Anemia. These conditions put an undo amount of stress on our body.

What does this stress do to our body as a whole?

That's what this amazing course, Stress and Your Body, talks about.

Professor Robert Sapolsky who is a professor at Standford University narrates and manages this course.

Professor Robert Sapolsky is an authority on the subject. He works in the field -- he even studies the ongoing effects of stress in baboons in Kenya.

Some of the highlights for me in this course was how stress and chronic pain interact. Professor Sapolsky went into fine detail about the pathways of pain and how acute pain works and how it can become chronic pain. As a chronic pain sufferer, it was very enlightening to see just how my condition set into my body. My only caveat about the 30 minute lecture was if he knew how to fix it! However, that's not his fault, he is here to talk about how stress effects the body, not how to fix it. I'm just always looking!

I also found very interesting the particular lecture on Stress and Your Immune System. This one really fascinated me as I am a nurse and one of the neurosurgeons I worked with had stated he believed glioblastomas could be due to the immune system causing chronic inflammation that then caused tumors, tumors like what you see in glioblastoma.

The research presented in the lecture by Professor Saplosky was amazing. He went into detail about how inflammation can be created by an immune response and how the whole system can go haywire. I thought he spoke about the topic in easy to understand language. The most interesting part of his lecture was about how the inflammatory response needs a recovery time, and the response can bottom out and not return to baseline. He stated this is why steroids helped because it's not so much about getting rid of the inflammation, but returning the body to a baseline.

There are 24 lectures to this series and ever one is loaded with excellent information. Feel free to pick and choose which ones interest you the most. What I can say, is that they are all very interesting.

Stress effects all of us. Take this opportunity, from The Great Courses coupon, to learn how stress effects your body, for 80% off. Learn just how important it is to lower the stress in your life and apply that knowledge to lowering your stress and improving your overall health.

To learn more, go to http://wwwgreatcourses.livejournal.com.