🦓 Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers…But Teachers Might
A Teacher’s Take on Robert Sapolsky’s Classic Book About Stress. Teaching can be one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. It can also absolutely wear you out. Both things can be true. That’s one reason Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers feels surprisingly relevant to education, even though it wasn’t written specifically for teachers. First published in 1994 and substantially revised for its third edition in 2004, the book explores what happens when the body’s stress response, which is incredibly useful during a short-term emergency, keeps getting activated by psychological and chronic stress. Sapolsky covers everything from sleep and memory to anxiety, depression, cardiovascular health, immunity, and coping. And somewhere between the zebras, hormones, baboons, and biology, I kept coming back to one thought:
This sounds an awful lot like working in a school.
🦓 So…Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers?
The basic premise behind the title is wonderfully simple. Imagine you’re a zebra. A lion starts chasing you. Your body responds immediately. Heart rate goes up. Energy becomes available. Systems that aren’t particularly important to surviving the next five minutes get pushed aside. At that moment, stress is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Run now. Digest lunch later.
But assuming the zebra escapes, something important happens.
The emergency ends.
Humans have essentially the same stress-response machinery, but we have one spectacularly inconvenient addition:
We can think about things that aren’t happening right now.
We can anticipate tomorrow. Replay yesterday. Imagine what could go wrong next week. Sapolsky’s central argument is that humans can activate physiological stress responses because of psychological stressors, and repeatedly doing so over long periods can take a toll on the body. A zebra needs a lion. A teacher sometimes just needs to open their email.
🍎 Schools Are Full of Little Lions
Most educators aren’t spending every day dealing with one enormous crisis. It’s often the accumulation of little things. A student needs help. Someone needs coverage. There’s a meeting. A parent emails. The copier jams. The Wi-Fi quits. There’s paperwork. Someone needs data. A deadline changed. A student is struggling. Another initiative is introduced. There’s a new platform everyone needs to learn. Someone stops you in the hallway with something that will “only take a minute.” And somewhere underneath all of that is the actual reason you came to work:
The students.
None of these individual things necessarily creates burnout. But pile enough of them together, day after day, without enough opportunity to recover? That’s different. And that’s where Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers starts feeling less like an interesting science book and more like something educators should probably be talking about.
🧠 The School Day Ends. The Stress Doesn’t Always.
One of the stranger things about working in education is how easy it is to physically leave work without actually leaving work. You’re driving home thinking about a student. You’re eating dinner thinking about tomorrow. You’re lying in bed remembering something you forgot. You’re checking email because it will “only take a second.” Sometimes we’re reacting to things that haven’t even happened yet.
What if tomorrow’s meeting goes badly?
What am I going to do about that student?
How am I going to finish everything this week?
The lion isn’t actually chasing us anymore. But our brains can be remarkably talented at keeping the chase going. Sapolsky devotes substantial attention to psychological stress and its relationship to sleep, memory, depression, personality and coping, which makes the book especially interesting when viewed through the lens of a profession where the mental workload routinely extends beyond the workday.
🔥 This Isn’t Another “Remember Your Why” Speech
Here’s where conversations about teacher stress sometimes lose me. We acknowledge that educators are overwhelmed and then immediately start talking about resilience. Practice mindfulness. Find balance. Take care of yourself. Remember your why. Have you tried breathing? Maybe there’s pizza in the teachers’ room. None of those things is inherently bad. Pizza is innocent in all of this. But sometimes an educator doesn’t need another lesson on becoming better at tolerating an unreasonable situation.
Sometimes the situation needs to change.
If people are drowning in unnecessary paperwork, the answer isn’t a breathing exercise. If every new initiative gets added while nothing gets removed, that’s not simply a personal wellness problem. If technology creates more work instead of reducing it, maybe we’re using technology badly. If employees routinely feel guilty about leaving work unfinished when the workload was impossible to finish in the first place, perhaps we should question the workload too.
Not every problem can be solved by asking educators to become more resilient.
🪞 But Here’s the Uncomfortable Other Half
Not every lion comes from administration, the district, the state, parents, students, or “the system.”
Sometimes we create our own.
That’s harder to talk about. We answer an email tonight that could have waited until tomorrow. We spend an hour perfecting something that was perfectly acceptable 40 minutes ago. We say yes when we really should say no. We take responsibility for things that aren’t entirely ours to carry. We treat everything as equally urgent. And sometimes we allow work to occupy our thoughts long after we’ve left the building. I know. It’s much more satisfying when everything is somebody else’s fault. Unfortunately, human brains refuse to make things that convenient. Sapolsky doesn’t argue that humans can simply choose not to experience stress. His discussion is much more nuanced, looking at factors such as control, predictability, social support, coping, and how differently individuals respond to stress.
That leaves educators with some worthwhile questions.
Which stressors can I control?
Which can’t I control?
What can I eliminate?
What can I simplify?
What am I carrying that isn’t actually mine?
And maybe the biggest one:
When the lion is gone, can I stop running?
❤️ You Can Love Education and Admit That It’s Hard
I think education needs more room for this conversation. You can love teaching and occasionally hate being a teacher. You can care deeply about your students and still be frustrated with the system surrounding them. You can believe education is incredibly important while also believing parts of the profession desperately need to change. You can be grateful for your career and still wonder whether you want to do the exact same thing forever.
Those aren’t contradictions.
They’re reality. And pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. Being positive about education shouldn’t require us to ignore what’s difficult. I’d rather acknowledge the problems and ask:
What can we actually make better?
💡 What Can Educators Take From the Zebra?
I’m not interested in turning Sapolsky’s book into another “5 Easy Ways to Eliminate Stress!” article. Stress isn’t disappearing.
Teaching matters precisely because some of the things educators deal with are important.
But I do think there are lessons here. We can get better at recognizing unnecessary stress. We can protect recovery time. We can stop treating every task as an emergency. We can build stronger boundaries. We can use technology and AI to remove repetitive work instead of adding more work. We can support colleagues. We can ask for help. We can sometimes accept good enough instead of demanding perfect. And school leaders can participate too. They can protect people’s time. Remove unnecessary work. Communicate priorities clearly. Listen. Recognize initiative overload. And perhaps occasionally, before adding something new, ask the revolutionary question:
“What are we going to stop doing?”
Imagine the chaos. 😂
📚 Is Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Worth Reading?
Yes, especially if you’re interested in why stress affects us the way it does.
But know what you’re getting. This isn’t a breezy little self-help book telling you to take a bubble bath and think positive thoughts. The third edition runs about 560 pages and gets into real biology and physiology. Sapolsky explores stress in relation to metabolism, immunity, pain, memory, sleep, aging, depression, anxiety, personality, socioeconomic status and more before eventually turning toward managing stress. That scientific depth is also what makes the book worthwhile. It helps explain why prolonged stress matters instead of simply telling us that stress is bad. And Sapolsky manages to make some very complicated science remarkably approachable, often with humor. For educators, though, I think the greatest value might be the reflection the book prompts. It made me think less about eliminating stress and more about recovery, boundaries, control, workload, and which stressors we’ve simply accepted as normal.
🦓 One Last Thought
Maybe the goal isn’t to create stress-free schools. That’s probably impossible. Schools are filled with people, after all, and people remain an astonishingly effective source of complications. Maybe the better goal is creating schools where stress isn’t permanent. Where difficult days can end. Where educators can care deeply without carrying everything. Where technology reduces workload rather than increasing it. Where leaders recognize that employee wellness is partly about individual choices and partly about the systems people work within. And where leaving work sometimes means actually leaving work. Sapolsky’s zebra experiences enormous stress. But eventually, if it escapes the lion, it stops running.
Maybe there’s something educators can learn from that. 🦓❤️
📖 Read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Copingis available in print and digital formats. The current third edition was published by Holt Paperbacks.
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