Stress: Firdaus Dhabhar at TEDxHayward

Dr. Dhabhar is Associate Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the Cancer Institute, Immunology Institute, and Neuroscience Program at Stanford. He was the first to discover mechanisms by which short-term stress enhances the body's defenses to increase protection during a fight-or-flight response. His laboratory investigates how fight-or-flight stress can have beneficial effects, while chronic stress has harmful effects on immune function and health. He has proposed that the fight-or-flight response, "good" stress, is Mother Nature's fundamental but under-appreciated survival system, and is working on harnessing this system clinically to promote health and healing. In contrast, the laboratory also studies long-term, "bad" stress, which can have numerous deleterious effects on health. The Dhabhar laboratory investigates molecular, cellular, and physiological mechanisms that mediate the effects of "good" and "bad" stress in the context of skin and breast cancer, vaccines, surgery, and circadian rhythms.

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