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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we review past issues to find the most effective and practical scientific tools for mental, physical health, and productivity. I'm Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. And now to my conversation with Dr. Elissa Epel. Doctor Epel, I congratulate you. Thank you. Very glad to see you here. I would like to start by having you explain a little about the different forms of stress. You know, we hear: stress is bad, stress can kill us, no one likes to feel stress, etc. But, as we both know, that's not the whole picture. So I'd like you to enlighten us a little bit about what stress is and what it isn't, where it becomes a problem and where it might even be
beneficial. Mhm. As a stress researcher, I use this word a lot, but it needs to be unpacked because it has so many different dimensions and meanings. So, there is good and bad stress, acute and chronic, and technically it means any time when we feel overwhelmed, when the demands exceed our resources. This is a fairly technical definition, but in reality, a large part of life is about overcoming challenges, and we will never be free from stressful situations. On the contrary, there are more and more of them. So it's not really about the stressors themselves or what happens to us, but how we respond-our stress response. So when something happens, we trigger a stress response and then we recover. That's
great, no harm done. We need this. We are still alive because of this survival response. The problem today is that we continue to keep it in our heads. We support her with our thoughts. Our thoughts are the most common form of stress. In your opinion, what is the best way or methods to deal with overthinking and dwelling on stressful topics? Should we work with them, trying to rationalize or understand the cause of the stress, or should we distract our thoughts? I would divide this into three, um, three categories. So, first, we have to understand how our minds work, otherwise we will simply become hostages to our thoughts, believing them to be real. We tend to think that constantly " ruminating" on problems helps,
because we are used to focusing on everything that seems like a threat or risk to us and trying to solve it. But you can get stuck in this threat mode or " red mind" state for the whole day, and it's a real bummer. We don't need to constantly turn on the stress response, but that's exactly the state we are in as a society. We are so used to the daily stress of urban and modern life that we simply don't notice it anymore. We are used to this. And so we go through the day with our fists clenched, and, you know, for the listeners: try to listen to yourself right now and notice how you might be holding stress in your body.
This is a huge clue. This is the place where we accumulate the most tension. So, we may not realize we are stressed, but our hands are clenched. So, returning to the concept of overthinking: what tools are most effective for dealing with this or with intrusive thoughts when people ca n't seem to let go of a stressor? I don't mean the stress itself in the body, but what caused it-a difficult conversation or something that irritated them. I would like to give one answer, but I will say that there are many strategies for this. There are three categories: the first is mindfulness strategies, thoughts, and beliefs that we can use to relieve stress and begin to perceive it more positively. The second category is not a change of body through
mind, but a change of mind through body. These are the strategies you use most often, right? We remove stress from the body, metabolize it, "burn it," and this brings relief. This changes the activity of the amygdala and puts us in a more sensory state where the somatosensory cortex is activated. The third category is a change of scenery: simply escaping all the stress triggers that are in the office or city and being in an environment that calms us. It could even be a corner of your home where you place what I call safety cues: pets, photos, pleasant smells, or music. When we talk about stress, it becomes clear that it can be short-term, medium-term, and long-term. You've studied all these different forms of stress. If you would be so kind as to
just give us an overview of the different forms of stress, how we can learn to recognize them, fill our minds with knowledge about stress in all its, um, beautiful and, um, not so When we think about stress, we usually mean feeling stress, you know, reporting it, and that's important. What our bodies do is also important, and it's not always connected to our minds. So measuring the levels of the nervous system and how alert we are is another way to understand stress. And this is especially important and interesting because this is how stress gets under the skin, and we may not realize it. We may not feel stressed, but we still remain tense and under greater influence of the sympathetic nervous system, meaning our body is alert and looking for signals, and we do not feel
safe. And so we mobilize much more energy than we need. And stress is very expensive for the body. The stress response uses up huge amounts of ATP energy, which is produced by our mitochondria. And if this heightened stress response continues all day, we will simply feel exhausted. And we don't necessarily feel threatened enough to release a lot of cortisol, but our nervous system is activated throughout the day. Then there are moderate stressful events that you may have to deal with for days or months. And it's important to notice: am I really having an acute reaction to something right now, or can I recover? So this daily renewal is very important. And then there are chronically stressful situations that last for years.
Many of us, not all of us, but many of us, have such situations in our lives. These are situations, I will give as an example caregiving for others, that we cannot change. other people, we cannot change certain circumstances or resources. We can think about them, constantly problem-solve, wish things were different, or we can use acceptance, radical acceptance strategies, and other methods to live with them with dignity. This is a very important strategy for people who feel like their lives will be stressful forever because of one thing or another. You can actually manage uncontrolled chronic stress in a way that doesn't cause as much damage to your body. I study chronic stress and how it accelerates cellular aging, and I can say that there
is a big difference between people. People are so different. So, among the caregivers, some appear biologically as young or even younger than our control group- people who have not had any serious hardships in their lives. In one of your articles, you distinguish between optimal, typical, and accelerated aging. How to measure the difference between optimal and accelerated aging? And why, exactly, is a certain level of stress better than none when it comes to aging? The absence of stress means we are not really living. It's as if we're not participating in the gifts of life, which inevitably bring with them challenges and risks. Let me give you an example.
One study involved retired elderly people, whom society supposedly labels as having already fulfilled their important mission and being almost incapable of being of any use. That is, there are so many negative stereotypes that people then subconsciously perceive and begin to respond to them. This program involved them working in schools, where they became mentors for at- risk students. And here's what happened to them: they went from a state of relative safety and lack of stress to a sense of challenge, but at the same time creative productivity. They began to feel more meaning in life. They felt they were growing and that their days were filled with meaning. They developed caring relationships with their students. During this study, scientists took images of
the hippocampus, and it turned out that those who participated in the program, especially men, experienced hippocampal growth. So, at any stage of life, we can develop, challenge ourselves even in old age, and grow our brains. Do you know better than anyone what this growth of the hippocampus means for their well-being and cognitive function? I even wonder if it's similar to exercise, because most people, I hope, now understand that exercise lowers blood pressure, lowers resting heart rate improves muscle condition and bone density. But if you take a snapshot of the body's reaction during exercise, the pressure will be very high. The heart rate will also be significantly increased. The level of stress hormones will simply go off scale.
Cortisol increases dramatically during and immediately after intense exercise. And yet, this triggers a series of adaptation processes that in most cases lead to a better outcome. Is there evidence that short-term stress, provided we are able to manage it-that is, we don't spend the next 24-48 hours dwelling on it, but are able to move through it and resolve the issue-is actually beneficial to us by mobilizing energy reserves and perhaps even changing our threshold for responding to future stressors? We know, as you said, that physical stressors, if they are short and repetitive, like high-intensity interval training, contribute not only to aerobic endurance, but also to stress tolerance.
People are less prone to obsessive thoughts, suffer less from depression and anxiety. So they are tuning their nervous system in a certain way. What about psychological stressors? We know two things. First, I believe that a certain level of interaction with moderate stressors, when we become accustomed to them, makes us stronger and increases stress tolerance, meaning we perceive them as less of a threat. Two people may face the same stressor, but one will have an exaggerated stress response, as if their survival were threatened.
Cortisol levels and vasoconstriction are high, blood pressure rises in both, but in a person who feels a strong threat to their own survival or social status, ego, the pressure rises precisely because of the narrowing of the blood vessels. Another person perceives the same stressor as a challenge that they can handle. This is a great opportunity and a serious challenge. I have everything I need for this. Such thoughts generate a different hemodynamic response, which actually leads to a greater cardiac output. So, the pressure increases, but in a healthier way: better oxygenation of the brain and more effective problem solving.
These people are able to maintain a positive attitude. We have measured the response to threat and challenge in many laboratory studies and know a lot of interesting things. If you answer the call more often, you end up with less inflammation. In the laboratory, we see that within an hour or two, the body does not trigger this entire inflammatory response. Additionally, their telomeres are usually longer, which we can talk about in more detail, but essentially it looks like they age more slowly. So, to simplify, we could call these two types of psychological responses to stress. Feeling threatened, like you will fail or be disgraced. We know this reaction to social pain well, and it's a terrible feeling. But also this powerful stress response,
where we feel it in our stomach and our heart is jumping out of our chest. This is simply an exaggerated, overreaction. This reaction is biologically different, the thoughts that accompany it are also different, and we recover much more slowly. And then there is the "call" reaction, which is more like a kind of activated, excited state. And the great thing is that there are many studies by psychologists who study the emotions and social aspects that predispose people to respond to " challenge." We can actually help to create this response to the challenge. So when you asked: is it beneficial to have a repetitive stress response? Yes, if it is controllable, right? Then we seem to be building stress resistance muscles. So
what can we-including myself -do to tune into this "challenge" response? Does it depend solely on thinking? For example, instead of saying, " Why me?" Why is this? Why now? "I can't believe this is happening." Is this a mental turn to, "Okay, this is a great opportunity for growth. I don't know how I'm going to handle this, but I will. " If you want to stop me, you'll have to kill me." This is the type of thinking. Is this the same switch that the body follows? The whole secret is that people need to find those " affirmative phrases," "stress shields," as I call them, that suit them personally, feel right, and that they believe in. Be a
lion, not a gazelle. So, the lion and the gazelle have high blood pressure, severe stress, the lion chases the gazelle, but the gazelle has a full vasoconstriction response to the threat, because it could die. The lion can get dinner, right? So he needs to activate the stress response because he's so excited to get a delicious dinner for the next few days. So, the lion has a "challenge" reaction. So we can remind ourselves: be a lion. We are not always a lion or a gazelle, we can shape that. There are many strategies, and you should use what works for you. Tell yourself, "I can do this, I will get through this, I have what it takes." These are all great shields. And, you know, some of us get really worried about stress itself. For example, when
we feel our heart beating faster, we think, "Oh no, this is hurting me." So, instead of stressing for the sake of stress, we should remind ourselves that this stress response gives us strength. This will help me cope. My body is excited. My body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do right now. So this reframing, in the research of Wendy Mendez and my other colleagues who are doing this reframing, has essentially taught people to see stress as a positive. People perform better in stressful situations in the laboratory They work better. They experience more positive emotions. They are better problem solvers.
They recover faster. So, this is pretty powerful stuff. I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the other health indicators that you've been researching. There is a graph in one of your articles. This is a 2018 article by Picard. It essentially describes the connection between mitochondrial health and mood in the context of people who have different types of mood predispositions. Could you just describe the general features of this study and some of the points that you find most interesting. Yes, we've done these in-depth studies where we look at people who are under a lot of daily stress, caregivers. And then we look at, you know, regular people,
parents of neurotypical children, who still have a lot of stress. But then we ask, you know, do people under chronic stress have accelerated aging? So we look at telomeres, epigenetics, mitochondrial health. And what then explains those who look really good, who look resilient and don't look vulnerable? So, we can learn what the secret to success in their day is that protects them from chronic stress. So Martin Picard, a colleague of mine who was obsessed with mitochondrial health as a way to understand both stress and, indeed, health and disease, developed a way to measure mitochondrial health in people. We can measure a bunch of enzymes and then adjust that based on the number of mitochondria we have. So we have this very good indicator that we
can get from the blood. And in this study of young mothers who had either typical children or children with autism, we found that the caregiver mothers had significantly lower, suppressed mitochondrial activity. This means they can't produce as much energy. So if they feel more exhausted due to chronic stress, we know why. It was quite dramatic. And, as noted, some of these low levels even looked like people had genetic reasons for low mitochondrial activity. But that's the beauty of that study. We can then look at their day, at their mood, and ask, "Well, what about the caregivers who have really great mitochondrial enzymes and thus should be producing a lot of ATP?
" "They experienced more positive emotions both upon waking and in the evening, but especially in the evening. And what's interesting about all these stress and mood diaries is that one of the important factors for long-term health is how positive you feel in the evening. So, especially on a stressful day. So, at the end of a busy day, can you find a sense of satisfaction, peace, confidence, joy within yourself? Do you have any of these, or has stress completely drained your positivity? People who experience less negativity or more positivity tend to have better health outcomes in the future. That is, decades later, this means less depression, less heart disease,
and a lower chance of premature death. That's why we pay so much attention to our daily mood. Our study found that daily mood was quite closely related to mitochondrial levels on that particular day. Then we measured mood a few days after that, and the correlation was much weaker. This is only our first study, but it suggests that our mitochondria are sensitive to our thoughts and feelings, presumably on a daily basis. So, for those of us who are chronically stressed- stress because a close relative is battling a terminal illness, or because we can't get out of a situation where we don't have full power to remove the stressor- radical acceptance of this fact can translate into the realization, "Okay, but there are tools that can help us not only
mitigate the negative health effects, but perhaps even thrive in these circumstances." "Essentially, turning what initially seemed like a curse into a blessing, at least from a biological perspective." What do we know about the best methods for mitigating these essentially unavoidable stressors? Mhm. I think it partly depends on how we perceive life and our purpose in it. What is this game that we are known to be in from birth? Even the very thought that bad things shouldn't happen makes us vulnerable, makes us feel like a victim, and prevents us from accepting what has already happened. So, let's stop for a moment and ask everyone who's listening: is there a situation in your life that you don't want and can't change?
How much time do you spend thinking about this? The more we try to solve problems, worry, or simply wish things were different, the more we create a state of chronic stress. So, just taking a step back to look at what situations in my life are causing me stress, and which ones can I cross out because I can't change them? The very realization that this is not going to go away is extremely powerful, because we can, as they say, put this burden aside and give ourselves relief and freedom from the enormous space it occupies in our minds and bodies. And this is not a one-time action, it is a practice. is something we practice over and over again to loosen the grip of unwanted situations, to stop allowing them to control our well-being and occupy our mental space-our
precious attention. I'm an expert at this because I take care of the patient myself. And I often have to switch from wanting to change the situation or trying to resolve it to a radical acceptance of the fact that everything is just the way it is now . By reminding yourself that there is freedom in this, that there are things you can do, you can actually live a better life, despite these circumstances. So let me tell you what we discovered in our guardians. We measured where their thoughts were in the evening. We would send them a signal and ask, "In the last 5 minutes, how much did you wish things were different?" "How much were you engaged and focused on what you were doing right before our signal?" And just these two questions
tell us so much about this person's well-being. And, actually, yes, caregivers are more engaged in what I would call suffering- wishing things were different, instead of being present in their own lives. But regardless of this difference, whether a person is a caregiver or not, this state of negative mind wandering, where you are not present in the moment, wishing to change the situation, instead of being involved, predicts more unhappiness. This involves shortening of telomeres . So, this suggests that pattern continues for days, months, and years and continues to wear them down. So some metaphors that I think are useful in this case: imagine this undesirable situation and imagine yourself pulling on a rope tied to a
brick wall. And you do it because you care. You want things to get better for you, for that person, or for a group of people. That is, this is what you really care about. So you pull and pull, every day you pull, but you can't move this brick wall. So the only thing that happens is you get your hands dirty. What if you just let go of the rope? I tell myself: throw the rope. When I start, you know, trying to solve unsolvable problems, the brick wall still remains. She will never move. But my hands are free. So I can free myself to live in a way I can control. When you describe this tug of the brick wall, I find the image very compelling, and it seems entirely logical-to try to throw the rope, as you say, because of the incredibly high energy expenditure
that this activity requires. As you said, it's a kind of way of directing resources towards something that has no end, right? And by throwing the rope, you can direct those resources to other things. Right. We really, really, really love control. And we want to control the future not only because it gives us a sense of power and happiness, but also because it allows to relax. If we know what will happen next, if it is predictable, we are much happier. We are not on alert, we are not looking ahead, and we are not preparing for what might happen. The ability to accept uncertainty calmly is a beautiful but rare factor in resilience. People who tolerate uncertainty have much less anxiety and
depression. And when stressful events occur, they recover more quickly. And I think there are practices that help us feel at ease with an uncertain future. Some of these conscious checks, when we notice that we are carrying stress within us because of uncertainty, are one way. And then reimagining uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life and the freedom we feel when we realize we have no control over tomorrow. We just go with the flow, do the best we can, and what a joy it is to just observe everything with curiosity and see what emerges. So even our posture is an exercise in dealing with uncertainty. Instead of being in that tense position, trying to take it all in and anticipate the next second, just lean back. And take a few slow
breaths. We know it will help us navigate. And to realize that we can meet time in this way, allowing it to come to us. And accept what is happening. And this is a completely different body position than our usual working routine during the day. And that's just a way of saying: I'm in a receptive state and I'm curious about what happens next. Actually, I learned this on a meditation retreat because I tend to be a Type A personality, and I leave the retreat going from complete relaxation to that tense state where you lean forward thinking, "Where's my to-do list?" And therefore, carrying this approach: letting time take its course, without trying to control everything.
This is really interesting. This gets to the heart of what I think about a lot in the context of stress management, as well as overall well-being. I think about half of the messages we get about stress and psychosomatic interventions are about accepting this " moving forward." It's the idea that when a challenge arises, you jump on it, you overcome it. On the other hand, there are these stress reduction techniques-both mental and physical, body-oriented or worldview-based, etc.- that are more like what you described; They are not about " stepping back" and letting everything wear you down, but about a certain state of receptivity. Do you think it's appropriate for us to adopt some kind of general concept that people could use for
themselves if they wanted to? " choice, but having both tools in your arsenal would be useful, as one is less energy-intensive, although it offers fewer opportunities for influence. At least, that's what it seems. This is the same "descent". And the other option certainly provides an opportunity to influence, but we know from 100 or more years of psychological and psychiatric literature. Mhm. and from the latest research on stress management, that it's work. This is not something that is given for free. This may yield much better results than if you just let stress knock you down, but it's still work.
Therefore, we must emphasize this work in quite conscious ways. When we know it is productive, we should work. And when we know that there is a brick wall in front of us, we have to let go. I like this idea of "moving forward." I take it this way: either you make an effort or you let go. And we need both. So, this letting go is a really important, wise, and insightful way to relieve stress in the right situations and at the right time. And you know, we can't overcome everything by force, right? So another way I like to think about it is just the waves of life. We are like in the ocean: we have small waves, we have big waves. We will always be covered by the next wave. And this is
skillful surfing or navigation, which we can do better when we are aware of when we are in control of things and when we are not, when we can truly feel safe and at peace, and when we need to paddle a little For people listening to this and wanting to start implementing certain practices, do you think it would be beneficial to spend time creating a written or oral narrative? I mean, we hear about it, but is there any data to support the use of journaling as a tool? Certainly. Creating a coherent narrative is critical to our ability to make sense of, find meaning, resolve, and have a social identity around our life experiences, what happens to us. So, the story is kind of everything, right? In stress research, what
matters is not what happens to us, but how we interpret it and how we react to it. And I heard you say exactly the same thing when you were talking about what stress is. It's really what kind of narrative we create around it. So I think the narrative of purpose-insert what's separates us from the rats we study or the monkeys. We have the ability to project the future, to ask what our purpose in life is, to see and know that we will die, and we can have some control over how we live, and perhaps even how we die, and how we want to be remembered. This is so beautiful. It helps us rise above being just monkeys in clothes.
I want to, first of all, just say thank you for your incredibly important work. I also want to thank you for taking the time to share this information today. I know I speak for many, many people, and I just really want to express my gratitude. Thank you very much and thank you for your podcast. Well, it's a labor of love, and it's days like today and discussions like this that make it worth it. So thank you. Thank you, Andrew.
