Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge, with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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Now let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Elissa Epel. She is an internationally renowned contemplative health psychologist who has conducted pioneering research into how stress impacts our health, all the way down to the cellular level. She has some pretty tremendous credentials, so take a listen. She studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University, and clinical and health psychology at Yale University, where she received her PhD. And she’s currently a professor and vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UC San Francisco.
But there’s some important things to know in addition to her credentials. She is a very dedicated person on a spiritual journey, on a journey of wisdom, spending time at mindfulness meditation retreats. And as you listen to her, I know as I have, because I’ve met her before, you’ll feel her deep heart, and her deep humanity that mixes with the tremendous training and research chops that she has. She’s such an unusual and gifted person.
Her first book was written with Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn. It’s a New York Times bestseller called The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer. And she’s the author of a new book, The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Elissa Epel.
Elissa, welcome.
Elissa Epel: Thank you so much Tami, for your generous words. It’s a pure honor to be here. I’ve learned so much from you and Sounds True teachers.
Tami Simon: My sense is that you are a person who is dedicated to a personal mission, if you will, who has a sense of purpose behind the work that you’re doing. And right here at the beginning of our conversation, I’d love to know how you articulate your own sense of purpose.
Elissa Epel: My first response was, “Wow, that must explain the urgency I feel about time, that I have to use my time and be doing things all the time,” because I’m so purpose driven and care so much about getting certain things done. I used to have an email header that said, “So much to discover, so little time.” And I took that off years later, just realizing that kind of stresses me out. That’s like the timer on my minutes, my day, my life.
So just being a very naturally… I’m going to say achievement-oriented person, although there’s so many negative connotations with that. But just having metrics of productivity and output attached to the mission I have, the things I care about, has made me both miserably stressed for a lot of my life. And that has probably kept me so interested in stress science for the last 30 years, just really understanding how we can live without feeling that time is a commodity, and our value and our achievement is based on how we produce and how we use our time.
And hearing Joanna Macy talk about that mindset as being so capitalist, so extraction-oriented—that I can’t do enough and I need to use every minute—it’s a natural mindset that we’ve absorbed and adopted from our culture. And it’s stressful, it’s toxic. It creates the divisions we have from seeing things more as they are, rather than as we fly by them.
Tami Simon: So I get the sense of urgency, but tell me what it is that you really want the research and the writing and all the educational work you do, what is the effect you want that work to have in the culture?
Elissa Epel: So my path has been really trying to understand and show the world this tight, inextricable connection between the mind and the body. And so, of the hundreds of scientific papers I’ve published, they’re always both. They’re always showing some angle, some aspect of how if we change the mind, we’re changing the body in this way or vice versa.
And that’s partly why I went into trying to understand aging and cell biology, the molecular basis of aging. Because that would show the world that the mind matters. That actually, if we can show that mind states like stress are speeding up our aging at the most molecular level, telomeres—we can talk about those—then that would be a check a point of saying respect the mind, and that mind body is one, and aging in a way that we all care about. So it’s a way in.
But once I checked that, and we had discovered that chronic stress states do affect our rate of aging, it opened up a whole nother door of discovery. So instead of just saying, we can sit back now, there’s a lot more interesting questions. So I’ve changed my attitude about the viewing. There’s no kind of end to the scientific ways, questions we can ask. But I think that answer to your first question, what is my purpose, what do I care about? It’s to relieve suffering, and it’s as simple as that. And I’m at a health-care institution, and we have a lot of words in our mission statement. But it is to relieve human suffering.
Tami Simon: Now, you briefly pointed to The Telomere Effect. And so for people who aren’t familiar with that body of work, can you briefly bring us all up to speed so we’re with you here?
Elissa Epel: So when we want to look inside our cells and understand, how does a cell stop dividing and replenishing—the cells in our body like blood cells and brain cells—there are multiple ways.
But one of the ways that we now really understand, it’s called replicative senescence, which just means our cells can’t replicate anymore, and they get old. And the underlying biology of replicative senescence is that there is a protective cap, kind of like the cap at the ends of our shoelaces, that sits at the ends of our chromosomes. And that really has a very important guard job, which is protect the genes. Part of aging is this kind of wear and tear on our DNA.
And these caps are very sensitive to the whole cellular environment, all the chemicals. So when we’re overly stressed for too long, we are changing the messages that our telomeres are getting, and they’re being damaged by oxidative stress and inflammation. They’re getting shorter, they’re wearing out.
And what that means is that the cells can’t divide as long for as many years, they’re losing their ability to keep going, decade after decade. So it’s a very slow way of aging. But it’s how we run out of ability to replenish tissue when we’re older. So this all kind of comes to a head maybe around… I hate to say an age, but around 80 years old, we can start to reach the end of our telomere length unless we’re taking really good care of them or we have really good genes.
Tami Simon: Now, one of the things you make very clear and explain in a way that I really understood it, is that there are different kinds of stress. We can’t lump all stress together and say, all stress is bad and all stress is going to shorten our telomeres. It’s not like that. We have to understand different kinds of stress. So let’s go there. What kind of stress promotes, if you will, healthy aging, and what kind of stress actually will shorten my telomeres? And dare I say it, probably will cause me to die at a younger age.
Elissa Epel: So we could probably spend the hour on the nuances and types of stress. But to be very simplistic, one of the easiest ways to understand stress is what we call toxic stress and acute stress.
So acute stress are short-term stressful situations that we might suffer through. Or we might get through, dance through them easily. Either way, they’re really not going to damage us. Chronic stress, something like being a caregiver, being in these long-term stressful situations, jobs that are just too demanding, relationships that have a lot of conflict, financial strain, situations that go on and on. Lots of us have lots of them. Those are what we think of as chronic stress. They’re not uncommon situations. So then it becomes, how much are we floating through the day, recharging our battery, and living with this really difficult ongoing situation? Versus having it wear a battery out by the end of the day.
And if you think of it at the cellular level, that’s wearing out the cell. There’s not the restoration, the cleaning out of the cell that we really need when we’re under such demand and wear and tear during the day.
So acute stress can be harmless or not so bad. We recover really well. Chronic stress can be wearing over years, and then there’s all sorts of things in between. But we’ve studied mostly the dark side in trauma and chronic stress, and we do know that those are the types of situations that are associated with telomere shortening. And then we can talk more about types of stress that we think are more rejuvenating.
Tami Simon: Yeah, well we’re going to spend quite a bit of time talking about how to deal with the chronic stress that I think many of us are feeling. But before we do, let’s talk a little bit about, we could just call it positive stress. Stress that’s actually good for us. What kinds of experiences are those?
Elissa Epel: When we think about physical stress like exercise, it’s the best and easiest way for us to understand a positive stressor. So we go through a big stress response, and we recover. And during the recovery we have a lot of reparation. We have restoration and rejuvenation, and those are a little bit different. So we’re repairing damage when we are in a restorative mode. And we can develop restorative modes also from deep rest states like meditation.
But the rejuvenation part is a bit specific to positive stress like exercise or caloric restriction. These short-term stressors actually can create a younger cell. Not just repairing, but actually creating changes that make the cell more resistant to stress and aging.
So just to give you an easy example, we think about studies that have shown this in worms. And in these studies, they heat up worms just a little bit. And find that the repeated stress of a little bit of heat creates a really robust, resilient, long-lived worm. And of course, if you heat it too much, you get a worm funeral. You’ve surpassed the ability to recover.
And so heat is actually great for us. We now know that hyperthermia, repeated exposure to, for example, sauna, infrared sauna or hot tubs, these create all sorts of positive stress in the body, repeated and positive stress. That’s both good for our health, but also for our brain and our mind, good for depression.
So those are ways that we can start to take more seriously, that short-term stress to the body when we have the right formula and attitude, and we’re not overdoing it, is actually rejuvenating and, I will say, anti-aging.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned heat. I think you probably know Sounds True published The Wim Hof Method with Wim Hof. And many people at Sounds True when they check in, for example, on our leadership team, we have 13 people, will describe their cold shower as part of their check-in. “I got up to X number of minutes.” So I’m curious what you think about cold immersion as a positive type of acute stress.
Elissa Epel: I think that Wim has brought the practice to millions of people in a really beautiful way. He embodies this attitude towards the cold, which I personally have a big—my initial stress response is please no. Anything but that. I’ll take the heat.
But I practice the Wim Hof method, and his view is to relax into the cold and remind yourself how good it is for you. And what that does is it reduces the psychological stress response, and you’re still getting the benefit of the physical response to cold stress. So what he’s been practicing and promoting has been practiced in other ways in many traditions. And it’s even been studied in Western models. Cryotherapy can help with many different kinds of psychological conditions like depression and anxiety, in different studies and big reviews.
So it’s not a surprise that repeated short-term exposure to cold is one of those positive types of stress. And there’s amazing anecdotes, and now there’s more and more data suggesting benefits of the Wim Hof method.
Tami Simon: Now I can’t help but ask, Elissa, because you’re an expert on this kind of thing, and don’t tell Wim this question. Which is, you mentioned hot tubs and saunas. And I’d much rather go that direction than I would a two-minute cold shower. Will I get equal benefits from a hot tub? Because if so, I’m definitely doing that.
Elissa Epel: I’m counting on that too. One of the practices that is probably a bit better workout for the nervous system is hot cold, hot cold. So when there’s an opportunity to have that experience where there’s a cold plunge and there’s a hot tub, we’re basically really creating the range of acute stress responses. And they are a little bit different. The long-term effects are very similar. We just know more about hypothermia these days. That’s been more well-studied than cold. But I would say that as long as you’re doing one of them, you don’t need to do both.
I also think it’s a very harsh protocol, and I know that he’s toned it down over the years. But we don’t think that things like hormetic stress—we call this hormetic stress, needs to be done every day. They are creating a type of stress that, what’s most important is that we create recovery time.
So for example, high-intensity interval training, that is not typically done every day. That’s actually done several times a week so that your body has time to really recover.
Tami Simon: You mentioned this notion of deep rest. You said this is something that we need as part of our healthy aging. And I think many of us are like, “Yeah, I remember deep rest. Before the pandemic, I used to have some of that. I can’t remember having a whole lot of it recently.” What do you define as deep rest, and how do we get more of it?
Elissa Epel: I think deep rest is no mystery to this audience, because the best example of it is really through engaging in mind-body practices and contemplative practices. So deep-rest states are when we are awake, but we are allowing ourselves to let go, and really feel safe and relaxed.
So a typical example is Shavasana after yoga, massage, really being in nature. You can be moving around, but the idea is that we’re not actively trying to control anything. We’re really just letting our body have time to focus on housekeeping, house cleaning, and not exerting energy, a lot of energy.
So I think things like different practices that are contemplative, like different yoga practices, or moving meditation, qigong. There are periods of restoration as well as activities. So those are all different ways to turn on and have a balance between the kind of energizing positive stress and restoration.
So meditation retreats are probably the most extreme example of deep rest, because you’re having a secluded, safe period where you can really remodel your nervous system. You can have dramatic improvements in how much you’re carrying around vigilance in every moment.
So think of being in a city in an urban street. You might be used to that. You might love it and not think you are feeling a lot of stress. But we know that from brain imaging studies and other types of studies that urbanicity is stressful. Even the birds, the honeybees that live in the city have shorter telomeres and more oxidative stress than those who live rurally.
So getting into a retreat environment, it is precious, it is a privilege. But as someone who’s studied these states, the most powerful intervention we can do to shift the nervous system down several notches and be turning on the deep-rest machinery repeatedly each day, even if it’s short periods, is meditation.
Tami Simon: Can you share with me what’s going on at a cellular level when I’m immersed in deep rest?
Elissa Epel: I can, and I actually think of the data that we have collected on this that’s very motivating to me. I try to take residential retreat a week or two every year, and it’s because I—well, I love it. It’s a very amazing reset.
But what happens inside the cells is that we’re changing all of the different messages to our cells from the common messages of fight immune invaders, stay vigilant, get ready to mount a big stress response. Or maybe even, we’re carrying around a chronic stress response.
We’re changing all those signals to, “I’m safe. I can turn off all of the fighting machinery, and I can start to repair and heal.” And quantitatively, what I’m talking about is that we are changing the gene expression patterns. Every protein that our cells are making—not changing the genes, but we’re changing the output from our genes in such a dramatic way so that all of the proteins that we’ve made show that profile. They’ve shown that we’re turned on all of these restorative systems. Telomerase, the enzyme that builds telomeres back, mitochondria, the little batteries in our cells. So in a sense, we’re rejuvenating our mitochondria. The, what we call restorative hormones, anabolic hormones like growth factors are turned on.
So to be really explicit, Tami, we’ve done a study, and other people have done retreat studies where we just measure the gene expression. Either during a meditation or in my case, we’ve measured gene expression after a week of meditation.
And when we just compare the blood of someone on day one versus when they’re about to leave. Well actually, we get day six. Because on day seven, when they’re about to leave, things are already changing too much, right? Because we anticipate.
So day one compared to day six, with machine learning, can we predict and understand if that’s at the beginning of the retreat or at the end? We can with 94% accuracy. Give me a blood sample, and I’ll tell you if that person has come from their normal life, or if they’ve just finished a week on a retreat.
So there’s tenfold differences in these regulatory systems, what we’re creating in our body, that are very impressive. I’ve never seen such big increases in both subjective well-being, vitality, decreases in depression, as I have on retreats. And then same with biological changes.
Tami Simon: You share a powerful study in The Stress Prescription, where you compare people who go to the same beautiful center, health center. And some of them meditate, and some of them relax and vacation and swim in the pool, or whatever they’re doing, walk around the grounds. What was the difference that you found in these two groups?
Elissa Epel: Yes, this is the study that I’m referring to. And this was Deepak Chopra who led a transcendental meditation retreat. And what we were expecting to find is that the people who learned the different types of meditation, yoga, self-reflection, would look better at the end of the week.
And we designed such a good control group. They also had to leave their computers behind and come and eat Ayurvedic food for a week and not work and be in a beautiful environment. This was a real test of, “Is it the meditation or is it really the relaxation?”
And what we found in the gene expression profiles was that they were indistinguishable. That both groups benefited so dramatically. The difference between the groups emerged over time. So by almost a year later, we see that those who had learned meditation, and some were still practicing, they had maintained this improved emotional well-being state.
So their levels of depression stayed low, whereas the control group bounced back up ten months later. So we were very impressed to see these long-term effects from the meditation. And in a way, it makes a lot of sense. The body’s not so picky. It’s agnostic. You create this great relaxation state. It’s going to take it. It’s going to say, “Turn off the stress response, turn off the fighting immune invaders. We are safe.”
But the mind is being trained for long-term resilience because it can now better distinguish between thoughts that are true threat threats, and really just realizing thoughts are just thoughts. So I think the ability to really understand the mind better is a big part of what people gain in a long-term way. That kind of paradigm shift from turning on the light and developing that awareness, so you can look at the mind and see that we don’t have to be on automatic pilot and be stressed out by our thoughts. We still often are, but it’s that ability to become aware and choose our response.
So I was just really impressed that there were such long-term effects. But when we looked even deeper, it was particularly under people who experienced early trauma. They benefited the most.
Tami Simon: Now what would you say, Elissa, to that person who’s like, “I just don’t like meditating. It’s not for me. I want to have the benefits you’re describing, the long-term benefits. But I’ve tried meditation, and sitting still like that makes me crazy.” Or, “It doesn’t work for me. And the last thing I want to do is go on a week-long retreat. Do you have anything else for me?”
Elissa Epel: I love that question. Since I’ve tried desperately to find all sorts of other ways to reduce stress both in our studies, and I’m always looking for colleagues’ studies that are really making a difference in how we see, view, feel, in ways that reduce biological stress. So there are so many ways, and so many fun ways, short ways, little hacks that we can do that can immediately reduce feelings of stress. But I will say nothing really works unless we first take time to turn the flashlight on in our mind, to really have moments of mindful awareness and check-ins.
So in my book, for example, every practice starts with just centering and grounding, because nothing could really happen until we actually know where we are, what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling. And to me, mindfulness is essential. Moments of mindfulness, mindful awareness is necessary, but not always sufficient for creating states of emotional well-being.
Living in the Bay Area and being fortunately and gratefully near Spirit Rock and this whole teaching community, it is so wonderful to see the benefits of a contemplative life and the joy of having a contemplative community. And, there’s tremendous suffering there. And teachers aren’t immune to the slings and arrows of life, and to feeling stressed often, and to depression. So there’s just so much more that we can do. And many people find a daily meditation practice is all they need, but many find it’s not enough.
There are many different ways that we can turn on that light and try to think another way, or changing our context, or changing our body state. So there’s those three levels. Change the mind, change the body, change our environment. For example, nature immersion. And we want to take advantage of all of those.
So while I have been transformed from that kind of Type A achievement-oriented person to not feeling that urgency and actually seeing the world much more clearly and being much more connected to it, it’s taken all three of those ways of regulating my nervous system.
I think my lenses through the nervous system and how we can bounce around from high-stress states to deep-rest states. But we can also move through them more consciously, and make sure we’ll get a balance. So we’re going to have stress states. We can try to make them positive, but we can also be shaping our world so that we’re allowing ourselves to have the deep rest.
We so deeply and desperately need to recharge, particularly now in this era that we’re in of multiple pandemics. And not just the viral one. The climate crisis as well, is something that I live with a lot every day, think about a lot, look for guidance about, have worked it into my work in different ways.
So when I told you the beginning my mission is to reduce human suffering, that was edited probably about four years ago, to be reducing suffering, and not putting humans in any hegemonic way above our animal and plant world.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned the many pandemics we’re living with, and I said how I thought deep rest has become more difficult for many of us since the viral pandemic, and also over the last several years. I think there’s a feeling for most of us in one way or another, that the rug keeps getting pulled out. There is no rug anymore, to even be pulled out. What’s going on? Whether it’s the threat to democracy, natural disasters, racial injustice in our faces, teenage suicide.
There’s this sense of, everywhere, how are we going to find deep rest when in the middle of the night we’re waking up freaked out about X, Y, Z? And it could be personally what’s happening in our life, or it could be the person we know. And the person we know is grandmother or grandfather or daughter or cousin or something.
So my question to you is, during this time in particular, the chronic stress that I think many of us sense—and you write about this beautifully in The Stress Prescription. We have to find a way to work, be with this onslaught and not—I’ll just use my language here based on our conversation—reducing the length of our telomeres every single moment, because we’re so captivated by it. So what kind of attitude and skills do we need to deal with our world right now and the chronic stress we’re feeling?
Elissa Epel: That is really the question. And there are many answers, and I can only share with you what I have learned from others, because I find this the ultimate challenge. That’s part of writing this book is patching together these different ways of viewing, what does it mean to be a human right now? How can we have ease in this world where we always have our personal challenges, our daily drama. Then we have this whole layer of seeing the fabric of our society, of nature, of brothers and sisters across the world just being torn apart.
I’ll give you an abstract answer and a concrete answer. One of the abstract answers is the irreducible uncertainty that we have about our future. We always have had uncertainty. We have extreme, what has been called volatile uncertainty now. Meaning things can change in a flash and we don’t control things anymore. Not clearly as much as we used to think we did.
So living in the West Coast, living in California, we’re pinballs for whatever climate has in store for us, in the ways we also see on the other coast. And the floods, the smoke, the fires. We know it’s going to get worse. It’s now baked in. It’s going to get worse before it may get better.
So there is this uncertainty that’s palpable, that we can touch now and name. And realize that if we can’t loosen up around that uncertainty and live with that better in the moment, in the day, in how we view the future, we’re really not going to survive. Both personally, we’re going to be burning out. The telomeres will be shortening, but as a society.
So in a research language, when we measure tolerance for uncertainty, we know that people who can’t tolerate uncertainty, meaning they get very intense, and constricted, and uncomfortable, and can’t relax if they don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. There’s a lot of uncertainty in their plans. And that is a predictor of anxiety and depression. So we’ve known that for years, that those mind states that drive us crazy, whatever your flavor, anxiety or depression, is very tied to how much we can relax around uncertainty. So that’s a big clue to us, that we do need to name it and feel, how are we living with uncertainty right now? What are you expecting of yourself, of this day, of the future? And just naming our expectations, because that really translates into the vigilance that we carry in unconscious stress.
So we measured uncertainty during the pandemic. And people who can tolerate uncertainty and be easy around it, they did not have nearly as much PTSD symptoms from the pandemic or climate distress. So it’s very relevant now, more than ever now. So I’ll stop there and see if you want me to—
Tami Simon: Well, I do want to know more. Because I think for many of us, “Yeah, I can kind of relax with uncertainty.” But then, the image that comes to me is a pot of water or whatever. The heat just got too much, and it’s like there’s more sources of heat in the burner. And we’re out outside our capacity to relax with uncertainty. And given that, what specific suggestions do you have?
Elissa Epel: Yes. You described it really well. Our nervous systems are all calibrated upward, more sympathetic post-pandemic. We haven’t had a true recovery period, and now we’re in for whatever’s next. Layers and layers of overlapping traumas really, to our social world, whether it’s hitting us personally or not.
So it is critical that we take the moments that we have when we are safe and can remind ourselves we’re safe. Because our body is not detecting safety. We’re looking for danger, and we’re carrying vigilance unconsciously, even while we sleep. And there’s all sorts of ways we can think about this with data and see how much is our nervous system relaxing when we sleep.
But the fundamental concepts of safety are now more important, because we need to find ways to plant safety cues in our day, to find secluded times to take these breaks. And even just tapping into slowing our breathing, that is a gift we have that we probably under-utilize. I’m using slow-breathing techniques in the middle of the night. When I wake up with insomnia, that’s one of the ways, instead of looking at my clock and thinking about my to-do list, I am definitely trying different breathing techniques. And I think that that’s a direct path to changing the nervous system.
But feeling safe is always a precondition of engaging in contemporary practices and meditation. So we can just even remind ourselves right now, “I’m safe.” And think about, our cells are listening. There’s such a concept of cell safety where if we’re telling our cells that we’re safe and letting our hands relax, our nervous system, relax, our cells are listening and they need those breaks.
Tami Simon: Well, it’s interesting. In The Stress Prescription, your first prescription, you have seven different prescriptions that progress, has to do with this embrace of uncertainty. And the second has to do with our relationship with control.
And I was sitting here and I was imagining, “OK, I feel safe in this moment.” I’m totally safe in this moment talking to you. I’ve got a roof over my head and good airflow and a cup of tea. I’m breathing slowly.
And then I suddenly thought, “But my wife is driving up the Sea-to-Sky Highway right now, and what if something happened to her?” So I stopped feeling safe because this is where my mind went and I was like, I’m really actually quite—I’m not really that worried, but I just made it up in the moment as a potentiality. Because even as we’re sitting here and we’re feeling safe, there’s so much happening that we can’t control. So how have you learned to prescribe to people to work with their minds, when suddenly they think of all these things that make them not feel safe because they’re imagining them?
Elissa Epel: Yes. It is our challenge, and that’s how our mind works. And finding some practices that help, it’s like going clothes shopping. It’s like finding the right glove that fits tightly. So I guess not all practices work for everyone.
Some of the practices are—I will just say this. Eight-minute window, a worry window of sitting down in the morning. As someone who’s kind of taught CBT, I’ve done this with other people, I’ve done it with myself. But it’s basically allowing yourself to just write out everything that is on your plate, that is weighing you down that you’re worrying about. And you get it all out. You might decide something needs to be dealt with right now. But you have let yourself create a list so that you don’t have to carry it in your mind, because that rumination or the worries popping in our mind, that’s because we think that we are going to solve a problem. And as you pointed out with the example of worrying about someone else, usually we have no control. But that doesn’t stop our mind from trying to problem solve and hold onto a thought repetitively. So taking a limited amount of time every day to write things out, we call it a worry window, can be helpful. That’s one.
There are ways that we can use physical stressors in a very short-term way that actually change the mind, that reduce rumination. So there are studies on that. So this could be anything. We’ve studied a seven-minute workout, which is a HIIT workout. you can easily download a free app on high intensity interval training. And it has equal effects on improving stress and rumination as meditation. And that was seven minutes a day. And so some people are never going to do that, and some people are going to prefer yoga meditation. Which is me. That’s what I choose.
What we’ve done is we’ve taken a step back to think about, there’s not just top-down ways to try to stop our thoughts, but there are body-up ways. And so it’s also realizing it’s really hard to be human with this human body, because I’m all geared for stress, and everything outside is looking pretty serious and pretty stressful.
So it’s befriending this animal body. We all have this animal body, and some of us have it more hyper-reactive. And so using these physical strategies, even comforting strategies, blankets. Using all of these sensory cues—I’m sorry, I mean weighted blankets. It’s becoming common among adults. I love it. We used to just use them for sensitive kids, kids with sensory issues. Aroma therapy can be helpful. Yeah.
Tami Simon: I have a weighted blanket just—
Elissa Epel: Yay. I think we need to take away stigma from all these sensory supports. We need them. We’re not these superhumans. It’s not cool to just walk around with this hypervigilant system, and think that everything’s OK, and you’re the only one whose body is super high neurotic channel, or that you need to regulate. We’re all going through this.
Pets. Oh my goodness. There’s so much research on these furry loving angels that many people live with. They actually have longevity studies on older people and pets even. So these types of relationships—I guess it’s also a sensory experience to spend time in the morning hugging your pet, hugging a partner. These are all really valid ways of thinking, “OK, that’s in my toolbox.” I think the overwhelming idea that we need to fix the things we can’t control is going to be the way that we basically unravel together.
So making a stress inventory and doing it with someone else to truly be honest with yourselves and reflect on these different situations in life that you care about, that you spend time being stressed, anxious, nervous about, or you’re trying to solve. Just be really honest and list them all, and even how you spend your time in a day.
And then really look at the ones that you don’t control much of. Because I feel that so much of the time we are spending, a lot of those, our energy, our mitochondrial limited battery, on trying to help situations, other people’s behavior, things that we really have so little control over.
So that’s a huge shift to make, is to really just realize the little bit that we control, and work on that. And I want to talk about climate as well, and how we can view that.
Tami Simon: OK. Before we get there, I want to clarify. The worry window is, I take, a period of time, I think you suggested eight minutes. And I write everything down or speak out loud, all the things I’m worried about. Then I shut the window. And you found that by—just to use everyday language—barfing it all out like that, it helps me in the rest of the time of the day. Yes? If I just get it all out. Get it all out. How does that work?
Elissa Epel: Yes. For people who have repetitive thoughts that they know they’re not problem-solving—so anxiety. It’s a typical technique that we use for generalized anxiety. So it’s different than planning a list of everything you need to do. It’s really just the things that are taking up a lot of mental real estate, and suppressed thoughts that come to you that you are not wanting to think about. But then all of a sudden, they’re an intrusive thought. The worry window can help with that. So taking that time to really just allow yourself the permission to go there, know that you can go back to that list, that you will the next day, can help.
But this stress inventory is different. It’s really taking an honest look at the situations in your life. So just asking everyone who’s listening, is there an unwanted situation, something in your life that you wish you could change? Most people have at least one situation like that. It still causes a lot of stress. That’s why you thought of that situation.
So it’s those situations that take a different type of coping. Needing to take that time out to say, “I’m safe right now,” means that you need to put down the baggage, or I like to say drop the rope. We need to realize, OK, I care about that. I’m going to have thoughts about it later. But right now, I can put this big weight down. I can drop the rope.
So think of a rope that’s attached to a boulder, and the boulder’s the unchangeable situation. We are so geared to be pulling on that rope. Our hands get shaved, and it’s taking a lot of our energy. But if we can just say, just drop the rope for now. Probably going to pick it up later. That’s a relief. That’s a shift. That’s actually allowing our hands to be freed up to do other things.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned climate change. The uncertainty, the worry, the concern, the lack of control that we feel about climate change, and how this is such a source of somewhat conscious and somewhat unconscious, that’s my language, stress that we’re all feeling, many of us are feeling. I think unconsciously, we’re all feeling it, and consciously, many of us are feeling it. How do we not allow that to have such a debilitating effect on our health?
Elissa Epel: I have been struggling with that for years. And part of me has felt like now, we’ve done enough on the mind-body connection, and now a new purpose can be making an impact on climate change. And boy, is that a tough mission to have, because you can’t see your impact as one person. You feel helpless.
So it’s been a process of really becoming aware of what we can do, what we can expect in our short lives, and realizing that it’s hubris or it’s a delusion to think that I shouldn’t be acting and doing what I can in my small world, because I can’t see all the connections, and I can’t see the long-term effect.
So I’ve pretty much ended on a very humble goal of what I can do in my world to help with climate change. It’s partly going to be a class helping youth undergraduates with climate resilience using mindfulness and action. So I’m excited about it.
And do I think it’s going to reduce carbon? I think it’s going to help us be moving toward the social tipping point that we need. But the idea of tangible outcomes is really tough.
So I had the opportunity to talk with Joanna Macy recently. Our friend, Dan Siegel was very close to her and knew how much I have been influenced by her and her writing. I’ve just been so paralyzed for a long time in figuring out what my role is in helping with this environmental crisis. So he arranged a meeting with her. You’ve seen her. Your audience has heard her and met her—
Tami Simon: She’s 93 at this point.
Elissa Epel: And she’s still the most joyful and energetic and engaging person. She’s still meeting with climate activists and supporting them. And when I had explained the place that I’m stuck in, she explained how she views this moment. It is of course, what many conversations you’ve had with her and with other thinkers leads to. Which is that we’re interconnected, that we need to do our part, even though we don’t know the outcome. We do not know. We know what’s in our children’s future, and we don’t know when we’re going to turn. We really don’t know how bad things will get.
But her answer to me was rather than trying to know or feeling that my actions had to be the exact right highest impact action, she took my hand and she said, “Honey, we may not make it this time. And that’s OK. Just do your work.”
And she has such an amazing attitude about the work that we’re all contributing to, this great turning. We don’t know where we’re at in it, but that is the work. And it was just such a relief to hear her say, “And that’s OK.” There’s many ways to interpret that, what she meant by that. But it gave me a sense of ease.
Tami Simon: What I hear in what you’re saying is, yes, we have to accept uncertainty in the uncertainty of outcomes. And yes, there’s only so much control we have and there’s so much we don’t control. But if we can activate our agency—the statement you made, do your work, do the part that you can do. If we can activate our sense of agency and bring our soul forward and do something that we’re called to do, that will help us really in the framework you’ve put out with The Stress Prescription. Actually, really have mobilization instead of just sort of chronic malaise. Is that fair to say?
Elissa Epel: Absolutely. Exactly. And it really comes down to the day. What we can do in a day, in the moment. That’s the unit we control. Both regulating, thinking of, well, I’m so stressed because I care. I care about how this world is and people I love—moving that from that stress state to this loving action state. So our caring can be expressed through this way of having a joyful action. Partly because we can, in the moment, feel those moments of safety. And with others. I mean, it’s so much about working together and being connected to others.
Tami Simon: Now Elissa, before we end our conversation, I want to share my favorite part of The Stress Prescription. So my favorite part is the section called “Be a Lion.” It’s my favorite chapter in the book, where you write about how we can take situations where perhaps we feel afraid, and mobilize ourselves, and actually feel a sense of possibility and challenge. And that we don’t have to be the gazelle, we can be a lion. So it’s not like all this is happening to us. We’re have the challenge of the lion, of the hunt, this example. So I’d love it if you could share some ideas, really maybe make it personal of when you feel gazelle-like, how you take that energy and act more like a lion. What do you do?
Elissa Epel: So the lion is chasing the gazelle. They’re both completely stressed, but the lion is having this kind of joyful like, oh my God, this dinner’s going to be so good. That’s why I’m going to put my whole body into this. My maximal stress response. And the gazelle is just completely vasoconstricted running for her life. So we all know what that feels like, the heart racing, the feeling that couldn’t go well. It could feel catastrophic, you could feel humiliated. There’s all sorts of emotions that go along with this kind of fear threat response.
The most common gazelle situation for me is in public speaking. So I would just be preparing my slides. I still do them last minute, but preparing them up to the moment, and just ruminating, and having that gazelle response. So I vasoconstrict, my hands are freezing, and I have to get up and be coherent. So public speaking was a major gazelle situation for me.
And then afterward, I would just ruminate for so long, wish I said this, wish I said that. And I just got to a point where I just said this whole stress response—well first of all, informed by this research. It didn’t just organically happen. But just knowing that I’m mobilizing the stress response, why not mobilize it for good?
So the things to say to oneself that might help are, “Thank you. This amazing body is mobilizing all this energy. Let’s just use it for good. My body’s excited. My body is trying to help me in this moment, and just do your best. You’re going to survive.”
And somehow, I have completely changed my response to public speaking. I only ruminate for a few hours afterward instead of a few days. So the appraisals, what I say in the moment has been helpful of just loving my stress response, and laughing at it, and knowing it’s there to help me. That’s been helpful.
But to be honest, a big shift was taking the mindfulness training class, teacher training class. Actually Mark Coleman and Martin Aylward probably have been on your dialogue. And something just shifted in how I was able to have metacognition in the midst of stress, and be able to not go with the racing hard thoughts of, this is not going well. I can’t think. So turning on the light bulb, mindfulness has been my way of turning from gazelle to lion.
And I have to say, Tami, all I meant before when I was saying everyone needs more techniques. I just meant to say even Buddhists. Buddhists gets stressed. But, I do want to acknowledge that it is the best training that I have seen in all of my different examination of different studies and interventions. And I’ve been doing this for 30 years. So I do really have phenomenal respect for Buddhist teaching Buddhist teachers. I didn’t mean to belittle it in any way.
Tami Simon: No. What I heard you say was that having awareness of thoughts and emotions, and that that awareness is cultivated through a mindfulness practice of some kind, that you can be aware of your thoughts not identified with them, is necessary but not sufficient, for managing all different kinds of stress. So I thought that was a very fair thing.
Elissa Epel: And the deep rest is beautiful, but not enough. We need the positive stress, the hormetic stress as well.
Tami Simon: Yeah. It’s interesting that you brought up public speaking, because I raised my hand during our conversation to say that I have a weighted blanket at home. And I don’t use it often, but I use it after I give talks. And after I give talks, I mobilize myself, so all that energy. But then I feel so exposed and so like I might float away. And also so empty and terrified all at the same time, and I don’t have any skin on that. But that’s when I use the weighted blanket in those moments, is recovering from public exposure basically. Probably use it after this conversation just for the record. Very good.
Finally, a final question. Seven Days to More Joy and Ease, The Stress Prescription. As I said, a book that’s both accessible and deep. What’s your hope for people who pick up the book, read it, start to explore some of the practices? What’s your hope for people?
Elissa Epel: To realize that we’re not stuck in our daily stress habits. To explore, to try something new, and really give it a try. There’s so much exploration that we can do with our mind and our body. And finding something that works can take repetition and practice.
My hope is that we can live with a mindset of seeing the beauty and joy in each day, the sacredness of each day more easily. Because we’ve taken those moments for safety, for deep rest, for even just being the lion means we’re recovering more quickly and we’re out of that fear state. And all of those are very possible. They’re very realistic goals for all of us.
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Elissa Epel. She’s the author of the new book, The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after the show Q&A conversations with featured presenters, and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
