In short · Summary by AI
Dr. Elissa Epel, a stress scientist, explains that stress itself is not the main problem; how we respond and recover matters most, and chronic rumination is a key driver of harm. She outlines tools for managing overthinking and reframing stress as a challenge, and links chronic stress to mitochondrial health, daily mood, and accelerated aging, concluding that acceptance, letting go of unsolvable problems, and meaningful narrative help build resilience.
- Stress is best understood by how we respond and recover, not just the stressors themselves; a healthy stress response followed by recovery causes no harm.
- Overthinking and rumination keep the stress response alive; tools fall into three groups: top-down mindset strategies, body-based strategies that discharge stress physically, and changing the environment with safety signals.
- Stress exists in acute, moderate, and chronic forms, and chronic stress shows up as sympathetic nervous system vigilance and high energy demand even without reported stress.
- Stressful challenges can build resilience: a 'challenge' response with more cardiac output and less inflammation is healthier than a 'threat' response, and it can be cultivated through reframing and self-affirming 'strength statements'.
- In caregiver research, lower mitochondrial activity tracked with worse mood, and positive emotion at night was linked to better long-term health trajectories.
- For uncontrollable chronic stressors, radical acceptance and dropping the 'rope' of unsolvable problems frees energy and reduces the toll on the body.
- Comfort with uncertainty is a resilience factor, and a coherent personal narrative of purpose helps people make sense of stress and recover.
- Both pushing forward into challenges and receptive, letting-go approaches are useful; the skill is discerning when to muscle through and when to release.
- 0:00Introduction and Defining Stress
- 2:08Managing Overthinking and Rumination
- 5:22Acute, Chronic, and Physiological Stress
- 8:12Stress, Aging, and Growth
- 10:06Challenge Versus Threat Responses
- 16:09Mitochondria, Mood, and Health
- 19:32Accepting Unchangeable Chronic Stressors
- 23:32Dropping the Rope on Unsolvable Problems
- 24:20Uncertainty and Receptive Posture
- 27:14Forward Push Versus Letting Go
- 29:22Narrative, Purpose, and Closing
Introduction and Defining Stress
0:00Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stamford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr.
0:18Alyssa Epel. Dr. Epel, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So great to have you here. I'd love to just kick off by you explaining a little bit about the different forms of stress. You know, we hear stress, stress is bad, stress can kill us. No one likes to feel stressed, etc. But as you and I both know, that's not the entire picture.
0:35So, love for you to just educate us a bit on what stress is and what it isn't, where it can be problematic, and where perhaps it can even be beneficial. Mhm. >> So, as a stress scientist, it is a word I use a lot, but it has to be broken down because it has so many different kind of dimensions and meanings.
0:56So, there's good and bad stress, there's acute and chronic stress, and you know, technically it just means anytime we feel overwhelmed that we feel like the demands are too much for our resources. So that's kind of a a very technical way to put it, but really so much of life is about meeting challenges and we're never going to get rid of different stressful situations in life.
1:22If anything, they are increasing. And so it really comes down to not the stressors of what's happens to us, but really how we respond, the stress response. So when something happens, we mount a stress response and we recover. And that's beautiful. no harm done. We need that. That's why we're here still alive is that survival response.
1:44It's it's a problem these days of just we keep it alive in our head. We keep it alive with our thoughts. Our thoughts are the most common form of stress. >> What to your knowledge is the best way or what are the best ways for us to manage overthinking and ruminating on stressful topics? Should we work with them in the sense that we try and rationalize or understand the basis of the stress or should we try and divert our thinking away?
Managing Overthinking and Rumination
2:15>> I like to bin it in three um three categories. So one is we well I'll just say first of all we have to have some awareness of how our mind works or we're just like you know a subject to thinking our thoughts are real thinking that it's helpful to keep ruminating and problem solving because that's our tendency is to go toward whatever we think there's threat or risk and to problem solve that.
2:42You could just be stuck there all day in this kind of threat mode or red mind state. And that's just a shame. We don't need to turn on that stress response all the time. But that's where we are as a society. We're so used to feeling daily stress from our urban and modern life that we're we don't notice it.
3:02We're just used to it. And so we're going through the day with kind of like clenched hands. And just, you know, for listeners, just even just taking a check in now and noticing how you might be holding stress in your body. That's a huge clue. It's a huge place where we accumulate tension. So, we might not be aware that we're stressed, but we're clenching our hands.
3:23So um going back to this notion of overthinking, what are the tools that um are most efficient for dealing with overthinking or ruminating uh when people just sort can't seem to let go of the thing that's the stress or thinking about not the stress in their body but the thing that caused the stress the difficult conversation the thing that irked them.
3:45I wish I had one answer, but I'm going to say lots of strategies tackle that. And so in those three bins, one are top- down strategies of awareness and things that we can say to ourselves since our beliefs and mindsets can really help us release stress, view stress more positively. The second bucket is not that the mind changes the body, but the body changes the mind.
4:07And those are the set of strategies that you tend to use the most, right? We're we're working stress out of the body. We're metabolizing it. we're burning it up and we get relief. It changes our amygdala activity and moves us to more an experiential state where we're more in our smata sensory cortex.
4:24And then the third uh bucket is change the scene just getting away from all the stress triggers that we have in our office or in the city and being in an environment that we find calming. It might even be just be a corner of the house, but implanting what I call safety signals, having things like comforting pets, pictures, smells, music.
4:51>> When we talk about stress, it's clear that there's short-term, medium-term, long-term stress. You've studied all these different forms of stress. If you would be so kind as to just you give us an overview of the different forms of stress, how we can learn to recognize those, pepper our minds with knowledge about stress in all its um beautiful and um not so beautiful forms.
5:13>> When we think about stress, we usually think feeling stress, you know, reporting stress and that's important. What our body is doing is also important and it's not always related to our mind. So measuring levels of the nervous system and how vigilant we are is another way that we can understand stress.
Acute, Chronic, and Physiological Stress
5:30And that's particularly important and interesting because that's how stress gets under the skin. And we might not be aware. We might not report stress, but we're still holding tension and being much more sympathetically dominated. Meaning that our body is vigilant and scanning for cues and we don't feel safe.
5:47And so we're mobilizing a lot more energy than we need to. And stress is so expensive to the body. The stress response uses a tremendous amount of energy ATP that's made by our mitochondria. And if we have that kind of vigilant stress response on all day, we're just going to feel exhausted. And we don't necessarily get so threatened that we release a lot of cortisol, but our nervous system is going up and down all day.
6:16Then there's kind of moderate stressful events that maybe take days or months to cope with. And what's important there is that noticing like right now am I really coping acutely with something or can I restore? So that kind of daily restoration is very important. And then there are chronically stressful situations that go on for years.
6:37Many of us, not all of us, but many of us have those in our life. These are situations, I'll just use caregiving as an example, that we can't change. We We can't change other people. We can't change certain situations or resources. And we can be thinking about them chronically problem solving, trying to wish things were different, or we can use acceptance, radical acceptance strategies, and other strategies to live well with them.
7:08That's a really important strategy for people who feel like their life is going to be stressful forever because of X or Y. You can actually be dealing with uncontrollable chronic stress in ways that it's not going to take that toll on your body. I mean, I study chronic stress and how it accelerates cell aging and I can tell you there's so much variance between people.
7:32People are so different. So among caregivers, some of them look as biologically young or younger than our controls, people with no identifiable big tough situation in their life. >> In one of your papers, you distinguish between optimal aging, typical aging and accelerated aging. How does one measure optimal versus accelerated aging?
7:53And why would it be that some stress is better than no stress when it comes to aging? Uh ideally >> having no stress means we're not really living like we're not engaging in the gifts of life which are inevitably have some challenge and risk. And let me give you an example. One study took elderly people who retired and society kind of labels them as you're kind of done with your meaningful work in life and you are pretty much not able to contribute to society.
Stress, Aging, and Growth
8:28I mean, there's so many negative stereotypes that people then kind of embody and then live. Um, and this program brought them to work in schools and tutor young at risk students. And what happened to them is they went from feeling maybe safe and understressed to feeling challenged but generative. They they were feeling more purpose.
8:51They were feeling like they were growing and they were feeling like their day had more meaning. They had these caring relationships with the students. And in the study they they took images of the hippocampus and those who engaged in the program particularly the men actually had growth of their hippocampus during this program.
9:14So at any stage in life we can be growing and challenging ourselves even in our much later years and growing our brain and you know more than anyone like what does that hypocample growth mean for their well-being and their cognitive function. I almost have to wonder if it's like exercise where you know so many people I think now everybody hopefully understands that exercise is going to lower blood pressure, reduce resting heart rate, improve muscularkeeletal function and bone density, all that stuff.
9:45>> But that if you took a snapshot of the bodily response during exercise, blood pressure is way, way up, heart rate is way, way up. Stress hormones are way up. Cortisol is through the roof during a hard workout and immediately afterwards. And yet that sets in motion a series of adaptations that brings you to a better place most of the time.
10:00Is there any evidence that short bouts of stress, provided that they're managed well, meaning that we don't spend the next 24 or 48 hours ruminating on the stressor, but that we're able to move through the stressor and resolve it in some way, that that's actually beneficial for us because of the mobilization of energy stores and maybe even changing our threshold for reacting to stressors in the future.
Challenge Versus Threat Responses
10:23We know as you said that physical stressors when they're short and repeated like highintensity interval training they are promoting not just aerobic fitness but stress fitness people feel less rumination less depression less anxiety so they're kind of tuning up the nervous system what about psychological stressors we know two things so one is I do think that there is a level of engagement with moderate stressors that when we are used to them, we get fit and our stress resilience builds, meaning
10:58we're less threatened by them. Two people can approach the exact same stressor and one person is having a pretty um overreactive stress response where they basically are feeling their survival is threatened. So, it's high cortisol, high vasoc constriction and uh blood pressure goes up equally in both.
11:18But the person who's feeling super threatened either their survival or their social survival, their ego, their blood pressure went up because of the vasoc constriction. The other person who is viewing the same stressor as I can do this. This is a great challenge and opportunity. I have what it takes.
11:33Those types of thoughts generate a different hemodynamic response which is actually more cardiac output. So blood pressure is going up but in this healthier way more oxygenation to the brain better problem solving they're able to maintain this positive outlook. So we've measured the threat challenge response in many lab studies and we know lots of things.
11:56So if you're having more of the challenge response at the end of it you're less inflamed. So just in the lab within an hour or two we see that they're they didn't trigger all that pro-inflammatory response and their tieumirs tend to be longer which is a measure we can talk more about but basically it looks like they have a slower speed of aging.
12:16So we could call this kind of a to be really simplistic two types of psychological stress response. Feeling threatened like you're going to fail, you're embarrassed. That social pain response we know well that feels terrible. Um but that also that huge stress response when we, you know, we feel it in our stomach, our heart is pounding.
12:37It's just an overexaggerated response. that response biologically is different and the thoughts that go with it are different and we recover a lot slower. And then there's the challenge response which it's more of that kind of activated excited response. And the beauty is that there are lots of studies out there done by emotions and social psychologists that tilt people toward the challenge response.
13:02We can actually promote that challenge response. And so when you asked about like is it good to have a repeated stress response? Yes, if it's if it's manageable, right? Then we're kind of building the muscle of stress resilience. >> What are the sorts of things that people I can do in order including me I should say um can do in order to wage that challenge response?
13:25Is this purely based on mindset? Like instead of saying why me, why this? Why now? I can't believe this is happening. Is it a mental pivot to okay this is a great opportunity for growth I don't know how I'm gonna manage this but I'll manage this you want to stop me you got to kill me type of type of mindset is that the switch that then the body follows >> the whole trick here is that people need to find the the strength statements the stress shields I call them that fit them that feels right and that they believe
13:57be the lion instead of the gazelle so the lion and gazelle are both you know high blood pressure high stress And the lion's chasing the gazelle, but the g the gazelle is having this total threat basil constriction response cuz she might die. The lion might get dinner, right? So, it's needing to mount the stress response because it's so excited to get the tasty dinner for, you know, the next few days.
14:19And so, the lion is having that challenge response. And so, we can remind ourselves, be the lion. It's not that we're always lion or gazelle. We get to shape that. There's all these strategies and you got to use what works for you. telling yourself, I got this. I can do it. I can get through it. I have what it takes.
14:35Those are all good shields. And another set is, you know, we some of us feel really stressed out by stress. Like once we get feel our heart racing, that leads to, oh no, you know, this is bad for me. And so rather than getting stressed by stress, we actually want to remind ourselves that this stress response is empowering.
14:56This is going to help me cope. My body is excited. My body is doing just what it should right now. So that reframing in studies by Wendy Mendes and others, my my colleagues who do this reappraisal research, they have basically trained people to view stress as positive during the stressful situations.
15:17In the lab, people do better. They perform better. They feel more positive emotion. They problem solve better. They recover more quickly. So pretty powerful stuff. I'd love to talk a little bit about some of the other health metrics that you've explored. There's a graph in one of your papers. It's the Peicard paper 2018.
15:35It essentially describes the relationship between mitochondrial health and mood in the context of people who have different type of mood tendencies. If you would be willing to just kind of describe the top contour of that study and some of the the points that it that you find most interesting. >> Yeah, we've we've done these in-depth studies where we are looking at people under a lot of daily demand.
15:56caregivers and then we look under look at you know normal people parents of neurotypical children who still have a lot of stress but we then ask you know do people under chronic stress have accelerated aging so we look at tieumirs epigenetics mitochondrial health and then what explains those who look really good who look resilient and don't look vulnerable and so then we can find out like what's the magic sauce in the day that protects them from chronic stress so Martin Bear my colleague who has been obsessed with
Mitochondria, Mood, and Health
16:28mitochondrial health as a pathway to understanding both stress and really health and disease. He has developed a way to measure mitochondrial health in humans. So we can measure a bunch of enzymes and then we can adjust it for how many mitochondria we have. So we have this really nice index we can get from the blood.
16:47And in this study of young mothers who were who had either typical children or children with autism, we found that the caregiving moms had significantly lower or dampened mitochondrial activity. What that means is they can't produce as much energy. So if they're feeling more exhausted from the chronic stress, we know why.
17:12It was quite dramatic. Martin commented, "Some of those low levels even looked like people with some genetic reasons to have low mitochondrial activity." But here's the beauty of that study. We then get to look within their day at their mood and ask, "Well, what about the caregivers who have really great mitochondrial enzymes and and thus should be making a lot of ATP?"
17:36They had more positive emotions both waking up and in the evening, but especially in the evening. And what's so interesting that is all of these daily diary studies of stress and mood, one of the things we know that matters for long-term health is how positive you feel at night. So, especially on a stressful day.
17:57So, at the end of a stressful day, can you muster some feelings of content, ease, confidence, joy? Do you have any of that or has it just wiped out your positivity? And so for people who feel either lower negative or higher positive, they tend to have better health trajectories. So like a decade later, less depression, less heart disease, less early death.
18:20So that's why we care so much about daily moods. In our study, it looked like the daily mood was really quite correlated with the mitochondria levels that same day. Then we measured mood like, you know, days away from that and it was much less correlated. It's just our first study on this, but it really leads us to think that our mitochondria are sensitive to our thoughts and our feelings probably on a daily basis.
18:45So for those of us that find ourselves in a in a state of chronic stress, chronic stress of the sort that really the stressor the fact that a very close >> relative or family member is dealing with a lifelong condition or the fact that um we can't extract ourselves from a situation that we are not in full agency to remove the stressor.
19:10radical acceptance of that fact then can ratchet into an understanding of okay and yet there are tools that we can use to not just offset the negative health effects but maybe even thrive in the context of this essentially turning what initially was thought of as a curse into a blessing at least biologically speaking >> what do we know about best practices for mitigating these essentially non-negotiable stressors >> I think it is partly how we view life and our our purpose in our own life.
Accepting Unchangeable Chronic Stressors
19:43What's this game that we know we were born into? And even just the idea that bad things shouldn't happen sets us up for vulnerability, to feel victimized, to feel like we can't accept bad things that have happened. So just stepping back and asking everyone listening, do you have a situation in your life that is unwanted and you can't change?
20:05How much time do you spend thinking about this? The more we spend time trying to problem solve or worry or just wishing things were different, the more we are creating a chronic stress state. And so just even taking that first kind of step back to get perspective on what are the situations in my life that stress me out and and which of these can I circle those that I can't change.
20:38Just that recognition of this isn't going to go away is incredibly powerful because we can, as I say, put the baggage down and give ourselves some relief and some freedom from the big space it holds in our mind and in our body. And this is not a one-time thing. It's a practice. Radical acceptance is something we practice over and over to help us loosen our grip on unwanted situations, on letting them control our well-being and taking up, you know, this mental real estate that's so precious,
21:17our attention. I'm an expert at this because I have I'm a caregiver and I often need to refocus from wishing things were different, trying to solve things to radical acceptance of this is how things are right now. And by just reminding ourselves that there is freedom within that, that there are things that you can do, you can actually live better, live well with these situations.
21:47So, let me tell you what we found from our caregivers. We measure where their mind is at night. We ping them and we say, "In the last five minutes, how much have you been wishing things were different? How much have you been engaged and focused in what you're doing right right before we pinged you?" And just those two questions tell us so much about that person's well-being.
22:08And actually, yes, the caregivers are doing more of what I'll call suffering, wishing things were different, not being present for their lives. But regardless of that difference, whether people are a caregiver or not, this negative minding state of not being present for your evening, wishing things were different instead of being engaged, predicts more unhappiness.
22:37It predicts shorter tails. So it it suggests that it's a pattern that has gone on for days, months, and years that has been wearing on them. And so some of the metaphors that I think are helpful for this are think of this unwanted situation and think of how you're you're pulling a rope that's attached to a brick wall.
22:59And you're doing that because you care. You want things to be better for yourself or this person or a group. I mean, it's it's something you're passionate about. And so, you're pulling and pulling and every day you're pulling and and you can't move that brick wall. So, the only thing that's happening is that you're chafing your hands.
23:18What if you just drop the rope? I say that to myself. Drop the rope. When I start get, you know, getting going on trying to solve unsolvable problems, the brick wall is still there. It's never going to move. Yet, my hands are free and so I can be freed up to live in the ways that I do have control over.
Dropping the Rope on Unsolvable Problems
23:42>> As you describe the this pulling on a brick wall, I find it a very compelling image. Um, and one that uh makes total sense to try and drop the rope as you describe it because of the incredibly high energetic demand that pulling on that rope represents. As you said, it's sort of a way of diverting resources towards something that has no conclusion, >> right?
24:05And in dropping the rope, you can divert those resources towards other things. >> We really, really, really love control. And we want to control the future, not just because it makes us feel powerful and happy, but because then we can relax. If we know what's going to happen next, if it's predictable, we're that much happier.
Uncertainty and Receptive Posture
24:29We're not vigilant and looking ahead and being prepared for what might happen. Being comfortable with uncertainty is a beautiful but rare resilience factor. People who tolerate uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression. And when stressful things happen, they get over it more quickly. And I think there are practices we can do that help us feel ease with the uncertain future.
24:58Some of these mindful check-ins, noticing that we're carrying around uncertainty, stress is one way. And then reframing uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life and the freedom that we can feel when we realize we don't control tomorrow. we just go with it and we do our best and what delight there is in just viewing things with curiosity and just seeing what emerges.
25:26So even just our posture, here's an exercise for dealing with uncertainty instead of like kind of that alert posture when we're like trying to take it all in and predict the next second and like just lean back and take some slow breaths. We know that's going to help orient us and realize that we can actually face time in that way by letting it come to us and receiving what happens.
25:53And that's a completely different body stance than our usual go mode during the day. And that's just a way of saying I am in a you know receptive mode and I'm going to just be curious about what arises. And so I actually learned that on a meditation retreat because I tend to be type A and I'll leave a retreat going from like very relaxed to like that leaning forward tense of like where's the to-do list?
26:22And so carrying with me that posture of like let time unfold as it will without trying to control things. >> It's really interesting. It gets right to the heart of something that I spent a lot of time thinking about in the context of stress management and also just general thriving which is that I think that about half of the messages that we get related to stress and mindbody interventions relate to adopting this forward center of mass.
26:51this idea of when challenge arises, you smash into it, you go through it. On the other hand, there are these stress mitigation techniques, both mental and physical, body oriented, mind oriented, etc. that are more of the sort that you described that are um they're not um being back on your heels, so to speak, like letting things bulldoze you, but are more of this uh receptive mode.
27:11Do you think it's fair for us to adopt a sort of a general framework and model that that perhaps people can adopt for themselves if they like that of course it's not an eitheror but that having both of these in one's kit of tools could be valuable um because one is less energetically demanding but of course offers less opportunity for agency >> um or at least apparently so that's the leaning back and then the the other certainly gives an opportunity for agency but we know from 100 years or
Forward Push Versus Letting Go
27:42more of psychology and psychiatric literature >> and from the emerging literature on stress mitigation that >> it's work. It's not something that is without a cost. It can get you far better results than it were you to just let stress bulldoze you, but that it's work. And so we have to emphasize that work um in very deliberate ways.
28:05>> When we know it's productive, we should work. And when we know there's a brick wall, we should let go. So I think of it I like this forward mass idea. I think of it as you muscle it and or you release it. And we need both. And so that letting go is a really important wise you know discerning way to mitigate stress in the right situations in the right time and you know we can't muscle through everything right.
28:31So another way I like to think about it is just the waves of life. Like I mean we are in an ocean and we have small waves, we have big waves, but we're always going to be hit by the next wave. And so it's this skillful surfing or navigating that we can do better, when we realize when we control things, when we can't, when we can truly feel safe and have ease versus when we need to kind of gently paddle.
28:59For people that are listening to this and that and want to start to adopt practices, do you think that spending some time creating a written or a spoken narrative is helpful? I mean, we hear this, but are there any data that support the use of journaling as a as a tool? >> Definitely. Creating a coherent narrative is critical to our ability to make sense, find meaning, find resolution, have a social identity around our lived experience, what happens to us.
Narrative, Purpose, and Closing
29:29So narrative is kind of everything, right? In stress research, it's it's not what happens to us, it's how we're interpreting it and how we're responding to it. And I've I've heard you say the exact same thing when you've talked about what is stress. It's it's really what narrative we're creating around it.
29:44So I think a narrative of purpose, fill in the blank about what your what's meaningful to you. But that is why we're different than just the rats that we study or the monkeys. We have the ability to do this projection to the future to ask what is our purpose in life to see and know that we are going to die and we can have some control over how we live and maybe even how we die and how we want to be remembered.
30:12That is so beautiful. That helps us rise above this being monkeys and clothes. >> I want to first of all just say thank you for doing the incredibly important work you do. I also just want to thank you for taking the time today to share this information. I know I speak on behalf of many many people and I just really want to extend my gratitude.
30:31>> Thank you so much and thank you for for your podcast. >> Well, it's a labor of love and it's days like today and discussions like this that make it worthwhile. So, thank you. >> Thanks, Andrew.
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