Dhru Purohit Show - The Silent Killer of Life Expectancy with Dr. Elissa Epel

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Birch mattress by Helix. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Elissa Epel to discuss how we can break free from the bonds of chronic stress. They share practical strategies for coping with stress when things go wrong, the importance of social support, spending time in nature, and cultivating true, restorative practices.  Dr. Epel is an internationally renowned health psychologist who focuses on how to live well and thrive with existential stress, despite the challenges we face personally and globally. She is a professor at UCSF and the director of UCSF’s Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect, which has been translated into 30 languages. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Epel dive into: - What happens when chronic stress is pervasive in our lives (0:07) - Why having the goal of an anxiety-free life is not practical (6:32) - Reframing your mindset when things go wrong in life (19:10) - The mental blocks that get in the way of understanding that things are going to go wrong (22:02) - Identifying and becoming aware of your personal cues for stress (26:42) - Practical ways to step into creating purpose for yourself (32:40) - The top practices that can help you reset when you’re feeling stressed(39:08) - Using walks in nature to connect and check in with ourselves (54:15) - The difference between “relaxing” and “restorative” (1:00:30) - Why the media can be an unforeseen source of stress in our lives (1:05:29) Also mentioned in this episode: -New York Times article, How Loneliness Is Damaging Our Health -The Roseto effect: a 50-year comparison of mortality rates -Dr. Epel’s new book, The Stress Prescription For more on Dr. Elissa Epel, follow her on Instagram @elissa.epel, Facebook @TelomereEffect, and Twitter @Dr_Epel. Get her new book, The Stress Prescription, here.  InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Birch mattress by Helix is made out of organic latex, organic cotton, New Zealand wool, and American steel springs. To get $200 off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to https://www.birchliving.com/dhru today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chronic stress gets into our cells and speeds up biological aging. It's the precursor to anxiety and depression. We all know how damaging stress is on our body. And we all know that stress makes everything worse in our life, especially if we're suffering from a health condition. Even with that knowledge, and even though we all know how bad stress is, how many of us truly prioritize getting to the real.

root of it and actually practicing the latest evidence base of what's been proven in the science and in the studies to actually make a difference on stress. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Alyssa Eppel and we're talking all things stress and how to get to the root of stress. the inspiration from her book, The Stress Prescription. Dr. Eppel is an internationally

renowned health psychologist who is focusing on how to live well and how to thrive with existential stress despite the challenges we face personally and globally. She's a professor at UCSF and the director of UCSF's Aging Metabolism and Emotion Center. She's a member of the National Academy of Medicine, past president, of Academy of Behavioral Medicine and serves on scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health. She's received awards from Stanford University, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the American Psychological Association. She's the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Telomere Effect, which is now written in over 30 separate languages. Dr. Eppel's latest book

is called The Stress Prescription, Seven Days to More Joy. and ease, and it's a practical guidebook for anybody looking for small, simple, but evidence-based tips that anybody can do at any time in their life to drastically and dramatically reduce their stress experience. Stay tuned for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Epple. Dr. Epple, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Drew.

I'm so happy to be here. I'd love to start off with a big picture question. and it's the idea of just how toxic chronic stress can be. You know, we were chatting a little bit. People hear the topic of stress, and sometimes they think, okay, I get it, stress is bad for you. But chronic stress, I actually don't think people realize just how bad it is for us when it's pervasive in our life. It has all sorts of implications.

Can you give us a few of the high-level things that constant, toxic, chronic stress does to our body and mind over the long haul. Yes, absolutely. And I couldn't agree with you more. I think that it's like this slow drip and we get so used to it, we don't notice it. And so we're all living in a matrix of chronic stress. I mean, most of us feel more stress than we need to be. And that is a shame.

We don't need to live that way. We could go on with a dark cloud of stress over our head for the rest of our life. and not know that it's dampening our life experiences and our ability to feel joy, to see positive things, because it kind of shapes how we think, what we see, and how our, of course, how our body is responding to the rush, the rush of adrenaline, the rush of must get more done each day, et cetera. So to your question, I like the word toxic stress because it makes it really clear that there is a type of stress that has damaging effects on our brain and body. And that is the type of stress that goes on for years and years when we're not managing it and we're not able to take breaks or we don't know to take respite from difficult situations that might, you know, cause us to live in this kind of hyper aroused state.

So what we know is very clear, chronic stress gets into our cells and speeds up biological aging. And I can tell you about some of those mechanisms. And the other part that we know that is really about human suffering is that it's the precursor to anxiety and depression. And so if we're not managing it well, we're just putting ourselves at open risk. of, you know, living a life of unnecessary suffering. And if we're vulnerable in our families and our genetics to any of these psychiatric disorders, then we're just fueling the fire. So let me give you an example.

We already had this burden of mental health epidemic before COVID. And so we already knew we had a youth crisis and that we weren't tending to people's mental health like we were to physical health. and taking it seriously. During the last few years during COVID, we have had 130 million extra people diagnosed with depression or anxiety, or at least scoring high on those in this era of kind of global stressors and pandemic stress. So we're not quite made for the modern stressors that we're bombarded with. And, you know, they can kind of spin our mind out of balance so that we're mounting the stress response often. And the toxic part is that our baseline changes, that we don't go back to a normal healthy baseline. Our baseline becomes elevated. This kind of

high level of sympathetic nervous system activity and low levels of vagal tone or parasympathetic nervous system activity. You're mentioning some of the mechanisms as well and talking about biological aging, like stress actually ages you. What are some of the ways or other things that you can kind of tease out a little bit more in that category. You know, you're known for some of your work in the category and sharing about telomeres as well. Does that play into this? Anything more you can add to the idea of what exactly stress is doing to us?

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Right now, InsideTracker is offering my podcast community a very special offer of 34% off your order. Just go to insidetracker.com slash Drew. that's D-H-R-U to get your discount code and try it for yourself. That's inside I-N-S-I-D-E tracker, T-R-A-C-K-E-R-com slash D-H-R-U for 34% off until the end of November. Now let's get back to today's episode. So we knew that caregiving stress, work stress, the type of stress that goes on and on for years is a risk factor for early diseases and sometimes mortality. But now we can look inside the cell and really see how those mechanisms are sped up even from childhood.

We can measure aspects of cell aging and see that early life, adversity, trauma, these are increasing the rate of biological aging. So it's not just we wait till 50 and then we see if we get diseases. Everyday matters. Like our cells are listening to our emotional state and our thoughts. And so that's something that I think by being able to look at cell aging clocks in the cell, we've now understood that this is a lifespan process or lifelong process that we can be tending to and curating and protecting. So to address your question, I'll mention four aspects of cell aging machinery in the cell.

telomeres, epigenetics, inflammation, and mitochondria. And we can talk about what each of those are, but what is remarkable is that they all tell us the same story, that, for example, trauma exposure and especially PTSD symptoms, speed up or wear down those aging mechanisms so that our aging is sped up. And of course, lifestyle affects them in a similar way when we have a really unhealthy lifestyle, we're eating toxic food, we're creating the same chemicals, a chemical soup of stress. So there's a common pathway that ages the cells that creates inflammation and oxidative stress through chronic stress or traumatic stress that goes on and on because we've, you know,

been conditioned to perceive threat in an excessive way. So we started off the conversation with talking about the chronic stress component and just how toxic that it is for us. But your book opens up with this idea that, you know, life never having any stress at all or being constantly sort of no stress or being kind of perfect or no sort of adversity is also not something that we want to shoot for. Can you expand on that? Yes. I definitely think that it's helpful to think of, you know, the curve. There's like the the Yerk-Stadson curve where not enough stress, we don't perform well. There's a peak level of stress where we perform at our optimal functioning.

And then there's too much stress when we kind of can't perform well. And so we believe it's the same with biological aging where our body loves healthy stress, short-term stress, physical stress, and recovers from that and actually has a little cleanup up crew in the cell that we stimulate with short-term acute stress. So exercise stimulates autophagy. So the machinery, the little Pac-Men that eat up junk in the cell and misfolded proteins and gets rid of free radicals. So we want to have stress. We just don't want it, we want it to be manageable, short-term, and under our control. And that's a healthy form of stress. And we just don't want it to be chronic where it goes on and on and we can't shut our response off.

So part of that and people understanding their baseline so that they can begin to correct from life's stressors that are on them is kind of following a little bit of a map that you've put together. And I'd love to just talk about that high level, right? In your book, which is available now, people can pick it up, the stress prescription, seven days to more joy and ease. you have this section inside of here where you talk about the mind states that create physiological stress or restoration. Can you chat about that and set that up here? Because that's going to be a

big part of the conversation that we get into moving forward. Yes, absolutely. So red mind is what we think of when we think of stress. It's when, you know, the whole stress response is engaged and our heart is pumping fast and our blood pressure goes up. And I mean, we all know what that feels like. And that can feel very threatening when it's like, you know, in your stomach, you feel unsafe, you feel threatened. That is extremely uncomfortable stress. That's what we call the threat state. And that's good for survival.

It will mobilize immediate energy so that we can, like, flee from a predator. But we can also have that red state mind when we're doing something like stressors to the body, cold stress or high-intensity interval training. And that is a different type of stress response that is still high arousal, but it's that type of hormetic stress that we recover from quickly and we think it's anti-aging. So red mind state is inevitable in life and we're never going to stop the slings and arrows from coming. So it's not about, you know, trying to control the the uncontrollable future and try to not have bad things happen. It's about can we respond to them and approach them with a healthy, positive mindset

that allows our body to recover quickly. Yeah, and part of that is this message you have, which is expect unexpected, which will tease out in a little bit. And then there's this, to be simplistic, we kind of think of when we're not stressed, we're normal, we're at baseline, we're relaxed. And that's where I think things get. a little tricky because I believe that we are very rarely, truly at ease and relaxed. And so even if we're, you know, watching TV or doing some hobby, we are often holding on

to unresolved business, unconscious stress. And so we can do better than what our baseline is and what our relaxation is. we can actually push our baseline lower to true East states. And that's what I call green mind, which is true relaxation. So baseline is not relaxation. Baseline is yellow mind, which we might think of as busy mind, ruminative mind. Maybe we're processing and reliving things or we're more likely anticipating things in the future and worrying. And that is just how our mind works unless we're consciously helping us land here in the present, our certain moments. Our certain moments. When I was reading about it in the book, I often thought about it's like, we're stuck with the inertia of the past, something that's incomplete, something that didn't happen well, something that even if it's not in the forefront of our mind, our body's kind of dealing with it, right?

Or we're sort of projecting into the future, that we're caught up in the momentum of the future. And it's so tough because for most people, they live in that state quite frequently. so it's even hard to even catch yourself in that moment because you're like, well, I guess this is how I always was. Well said, exactly. But that's the work. That's the work that is really, you know, and for those that don't have a copy of the book in front of them, this is really about following a prescription, a seven-day plan that will help you gradually move through these levels. So you explain the green mind, which is a true rest state. Where do we go from there?

There is a state that is so rare that we rarely get, and that is blue mind, and that is a state of pure receptivity, ease, and relaxation when we're not needing to exert effort or worry about our environment and surroundings. And how do we get there? There are two easy ways. One is we all get there every night with deep sleep. That's the most restorative physiological state we will ever have where brain is being cleaned, our metabolism. is being reset so that we're moving to be more insulin sensitive. And we're having a lot of vagal tone. So that's beautiful. We can actually work on improving deep sleep. There is no research to show us how we can get more deep sleep. But there are some obvious things like how we, how stressed we are during the day can impact our sleep and we can take it to bed with us. But we can try to have a ramp down before bedtime to increase that deep restorative state. But we can have that. when we're awake too. And I will say, I think safely that very few of us ever build that time in a regular way. But it's not hard to do. It's just that we think we have to like go to a

week-long retreat or, you know, maybe drive, have a two-hour venture going to yoga class. But we can actually create those deep restoration states in shorter periods at home as well by conditioning our body to, you know, these environments that are conducive to relaxation. So it wouldn't be the office with screens and phones and, you know, people being able to reach you, but rather short periods when you just check out and you do slow breathing and you really try to be in the moment and slow things down for your body to reset. So I mean, I wonder for people listening, like, is this deep restate, something that you're familiar with. We all know what it feels like after a massage or a yoga class, that type of real release that feels so great. That's what I'm talking about.

I wonder sometimes, like, I get into the zone when I'm interviewing people, most interviews, not every interview. And I have this deep sense of relaxation that kind of overcomes me. I'm super present. I'm not really thinking about anything else besides the interview itself. Where do you think that that falls on the spectrum of stuff? I love that state. And that flow state is definitely a healthy mind state of present-oriented engagement and the body and the mind are pretty synced up. That, I would say, is probably green-blue because your attention is also, even though you're not eyes closed doing some mind-body activity, your attention is so focused.

And so you're not kind of triggering the nervous system to stay vigilant. Right. My nervous system still has to be pretty engaged here to make sure that the interview stays on track and that we're appropriate for time. But I bring it up because I think the better and better that we get at some of these, and I want to also tease out that we're going to talk about a lot of practical tools that you have inside of this prescription beyond just like the, you know, people hearing about meditation and yoga, which are all of wonderful things.

We have some other things that we'll tease out there. So please stay tuned to everyone. But the better that you get about this process, the more that your life starts to live in these healthier regions. And even things that can look like work on the outside, you can do them from a much more relaxed place. And I find that that's a big part of how I keep my stress levels. at a manageable place, and then I can bring in the targeted stresses like working out,

cryotherapy, sauna, et cetera, as a way to support my body's nervous system and become more resilient. Yeah, beautiful. So when you look at those mind states, where would you say you spend a lot of time and how do you, you know, stay out of red mind? I have been focused a lot of my life on how do I organize myself? towards the things that bring me joy and happiness. A lot of that is relationships.

I was sharing with you previously, but I work with both my sisters. I'm involved in a business with my dad. And I've arranged my life to spend quality time with people who really fuel me. And I have removed a lot of situations. It's taken time to get there, for sure. But I've removed a lot of situations

that put me in a place where I'm not doing what makes me excited. And I don't even would say excited. I'm not involved in situations that, you know, I heard this great quote. It's very simplistic, but I get the idea of it. It was from this author named Seth Godin. He said, you know, stress is one thing going one way and another thing going another, right? There's part of your body that wants to relax and there's this, all these mind, these thoughts inside of the mind that are pulling you in another direction. I try to remove those friction points in my life that are happening in the background without me knowing about it.

So I feel on a weekly basis, I don't really have the levels of anxiety that I used to have previously because I'm more aware at catching these stressful moments early, not being scared about them, which goes into your next thing, which is expect the unexpected, and using them as an alert that,

hey, actually, this is like a smoke detector. Like something is going on, what do I need to do? Do I need to slow down? Do I need to question some sort of belief system? Do I need to let go of something? Do I need to reframe a goal? Do I need to quit on a goal that worked for me six months ago, but now doesn't work for me now or create a new version of it? So it's kind of a little bit of a

hodgepodge, but it's probably a lot of the tools that you talk about here. Absolutely. It's so similar. I'm just that stepping back and reflecting and asking yourself about your time used. You know, is this creating that conflict or is this bringing me regenerative energy through joy and purpose. It's something we don't often do, but it's, we deserve to like step back, do our personal inventory and really ask ourselves hard questions about how we fill our time. It's habitual and we feel obligated to our routine. We're very, you know, routized people. And our days are very similar in how we spend our time. So I think that's, that's absolutely beautiful and it sounds like that type of shift is something that evolved over years.

Absolutely. And I don't think you can get there without friction. And sometimes when people go down the path of thinking about how to reduce stress in their life, even the idea of the fear of stress coming up and the concern about avoiding stressful situations causes stress in itself. Exactly. And really, that's a great opportunity to go into, you know, inside the book, you have a broken down a week's prescription. So day one, things will go wrong and that's all right. Tell us what you mean about that. I think that really solidified and became 100% crystal clear from the pandemic. And we have,

we always have an inherently uncertain future. And we want it to. to be certain and predictable and controllable. We love control. That is how our brains work. When we feel things are predictable, we can relax. We don't need to be scanning and controlling and trying to, you know, prevent things from happening. So the, I just the simple idea of realizing we actually control very little of our future. So we have our, you know, idea of tomorrow and our plans and things may go wrong and things may change.

And that's okay. If we can believe that's okay, we can loosen our grasp and our tight, rigid expectations of how things have to go so that we can, you know, really surf the waves more. During the pandemic, our research was so topsy-turvy. There were so many things that would go wrong each day. You know, we had, it was an extreme example, but we had. We had heat waves, we had COVID infections, we had smoke that would shut down our lab, we had supply chain issues, we couldn't get pipettes and continue basic procedures looking at people's blood. And so when I, I mean, this was all incredibly stressful because we have a big operation involving a lot of people. and when it gets disrupted, it feels like, oh my goodness, we can't go on this way.

But when I shifted to this is exactly how things are right now and we just have to go with it and laugh and smile when tomorrow doesn't turn out as we planned. And writing plans in pencil is the same thing of just realizing, you know, we want to make plans, but we just in this world with this kind of volatile uncertainty, we have, we also need to really be able to have that flexibility and go with the flow. And older people are great at that. Like with age, we have more positive emotion. We have less of this striving to control events in the future and more of this not sweating the small stuff. You said during the time, you know, you shifted your perspective. For a lot of people shifting to shifting into the idea that things will go wrong and that's all right feels like like a major leap what's getting in the way of that happening like what are some of the things that are the blockages that you see in your work

people reading your book people giving you feedback hearing you on podcasts what are some of the things that you see that get in the way whether their mindset practices lack of practices media, etc. What gets in the way of stepping into that understanding that things are going to go wrong, but that's okay? And actually we should expect it to be a part of our life. And expect it not vigilantly waiting and anticipating for something to go wrong, but rather being in ease with a moment because right now everything is okay. Right now we are safe.

And that reminder, like you said, catching yourself and noticing what stress you might be caring, that's part of the key to being okay with the uncertain future is embracing the certainty of this moment as well as understanding that my expectations won't be violated. I won't feel like a victim if things go wrong tomorrow. If all the things that we're hoping that are going to happen in our personal life, our work life globally, most of that is, or let's just say a lot of of that is out of our control. So you ask, what is it?

What is it? So I will say there is one quality that I think is quite interesting that we don't often think about. And that is simply that how tolerant we are of uncertainty. And when we measure this tolerance of uncertainty, this ability to be okay, not knowing, not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, that turns out to be a really big vulnerability factor. So when we're really wound up on wanting certainty, we're more vulnerable to depression, stress, anxiety, PTSD. There seems to be that there are some folks that are out there,

that their baseline of stress is so high that even catching themselves feels very hard to do because they're constantly reacting to the inputs of different stress around them. You mentioned they could be a caregiver. They could be, dealing with some sort of chronic stress component. It could be childhood adverse experiences that never really got a chance to get resolved or the tools to help them sort of self-soothe that in that process. If somebody thinks that they're one of those people, where do they even get started? Like what's step number one? I love that question and I'm no stranger to that. And I think people who feel like that right now, they know who they are and they might be listening

and that little check-in didn't do anything for them, right? So that check-in of, like, what's in my body right now is really good for discovering the vagueness that we carry with us, the uncertainty stress. And so that's a advanced level of you think everything's fine, you're not coping with some stressful event, but you can do better and you can check in and release some of that stress and tension.

The body knows. The body carries so much. It's a great source of information we can tap into. I was just reading email yesterday. I got to an email with a really upsetting content. I had offended someone that I didn't know about. And so I read that and I just had such kind of shame, dread, anxiety. And I went on. and I was so distracted. I went on, you know, 50 emails from there and was distracted and engaged with other things. Because this original email that was critical of you, you were trying to move on and kind of focus on other stuff and you were super distracted.

I was in the middle of my time rush. I'm like, I got to get through, you know, the three hours of email right now. Yeah. And so I went on and on. I get to the end and I'm like, why am I feeling some dread? What is this bad feeling? I actually forgot the specifics of it. but my body didn't.

And so I, you know, I, I, I, I, it was pretty noticeable. I checked in. I'm like, there's something wrong. What is it? And then, of course, it brought me back to, okay, I need to, you know, work on this issue. And that is just an example of the body carries it longer. We might be distracted. We might forget.

We might repress. And, you know, distraction is great for moving on, but the body doesn't get distracted. So if people who are listening now want to get a chance to kind of check for themselves, what would be some cues that they could be looking at? One of the ones we hear often is like, is like our stomach clenched and are we kind of like tightening our abs? Is that, is that one? Is there any other cues that you might say? That's a good one. And I will say, what is it for you is the question? Because we all carry it quite differently. And, you know, just a check-in, I mean, furrowed brow and clen shrewed.

jaw and shoulders tightening, those are really typical and subtle. So often checking in with your kind of upper body is helpful because there's always room for improvement there. And leaning back is also another important body cue, postural cue, to help us be more in the moment rather than kind of leaning forward and trying to control the future. But really, you know, where we store it in our body can be different for different people and there are age differences and personality differences. Where do we somaticize? So stomach, of course, has tremendous nervous system. And so that's a sensitive place. What about for you on a personal level? Where do you notice when you catch yourself? Yeah. Where is it? It's stomach, absolutely. Yeah. It's that, you know, that the GI track nervous system is very, very sensitive.

to your question about what do you do if you're always feeling stressed out and where do you begin? I think that it's wonderful to realize that you can bring your baseline lower within minutes with slow breathing. That's just like that is how we're wired and we don't take advantage of that enough. And so many people know about the power of breath, but just to talk about how simple is, when you're talking about slow breathing, is there a little protocol or sort of format you follow? People talk about box breathing or this. What have you found that works well? Well, personally, I think box breathing is so easy to remember. Inhale, four, hold four, exhale for, hold four. So that's what I might do like in the middle of the night if I'm having insomnia because it takes no cognitive effort.

there are lots of ways to breathe that help us relax, but also reset. So when we hold breath a little bit and you've talked to James Nestor so you know, like there's a lot of ways that we can create a more tolerance to stress in our body, tolerance to CO2 in our blood by doing a little bit of breath holding in our breath exercises. I really think that there are many paths to ease to lower depression, to lower anxiety, and people just need to try a few things and grab what feels best because that's what they're going to stick with. That's what they're going to do.

The most basic one is six breaths per minute. And if we can slow down, so it's roughly 10 seconds per breath, the inhale and the exhale, we can slow that down. that actually is triggering the vagus nerve. That's called vagal breathing or resonant breathing. And anyone could do that anywhere. It's just a matter of, are we valuing that? Are we really going to take time out and be disciplined and do it?

And it feels great. There are guided apps and all sorts of biosensors that might help people feel like it's a concrete thing that we're doing. I love it. So once we have a frame of how you're kind of thinking about stress and how people can see themselves in the line of the different circles that you outlined. And we understand this idea that things will go wrong and that's all right. Where do you want people to kind of go from there? What are the next sort of principles that we want

to set up so that we can begin to untangle this ball of stress that people have in the lives? What the reflection you are talking about about looking at what you're doing for work and what relationships you have, I feel like there's a lot of, a lot to be gained from that type of stepping back in what I call in the book stress inventory. And one thing that we fall into is feeling like I'll do it tomorrow or that's in my future. But what we do in a day is really how we live our life. It really adds up quite quickly. And one thing that's been compelling for me in dealing with more existential stress, things we can't control, climate crisis, is realizing that we have such limited days. It feels like unlimited. But the shortness of our life,

walking on earth and choosing how we live is really precious. And often people get to a point a crisis and they get this spiritual urgency. They feel that they realize that they need to live their values more and they reshift their priorities toward relationships usually, toward love, toward purpose. And so can we feel that spiritual urgency now? Can we actually take a step back and rather than feel, like this is something we can change later, realize how precious every day is and how fragile life is, and make those changes now. And so that kind of living with the sense of the preciousness

of each day has helped me not sweat the small things is really a really great perspective-taking shift. You were mentioning before we were recording the podcast that you went to India recently, to the town of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government in exile. I know in the Tibetan tradition in Buddhism, there's like a death meditation. I used to do it when I was younger. Yes. Do you use tools like that, like meditating on sort of the smallness of life? Are you journaling?

What are some practical ways that you've stepped into creating that purpose for yourself to recognize just how quickly life can kind of move before your eyes? Mm-hmm. It's a great question. For me, the focusing on the climate crisis most definitely helps us understand the vastness of time and deep time and where we are. And rather than feeling, you know, why me, why us, it's really hard to live in this time, that shift to, this is actually amazing that we're alive in this time when human actions and our collective action determine the future so much. And so this is an opportunity for us to live our best life and to

decide what is it that we will do that will leave the ripple effect on others in our local lives typically. And so for me that realizing that local is global, global is local, we can't touch the climate crisis, but we certainly can do things that matter to the earth and the people around us. So that has been very helpful to just focus on purpose rather than some really bad projections that we have no control over and we don't know how bad it will get. Yeah, totally. Let's talk about this next idea that you have inside of the book, which is called Being the Lion. Can you extrapolate on what it is? Many people know this idea of, well, I'll let you get into it. I'll let you get into it.

So talk about what does it mean to step into us becoming the lion? The lion in the gazelle metaphor is really helpful. So you can picture the lion chasing the gazelle, and they're both having huge physiological reactivity, stress response, but it's quite different inside. So gazelle is threatened and having vasoconstriction running for her life. Whereas lion, she's running out of this amazing opportunity for dinner. And so, you know, that predator, or let's just say that potential opportunity stress response feels different.

It feels like you're driven by, you know, something good, reward, some growth, some positive outcome getting the prize. But it's also different in the body. And so the body is actually responding with a tremendous cardiac output and more blood and oxygen to the brain. So we're able to think better and problem solve better and still have positive emotion in the middle of stress. It's that adrenaline response that is different hemodynamics than the threat response, which we kind of think of as dominated by more cortisol. And as I said, like the blood pressure rises, but it's from vasoconstriction, not from this healthy young response of cardiac output. So how do we become the lion? those are simple statements we can say to ourselves as we're approaching a stressful situation

to shift from feeling threatened and just that kind of general feeling of tightening and heaviness and dread and fear all of that is just not necessary in our day-to-day psychological stressors we can actually shift toward thinking about we can do well. We can view this as an opportunity. We can feel enthusiastic. We can feel hopeful. Like shifting toward we have what it takes. We got this.

We can do our best. And we can't control outcome. We can only do our best. And that's a comforting statement to a lot of people. Everyone has a different line statement. So I do list a lot of options in the book. but it's what you believe, what fits and feels right for you that your body's going to listen to and kind of shift you to that positive response.

And there's been lots of studies by, for example, my colleague at UCSF Wendy Mendez, who's shown better performance when you tell someone to shift to this positive thinking. So in one study, she just had students shift to feeling their stress response before they took a fake GRE, a practice GRE. and thinking about how that positive stress response helps them perform better and how it's really their body feeling energized and oxygenated and excited. And they did better than the group who didn't have that reframe, that positive mindset about stress. So just that one suggestion made a big difference.

And then when they took the real GRE sometime in that next year, they actually did better. So there could be some, you know, real lasting mindset shifts that we can make. what is a statement if you have any that you're aware of like what do you say if you're approaching a you know talk performance something that it feels really challenging you know I think that one of the challenges that a lot of people have is when they notice they're stressed they try to access that stress by thinking through the mechanism of thinking or through the mind and well actually i'll just say through the brain let's let's call it that way like through thought and uh they try to think about it or they maybe in some cases they talk about it they could have a

therapist or somebody else and i think that's so much of the work that's coming out there and you talk a little bit about this in your book is that for a lot of people you're going to be better off quieting the stress in your life which yes maybe you think of it as coming from the mind which is obviously bigger than the brain but you're going to be better off quieting it through through the body. Like going on a walk, doing a little bit of box breathing. What are some of the top physical practices that you use in addition to breathing that help you start to peel back a little bit on the stress that's like the layers of the onion that are sort of wrapping you up? Are there top physical practices that you have that you can tap into? For instance, today,

you have like three interviews. You're on a press tour. There's a lot of different components that are there at the end of the day, if you're feeling a little bit wound up, a little stressed out, how did it go? What happened here? Do you have physical practices that you use? We've already talked about breathing. Is there anything else that you've tapped into? I would love to share some, and I will admit that I was, you know, you interview amazing people all the time. And I was talking with a friend yesterday about, you know, the science seems so boring sometimes next to some of these, you know, I'll just say kind of super exciting, phenomenal topics that you address. You know, science can never be extreme, like, life-changing ways.

I mean, you only interview people you find extremely interesting. And so I was telling my friend, like, you know, I can talk about. what I've been doing for almost 30 years. And there's a lot there, but it's this kind of incremental build. And so I guess, you know, maybe I was feeling a little bit like, oh, I'm, you know, I don't want to disappoint you in your audience. And, you know, my friend said the exact right things that are like within this, you know, of changing the shift toward, you know, away from Gazelle, maybe more toward line,

which was you have your whole life that has prepared you for this. You just go and you be yourself and you got this. Like just saying to a friend, you got this. And you've done this before. Like all of those things we can say to ourselves, of course. And it's super supportive to say that to someone else right before they do something. We don't realize it. And again, it's kind of boring.

But relationships and social support are the biggest stress buffer we have. Like, that's just how we're wired. I don't think of it as boring as all. I oriented so much of my life around this. I have a weekly men's group that meets every Thursday morning. We call it man morning because it's, you know, it's a men's group. If somebody wants to start a goddess morning out there, please go for it. And we get together, usually around like 8 a.m. is the new time because there's a lot of new dads in the group.

And we go hiking outside. We're lucky in L.A. We have all these beautiful hikes that are available to us. and we can go down to the beach. And we typically, as a way to kick off the walk together, we start off with a question, which I've borrowed from some of my friends from this organization called Summit Series.

And the question is, what are you celebrating and what are you navigating in life, right? Like, what's going well this week that you want to highlight? Because, by the way, human beings are bad at celebrating the things that are good for them. I mean, I can just think in my own life, there's so many amazing little accomplishments or a great episode or I was able to put the spotlight on an incredible guest like yourself. And I want to celebrate that, but we don't naturally create moments in our life to have these

conversations to pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, that was a tough thing you did, but you still attempted it. And maybe it wasn't as successful as you wanted, but you still did it. And that deserves celebrating. And then the other side, which is, what are you navigating? What are you navigating? What's tricky? What's not going as well?

What fight happened with you and your wife or husband that's still kind of on your mind? And really, you've got to just kind of share it a little bit. Not because you need advice, you know, but because you just need to get it off your chest. And it's amazing how every week our men's group, which is doing this now for about seven years pretty regularly, we all walk away from that morning, feeling so much more energized and having perspective. And I think you walk away with a few principles. You walk away with this idea that and reminder, and I call it a reminder because we, We all need this reminder.

Number one, you're not in it alone. The same stuff you're going through, even if somebody else is living a different life, they're going through the same themes that are there. So you're not alone. And as we know from a lot of the research on, you know, human origin and tribal development, our fear of being alone and being ostracized is a big driver of stress that's out there. Just the idea that we're going through stressful situation alone is stressful versus. knowing that, hey, we're not in it by ourselves.

We have other people that are there with us. And the second component is that most of us live with all these stressful thoughts in our head and we haven't even shared it out loud, sometimes to our own partner or family member or spouse. And when you acknowledge something and you speak it out loud, for some people, they don't like to talk, they want a journal. Great. When you see it on paper, you speak it out loud.

there's always a little bit of distance between you and that thing. If somebody's there to receive you, just as you were sharing with your friend, that, hey, I'm feeling a little bit nervous, talking on this podcast, you know, I'm back in a press tour. Am I going to, is it going to be interesting? Is it going to be this? When you say it out loud, even the tiniest little words of encouragement of somebody of like, hey, you know what?

That is tough. And just stating the obvious, you've been doing this work forever, right? Whatever you have to share is going to be perfect for that moment. And I think that the best tools for us to tackle things like stress are the obvious tools that we have to get people excited about. Because even though they're obvious, it doesn't mean that people are implementing them. There was recently a big report, I'll link to it in the show notes about the state of loneliness in America right now. And we know New York Times article, a bunch of press covered it. it's interesting that even the younger populations, right, Gen Z, etc., are also feeling this

increased levels of loneliness. So as much as people are out there writing bestsellers and yourself talking about the importance of relationships and stress, it's still we're fighting against so much inertia of life, technology, a lot of beautiful things that we have, but a lot of challenging things that have disrupted the way that we interact with these people. So I don't see these soft, I don't see these as soft interventions at all. I see them as incredible interventions and I see people like myself and really people like you as the hype people. You're like the hype woman for these simple things that we know that can drastically make a difference in people's life. Like a lot of people would be better off, not maybe focusing on their diet or, you know,

not focusing on what's the next supplement that I need to take. And instead, just genuinely looking at their life and saying, do I have a best friend? Okay. If you don't have a, have one person that you feel is your best friend that you can rely on and have these conversations with, maybe we're going to make that a priority. And let's see how that significantly changes our lives. Anyways, that's my little rant on the situation. We should just end here because that is like the absolute golden foundation of well-being. I couldn't agree more. And the, the, the, what we know, foundationally from research that, you know, that have no questions. We still can't do. So like, let's even just look at exercise. Most people don't exercise enough.

What I point out is that really short bouts of exercise, just take five minutes and do some high-intensity interval training, you know, do five things, push-ups or, you know, jog or something that's going to get your heart rate up. Like, that is a significant shifter. You were asking, like, what can we do in the body? For sure, it is, we're not using our body enough and we can use the body to change the mind. We can create these arousal states and the recovery states that really will relieve us of the burden of our overthinking and anxiety. But to your point about relationships, I think the anti-aging industry

is, you know, they do sometimes list stress and social support, but they just don't get the big picture because like you said, you can optimize all of these things, the nutrients and other biohacks, but if you don't have social connection, you're just one person, you are vulnerable. You're an open system where stress, depression, the joy in life is not getting inside. Did you ever hear the story about the little town in Pennsylvania filled with Italian immigrants? And it was during the 50s that a group of researchers went down there because one of the doctors that was at a nearby town that was studying rates of cardiovascular disease was talking to a colleague at a bar. And he was saying, you know, I'm a doctor.

doctor in this little town. I think the town is called Rosetta. And it's really crazy, but there's like no incidence of heart attacks for anybody under the age of at the time. I think it was like 80 years old. And the researcher from a nearby university got really curious and said, huh, we need to look into this. And so amassed a little bit of a fun and got some people on board and said, we're going to study this town of Rosetta. And they went and studied the town and they tracked their progress and looked at their incidences of cardiovascular disease over a few generations to try to understand, you know, what's going on? Is it the water? Is it their diet? Well, it wasn't the water. They're drinking the same water that everybody else is. It wasn't a diet because now that they were here in America,

they were eating kind of like similar diet that a lot of Americans were eating. And they had some of their remnants of the Italian diet that was there. And they kept on going through the list. And ultimately, what they found is that it was the social relationships. Wow. They had these social relationships, Malcolm Gladwell wrote this whole article, there's been a few documentaries about this as well, we can link to in the show notes. And these social relationships, they found that the average man above, I think, the age of 40 years old, was part of like three social groups. And people were making time. You had generational households, often four generations living in one household. Beautiful. You know, eating meals together, spending time

together, taking time off on the weekend. There's this huge level of interactivity. As the decades proceeded it went from the 60s to the 70s. Every year, the incidences of heart attack and heart disease increased, both in men and women. And by the time, I think it was like the late 80s, it was at the same national average as it was for everywhere else in the United States. And it was so powerful, and people could look it up and they could type it into Wikipedia or whatever. It's called the Rosetta Effect. This idea that social relationships can have a huge impact on the expression of our genome. Powerful idea and powerful reminders. and just goes right back into the things that you've been chatting about.

But enough about the Rosetta effect and relationships, which I love that component. You mentioned these targeted components of working out and like a quick hit workout, right? Or a seven-minute workout, you know, that was, I think the New York Times has a seven-minute workout that's out there. That was created by a university in Canada. What about walking? Do you find that as being a powerful tool in the toolbox for individuals as one mechanism? of getting back into the body and kind of quieting the mind? Absolutely.

What kind of walking are you thinking of? I'm just thinking about... Urban walking, nature walking? I mean, I would love a nature walk for most people, but I think that for a lot of people who maybe don't have access to that, even I feel like sometimes just getting out and walking a little bit around your block, if that's all you have access to, like let's do that at least. Yeah.

Absolutely. The ability to change things up, change our physical environment is a really big stress buster. And of course, if we can get urban greenery in, it's even more powerful. But opening the sensory gates, wherever we are, and observing things, noticing beauty, noticing the small flower that can grow through the cement in the city, those are. Those are. are ways to have the green effect, to have our senses focus outward and actually create a state, kind of like that flow state where we're getting out of our ruminative mind or our self-referential mind. So the ability to change our physical surroundings sounds silly, sounds like it wouldn't have an effect, but we're constantly perceiving threat cues. And the urban environment itself

is a sensory overload for needing to scan for danger and threat. And we know that. We know that the brains of people who live in the city detect more threat. When they're stressed out, their amygdala lights up more than people who live rurally or in the country. And even the bees and the birds have shorter telomeres if they're living in the urban area versus the country. So there's all sorts of reasons why we want to simulate nature, calmness, whatever makes us feel relaxed, whatever's meaningful to us, make a corner of your house, make a room of your house, be the place where you can go have that green mind or blue mind, some deep rest and not be multitasking.

I even saw a paper and I didn't have a chance to like really get into it and send it to my friends who I kind of say, like, what do you think about this paper and stuff? But it sounded like on the surface, and I feel like it's true for me, for people that are not a green thumb at home, even having fake plants, right? Even having like a fake tree or fake plants, like that even creates a relaxing effect is what the argument the paper was making. Do you think that that has any legitimacy inside of there? Of course, I'd like a real plant.

My wife and I travel so much that often we end up losing the plants that we have in. So we have our house filled with, you know, some fake plants and things. things and I know that when I look at them and I come into my living room, I like feel actually quite relaxed. Yeah. It's a wonderful idea for, you know, lots of people who can't, who are in environments, they're not in regularly, like the office, right? We rarely go to the office. Put a fake plant in. Yeah, we got a few fake plants over here. I find the studio very relaxing. And, of course, I love to get nature as well too. So anything else you want to add on the topic of nature? Because that's day number five in the book. Let nature do the work. Anything else that you want to

talk about because nature can often seem again like a soft intervention, oh, tree bathing, you know, forest bathing, that sort of thing. But yeah, anything else that you want to add? What are we doing with our mind while we're walking or while we're in nature is really, is really a big part of the question of whether it's going to be healing and relaxing? So when we are in nature, we often feel part of something bigger. the small worries get dissolved and we feel like we are connected to the larger world in a way that is people have called transformational lots of people have awe moments in nature and feel like they have a mental shift and I write about that in the book about there are many stories I

mean just if you ask people like have you ever had a moment of transformation when things looked different to you and you kept that perspective. That is what nature can do for us. And these are lasting effects. And my colleague, Dacher Keltner at Berkeley, studies awe, particularly in nature, but really you can find it in an urban walk. You can look at something and actually look at it for the first time with your sensory gates open and see the beauty in it or the miracle in it. And it could be a small object you're looking at, or it can be, you know, the sky.

And those awe moments both affect our physiology. They're stress reducing. And they also affect our, again, our sense of threat mind, our small mind, small rheumative mind. So the awe effect is big. There's a study showing if you take an awe walk, you actually end up with more joy and you smile more. and this is, you know, this is with older people over several weeks.

So just taking some, you know, a walk three times a week where you're actually seeing things and not preoccupied. So it's the sensory immersion that we want. I love that. And I love that, you know, through the work and efforts of people like yourself, you know, we're finding all these different ways that we can personalize these things to the life that we have. You know, you mentioned, you know, a lot of people sometimes can't or aren't as comfortable working out, right? I know some of the people that listen to this podcast or in that space. Many years ago, you were on the podcast of Dr. Rhonda Patrick. I love that interview.

It was great. You guys talked about the telemere effect, everything we can link to it in the show notes. One of the things that Dr. Rhonda Patrick has also shared is that, for example, if you're not somebody that can work out or feels like you're gearing up to a place to do that, right? Even getting in, which I know is tougher in the U.S. compared to like European countries like Finland and Denmark, the closest thing to working out that we know of right now is go into a sauna. Right.

Again, that's not accessible for everybody, but there are increasingly more people. I've even heard people that are listeners of this podcast are like, you know, I've heard you talk about some of the research around saunas. I've heard some of the other individuals talk about it. Me and my friends all chipped in together. And for our friend who has a bigger backyard, we keep the sauna there and we all kind of use it. Nice. Beautiful.

And that's one way to create some of those same effects, stress positive stress effects that are so beneficial that we know from the studies out of like Finland and Sweden. And I just love this day and age that we're in where you're constantly getting little nuggets like that, even with walking. I feel like probably part of the effect of walking, are you familiar with the whole EMDR movement, right? We've done a few podcasts on this, but just walking outside and the work of Francine Shapiro,

I believe, her name is. And the bilateral eye movement, scanning the horizon and how that triggers a sense of calm. Then you add nature on top of that too. And all of a sudden you're filling your body with all these positive benefits that are going to start to relax you. Big effects. And we shouldn't belittle them. We so overvalue and really think that the highest thing we can do is meditate and change the mind and change our thoughts. And yes, meditation is great and we can reframe things and view things differently.

But it turns out that we're not using the whole nervous system in the body if we're just using mental strategies. and all of those things that you are talking about, whether they're, you know, aerobic, physically active. So I'll call that aerobic fitness or stress fitness, which is the cold exposure, the hot exposure, and ideally the alternation, hit. Well, hit I would put in the fitness category. Everyone knows that's good. But it turns out we can reach stress, we can get stress fitness through stressing out the nervous

system in those ways, right, that are healthy and short. And the sauna work is phenomenal. I mean, has so many physiological benefits to health. You know, we can make a whole list, but at the end of the list is usually mood or mental health. And it's like, oh, no, no, that's actually big. And there's amazing research by my colleagues, Chuck Rezone and Ashley Mason that are showing depression can be really tough to treat. It can be lots of people have treatment resistant depression. Meds don't help. and believe me, people tried cognitive behavioral therapy, et cetera, but it's a chronic remitting, chronic ongoing condition. And sauna, heating up people's core body temperature acutely, even just for a few sessions can lead to remission of depression in the brain. So big effects,

release of inflammation and growth factors is probably the mechanism. These are all being studied in an acute way that then recalibrates. So why not use these body up strategies? They should be no lower in status. They're really powerful. I love it. It's a powerful reminder. Help us understand the difference between relaxing and restoring, right?

You make that distinction inside the book. What do you want people to know the difference between relaxing and then truly what is restorative? So relaxing is great and important, and we should do it. during the day, we must take short breaks. That was our top advice as we were dealing with the pandemic frontline workers, medical workers at UCSF, my university. Take your breaks. If you can't take breaks, you're basically having a buildup of the nervous system tension throughout the day and it's going to lead to burnout. And the other piece of that, if we're not taking breaks, is, you know, stress uses a lot of energy. It is exhausting. No wonder everyone's exhausted,

you know, peri-pandemic, because it challenges our mitochondria. And we've shown that chronic stress dampens mitochondrial activity. And so when you realize that, you're like, oh, that's actually, that's pretty serious. We don't want to wear out of mitochondria early. I mean, that's like how we feel, how vital and energetic we feel. And it's really the source of a lot of diseases early in life is this kind of, we think, the mitochondria quite involved. So these, relaxation is great, but what's better is restoration and rejuvenation. And so that's going to take longer. That's more these mind-body activities where we're sending signals constantly for hours or even days if we're on a retreat. It's safe. We have to feel safe. That's the biological signal our body's

reading. It's time to restore. So I did a retreat study with colleagues with Deepak Chopra at his center. And for one week, we looked at gene expression changes and people couldn't bring their computers and they weren't working. And so we really, you know, we kind of created a bubble of relaxation being at the resort. And then half the people were randomized to learning meditation. The other half just being at a resort. And so the question was, what is happening in, are we shifting what our genes are doing, the types of proteins that are made and does it differ by group?

And so what we found was that there is a dramatic relaxation and restoration effect. And that means that all of the genes that are creating responses related to stress, regulating stress and regulating our immune response, those went way down. I mean, dramatic decreases. And so the body was basically saying, we don't need to put energy there. We're safe. and we saw increases in mitochondrial genes, in some telomere related genes. We actually saw an increase in telomerase in the expert group, those who had been meditating

a long time, their body got right into restorative mode. And so that, you know, it's a privilege to have a long retreat, but we know how potent they are, and we think it's a big reset. Ten months later, we saw that the group who learned meditation had lower, depression and stress and anxiety and more vitality. So there can be lasting effects of a big reset and probably mind shift sets, but also some we're still doing some of the mantra meditation. Rejuvenation is different.

That's like, can we stimulate the stem cells? And that really takes us back to the hormetic stress, not so much relaxation, but things like caloric restriction and the work of, you know, Volta Longo shows that we can create rejuvenation through stem cell activity with some of these, you know, kind of more extreme hermetic stressors. You know, I want to go back to something that you were sharing previously. You were talking about, for you personally, thinking about and reflecting on sort of the magnitude that we're dealing with with climate change is part of what gives you perspective of just how much bigger life is. I know for, you know, related to that as a parallel thing and tied into this topic

of stress, whether it's the topic of climate or whether it's the topic of sort of geopolitical things that are happening, I find that I'm so much happier when I turn off the news. And I focus on more long format, long format, true sort of discussions that come from all different perspectives that help us really get a true sense of stuff. Because I think it's natural that the 24 News hour cycle is trying to use the fear component to kind of bring you into a story that they feel probably well-intentioned is deserves attention. What have you found with media consumption and your recommendations and for people when it comes to this topic of the stimulus that so much of us are getting from these outside sources

that are trying to inform us but may end up causing a little bit more stress in our lives? Yeah. Media is huge. The media effect on stress. And it's been well studied. My colleague, Roxie Silver and Ellison Holman have studied disasters and media use. And, you know, Boston Marathon Bomber, 9-11, and now COVID. And the story is always this. Dose response, the more media, the more anxious you are, the more PTSD symptoms you have. And long term, the more health or cardiovascular symptoms you may have. So these are large studies with lots of people. So you can look at, are there real health outcomes to watching media, on disasters, the more visual images, the more severe the symptoms. And the more types of media,

TV, phone, social media, the worse the symptoms. So we do need to protect ourselves. It is getting to ourselves, whether we realize it or not. You know, we know that we can say, okay, I know they're just being dramatic, but yet our body's responding as if we're also experiencing some of that real threat. Like after 9-11, there was this amazing population-based study showing there was a large study showing that the closer you live to the World Trade Center, the closer you live to the tragedy, the higher your blood pressure is. But even on the other coast, you know, in Washington State, blood pressure went up. Just a tiny bit, but in everyone as a population, it went up a little bit. So the idea that we're vicariously experiencing each

other's traumas, even across the world, is real. So we need to really limit our media and protect ourselves. And some people are so good at that. And just watching, you know, maybe reading news media once a day is that it sounds like that's more what you do, having trusted reliable sources. That's a great habit. And it's really hard to not check the news because we think we're missing something, but it can be helped by, for example, putting your phone in a drawer or in a different room because we're so impulsive about it. Yeah, and I think once you get started, it's kind of like processed food. Process food is really addictive.

And even though it's not a big part of my diet, if I'm going to eat a little bit, like on the rare occasion, it's immediately, even somebody like me who is the base of my diet is, you know, quite healthy. I work out regularly. I'm in this industry. I know anybody can get addicted from that level of a food. Like, you just cannot stop in that moment. I think media is a little bit similar.

Like, you turn it on and you're like, oh, like, I'm interested in this thing that is the next disaster, which everything is a disaster these days. And I think it's just another reminder that sometimes the background noise that's going on in people's lives is also because, which accumulates to the stress, it's just because there's actually too much noise that's there. Could be from a TV, could be from smartphone over consumption of social media. There was this interesting study that was done that the noisier your area is on a city level, the less likely you are to know your neighbor.

Fascinating. Right? So the further you got out to an area is that were quieter in general between traffic, you know, sirens, etc. other stuff, the more likely it was that people knew their neighbor. I think a version of that is also happening inside of the home, right? The noisier it is with just background noise in general, I think that's very taxing on our body and we're less likely to want to engage with the people around us. And I think it's just good to pay attention to.

You know, it's funny even the new Apple Watch, no endorsement, it's just something that I use. it has a decibel sensor and it will give you an alert like a haptic alert it'll kind of tick you a little bit and say you're in a very noisy area and by the way if you stay in this noisy area above 80 decimals for quite some time that is also shown to have like long term damage on your hearing and other things like that and I was like oh well that's pretty cool I'm not really going to use that I don't go to like a lot of concerts and stuff what was interesting is that I would find myself during the week in many situations, especially when I'm here in Los Angeles and kind of the busier parts, there'd be many situations where I might even be at a cafe outside sitting with friends and

having coffee and I'm just in a noisy intersection. And my phone is kind of constantly going off saying like, this is too noisy right now. Like this is going to impact you. It's going to impact your focus. It's going to impact this, that. So, you know, just tying a couple ideas together and just the power of constantly having actual noise around you and how that. that prevents you from getting into relaxation mode. I'm really happy to hear Apple has that sensor. You know, there are ways technology can try to counter the damage they do. Right, the damage is done.

The screens of the social media does. And that's a good one is raising our awareness of those noise levels. Absolutely. So, let's as we're winding down here and we're kind of putting all these thoughts together, just zooming out, talk to us a little bit about even the name of the book, the stress prescription. What does prescription mean to you? And why do you think that people need a prescription for stress at this particular moment in history? We are not prepared for the multiple and overlapping existential stressors that we are facing.

We know that stress has gone up over the years in the last 15 years on a daily basis people report more stressful events and feeling more stressed by them. You said the last 15 years? Yes. And of course, that doesn't include the pandemic. And we know that, of course, we're now dealing with more global stressors that we can see every day that are threatening us in a new way, in a different way. And could I ask you one question? You're on a role here, but just to clarify, what happened 15 years ago? Or is that when this research began? Yes. Like, why 15 years? That was my colleague, Dave Almeida, who's been doing these daily diary studies of stress. Uh-huh. Stress in America and in different countries and really asking people every.

day what happened and how they felt about it. So that's, and it may be more than 15 years, but that's when we have this kind of granular data tracking people's daily stress. But perceived stress, you know, kind of global stress has also gone up. And we know that the outcome of stress, these mental health conditions have gone up dramatically. So it's no surprise that stress is going up. But I feel that we need a new mindset. We need to be mentally prepared for, this new world of hyper-connectivity and more volatile uncertainty and traumatic events that we will all witness together and may be experienced directly. So with the climate crisis, we know that our children will be experiencing many more climate disasters than we were. And in our own lives,

we will see these disasters increasing for the rest of our lives. That is baked in at the this point. And it's so easy to go to gloom and doom and doerun and hopelessness, especially for young adults. And that is self-deterministic. That will lead us to lead our personal lives and try to deny and avoid what's happening because we feel so helpless. And the alternative is this more stress resilient mindset where we understand that these things are going to happen, we truly need to be okay. We need to start within and look inward and calm our nervous system, right? Because if we're having the threat response, we can't be okay and we can't connect to others and do the work we need to do. But if we can understand the fragility of life and our time on earth and how we can,

the real work is connectedness, is doing things together. As one single person, we can't do anything for, you know, climate, political divisiveness, instability, the climate refugees. I mean, there's just so many different situations we can list that are, you know, really looking at human suffering in the face and the future that we know where it's going to get harder. So what is our job in our own individual lives. It starts with managing our own threat response and not overestimating it and grabbing onto joy and purpose now in our days and how we can build that and see it, magnify it, savor it, and then be doing the work that we care about outside of our selves and our self-focused, ruminative mind that tells us we're inadequate and not enough. So,

escaping the kind of the tricks and traps of the brain we have so that we can get above all of the clatter of events that tell us to hunker down to not trust each other to stay you know competitive and that is part of our why we're even in this situation you know with with the climate crisis the kind of core causes is this illusion of the individual self and that we're not interconnected and we're not connected to the earth. There was a great new book out by Dan Siegel called Intrachconnected, and it really gives us a view of how connected we are. Emotions are contagious.

So that's one reason we want to manage our stress better, not just for ourselves, but so that we're creating ripples of support, love, and positivity instead of, you know, fear, threat, anxiety. So what you said about feeling that in the men's morning, you leave feeling not alone and just expressing your human experience and seeing it in other people's lives is magical. Like there is magic in that. And one of the ways that we understand the healing that needs to happen in our world is actually through. seeing the universal mind, seeing how the ways that we suffer so similarly and the ways that we are connected.

And that can actually be the most healing experience for things like PTSD. So it's not necessarily going to doctor and getting meds. It's being with people with similar values, similar experiences, similar traumas and sharing. We call it contemplative listening, really deep listening to someone. else has curative ingredients. And so that's about more healing and curation. But in terms of the work we need to do in the world, we need to start with not living in our own stress bubble.

You know, I think the other beautiful thing about stepping out of our stress bubble is a lot of the narrative that's floating around today. And I think whether, you know, on anything where you have multiple sides or especially you have two sides, both groups are really guilty of this thing. And it's making other people the enemy. And when you make other people the enemy and when you get into tribal thinking and you get into this like you're either with us or against us, you stop being able to have productive, nuanced conversations about what actually can move things forward.

You know, even in the topic of climate, I think one thing that's there is that there's so much focus on the energy of the bad actors that are there. I think more the narrative is shifting to like our own individual responsibility, how we play a part in it, other things. And there's not enough focus on like, where does innovation play a role? Where can we collaboratively work together? Where can we look at things that we thought were a bad thing in particular for, you know, just using this as an example because you brought it up for a long time in the world.

of climate and climate topics, nuclear was shunned for such a long time, right? No, it's not the option. It's going to be other options. It's not the way to go about it. And we stopped, you know, a media-driven conversation, stopped really healthy conversations around really looking at this thing, like, could this be a part, right? Could at least we talk about it with the person who's on the other side instead of writing them off that absolutely not they're the other, so we're going to shun them in this space? think that if you turn off the TV, if you work on your stress, you're also more resilient, which means that you are okay having conversations with people on the other side of the aisle,

finding the people, because on every place in the planet, there's always going to be good people who want to do the work to make the world a better place. And now using innovation, awareness, other stuff, we're actually getting towards the root of how to like change something versus spending so much of our time shaming other people. Now, I'm not. saying that shame doesn't have a role in society and to institute change. It's just that it felt like for a long time that was the primary narrative that was coming in. And when people feel that, oh, we're in the climate crisis because it's that person's fault or that organization's fault, it leads to a little bit of, okay, it's not going to get fixed until they do something about it.

And yet going back to your message, it's like, no, we're all going to do something about this. Right? We're all going to do something about us. So I'm not going to let somebody try to trigger my stress response by getting me into tribal thinking like they're the other. Right. And instead I'm going to say, no, okay, this is an important topic. We need to get to the root of it. How do we actually make progress on it? Well, we have healthy discussions about how to go about that, which means exploring all the different ideas on the table that can use innovation to help us actually solve the situation that we're in.

Right. The one thing that I'm seeing a lot more of these days. And I think it's probably because, you know, experts like yourself are coming on podcasts. and a lot of the media people are getting as direct is you're having these long format discussions. And in long format discussions, you can have people that have difference of opinions and really kind of steal man each other's argument

and talk about how to, well, here's why I want to tell you why nuclear is a good idea, right? And here's how we would potentially do it. Another person comes in and says, no, you're missing this point, right? This is the other aspect of that. We need healthy debates and conversations with people on opposite sides of aisle

that are not done to drive to drive eyeballs and attention, you know, which you have these short segments on news like six minutes. Okay, now debate nuclear. It's like we're not going to be able to have a healthy conversation in that period of time. Sound bites, yes. Sound bites. Instead, this long format thing. And I feel like this is the, this is society growing up. We're learning how to have deeper, more meaningful, rich conversations, even with people that we disagree with to actually get to the to the best way to approach these big challenges that we have. That's my own unique take on the situation. I couldn't agree more.

I think it starts with listening and, you know, awareness and discussion. And then we can get into innovation and working together. And so it is a consciousness revolution. And we are all part of it. And the question is, where's the tipping point? Yes, exactly. And it really comes back to stress, which is what you're talking about, because when you're stressed, you cannot listen.

Right. If you are stressed and caught up in the inertia of whatever thing happened wrong yesterday and now you're having a conversation with somebody else, so much of your criticism towards other people is often just your own criticism towards yourself. And I wrote something on Instagram this last year and was saying, you know, the thing that I've found is that hypercritical people are often the, the most critical on themselves. You don't find somebody who's just truly joy and actually really loves their day-to-day sort of existence is in, you know, regularly in that blue mind.

Yeah. Right. Right. Green mind that's there. It's not consistent with green mind. Who's constantly attacking other people and telling them how they should, should, should, should, constantly shooting on people. And so really, actually, I think that, you know, when I was telling you, we got introduced through our mutual friend, Sean Stevenson from the Model Health Show. And him and I are always talking about this. We talk about this on nutrition. We talk about this with media. We talk about this with tribalism, other stuff.

Just the idea of the better you understand how to manage and really get to the root of your stress and step into restore, the better of a kinder human being you're going to be. And that doesn't mean that you can't stick up for your ideas. That doesn't mean that there isn't black and white in this world. That doesn't mean that you're just going to let everybody bulldoze you. It means that, no, you're firm, but you're more understanding of others because you're more understanding of yourself. Yeah. Beautiful.

That is exactly why I wrote the book. And that's why it's called the stress prescription because we need to take the excess stress, which is like, you know, it's like a veil or a cloud preventing us from being our best selves, our true selves, from working together, from seeing reality as it is. We need to take it seriously. It's causing so much suffering. We talked about health. We talked about mental health.

But this whole way that we're not connected, we're divisive. You know, one of the concepts in the book, and I'd love to conclude on this, is this idea of reframing beliefs. I think one of the toughest beliefs that I see people have is this idea, and it may me not spoken in this exact way, but just this sort of belief that people feel that they're not good enough to deserve a. a stress-free life or they're not deserving of more peace in their life. Is there anything that you want to say about that or expand on when it comes to some of these

limiting beliefs? And that was one example that get in the way of people stepping into a more harmonious life that gives them access into their ultimately, their blue mind state. Our minds work such that we are so vulnerable. to feeling that we're not good enough, that we're not enough. And then we have the cultural messages of we're only as good as how much we achieve or how much we earn. And so we're diminished selves. You know, we're not living at our full potential, feeling the goodness of just being and the goodness inherent in our humanists and our common humanity. And that's partly what I have so loved

and learned from different contemplative traditions because they do allow you to reach these blue mind states where you just feel, you feel full and it has nothing to do with your superficial identities or acquisitions, etc. But it's actually just the inherent joy in having a body and being on this earth and seeing the connectivity. and of course love, love for earth, love for relationships. So that is all the opposite of the messages of the kind of social inequities and our value being so determined by materialism. And in the book I talk about someone I met on one of the retreats I was leading who has struggled with depression on and off her whole life and has really seen. and believed the statement, you are enough and felt that that was a message that she could share

with other people who are not, who are feeling inadequate like a failure and or maybe even close to suicide. And she now has banners across the United States, Billboard, saying, you are enough. And I really didn't think that this was going to have an impact. I thought, this is a really sweet idea, but I don't think it's going to reach anyone. And boy, was I wrong. There are many people, the response to her campaign has been beautiful and lots of philanthropists have helped her spread the message.

And I think what's most moving is that many people have written to her who have said that they were in that world of feeling so insufficient they shouldn't live, live. There were people feeling so suicidal that they were considering killing themselves. And seeing her sign made them questions. that and say, is that true and looking at her website, purpose website, and in a sense, saving them. So this question about our inherent self-worth, it is an obstacle, an unnecessary obstacle we've created to feel so insufficient, such, you know, so fixed on social comparisons and feeling like we need more, we need more. It's a great reminder and a fantastic place to conclude the

conversation. I'm so excited for the book. It's out seven days to more joy and ease. The stress prescription, people can pick it up and they can follow all the recommendations that out of there. There's a bunch of tools. Just take one. You don't need to do them all, right? You don't need to do them all. What one did you take, are you taking home? You know, the ones that I do on a regular basis is nature. Yes. Nature. It's built into my, again, we're right recording where we're recording here in Los Angeles, we're right nearby the Santa Monica Mountains. And in 15 minutes, you're in a part of L.A. where you really cannot see any bit of L.A. and you kind of feel like you're not in L.A. You can't hear anything. You barely see many airplanes and stuff. And regularly,

my men's group, we go on these hikes or walks even. They're not like these intense things. And we just talk about what's going on in life. And that's a big part of it. I really feel super restored in nature and especially when it's quiet I really can kind of step into that and ease into it breathing is another tool and mechanism and I think even just when I was starting off in this journey for anybody who feels that they're quite stressed right now and they're trying to get a grip on it it was just even being okay catching myself and feeling excited I feel excited when I catch myself a little stressed out right now because I'm like oh wow I had no no idea. And now that I know I can do something. Sometimes I have friends who beat themselves up

when they catch themselves being, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed out. How did I get stressed out? I'm not doing anything right. And it's like you're now beating yourself up for being stressed, which is like a double accident in a way. So being gentle with yourself and saying, ah, you know what? That's funny. I got stressed out in that situation. Okay, great. Maybe I didn't eat this morning and I ran off to the next thing and this meeting didn't go well. I just let me take, let me push this meeting back and just take 10 minutes here for myself. Let me just walk a little bit. Let me just stop the inertia of the moment.

And let me just pause for a second to regroup a little bit. So catching yourself being stressed out is actually, it's fun and exciting for me now because it means that I can do something. I often call it the law of responsibility. If you had a hand in creating it. That's a beautiful thing because that means you can do something about it. Yeah. Love that.

That's my thought. Yeah. So let's, yeah, let's view that, that pause, that timeout, not as, you know, a weakness or vulnerability, but as a sacred moment that you're choosing. It changes everything. Changes everything after that. I'm so excited for people to pick up the book. Do you want to send our audience anywhere else so they can follow along with you? news that or social media? Yeah, thanks for asking. I do have a website where I'm updating

resources. And so in the back of the book, you'll see a short list of resources. But if you go to my website, you'll see the books I love most and apps and other resources. Oh, and our research, so PDFs, it retreats. My website is my name.com. So it's alisaeple.com. Fantastic. Dr. Apple, thank you for coming on the podcast. Appreciate you. And good luck. continuing the press tour and getting this message out there. It's an incredible one and it's an important one for this time that we're in. Thank you so much. This is my only tour because of climate, so I'm not flying, but I was so happy that your wonderful podcast and your colleagues were in L.A., so this was my one splurge. I love it. Thank you. We're honored to be that splurge. Thank you again.