The One You Feed - Is Stress Speeding Up Your Aging? What You Can Do About It Today with Elissa Epel

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

In this episode, Elissa Epel explores how stress can speed up aging and what you can do about it. She explains telomeres, which are those protective caps on our chromosomes, shorten with stress and poor habits, speeding up aging and disease. She also delves into the science of how thought patterns, diet, and even our response to daily challenges can literally change our biology.Want to stay intentional in your daily life? Sign up for Good Wolf Reminders—free, thoughtful text messages from Eric that land once or twice a week. Each message offers a quick burst of insight to help you pause, reflect, and feed your good wolf. No spam. Easy to opt out anytime. Join nearly 5,000 others at oneyoufeed.net/sms.Key Takeaways:The science of telomeres and their role in cellular aging.The impact of stress and lifestyle choices on telomere length and overall health.The relationship between genetics and environmental factors in health outcomes.The concept of “inflammaging” and its connection to chronic inflammation and aging.The influence of diet on telomere maintenance and inflammation.The bidirectional relationship between depression and telomere shortening.Strategies for reframing stress as a challenge rather than a threat.The importance of mindfulness and social support in managing stress.The potential risks and benefits of telomerase and its role in telomere health.The significance of making intentional lifestyle choices to influence aging and well-being.Elissa Epel, Ph.D. is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author of The Telomere Effect, and now The Stress Prescription. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, at The University of California, San Francisco, where she is Vice Chair of Psychology and directs the UCSF Aging Metabolism Emotions Center. She studies how psychosocial and behavioral factors, such as meditation and positive stress, can slow aging and focuses on climate wellness.Connect with Elissa Epel Website | Instagram | Facebook | X | LinkedInIf you enjoyed this conversation with Elissa Epel, check out these other episodes:How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan KrossSmall Steps to Happiness: The Science of Mindful Living with Laurie SantosFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I really like to focus on what we can do now, today, and that's all we can control. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. We know stress ages us. But how exactly? Dr. Alyssa Appel has spent years answering that question, down to the ends of our DNA. Telomeres, which are those protective caps on our chromosomes, shorten with stress and poor habits, speeding up aging and disease.

But the good news? They're also responsive to the way we live. Today we'll dig into the science of how thought patterns, diet, and even our response to daily challenges can literally change our biology. Her book, The Telomere Effect, offers a roadmap to healthier, more intentional aging. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview,

the latest installment of the gripping Audible original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the Grandview shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on

Audible. Listen now on Audible. Hi Alyssa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much Eric. Your book is called The Telomere Effect, a revolutionary approach to live in younger, healthier, and longer. And it's a fascinating book to me because really a lot of it talks about how the choices we make emotionally about our thought patterns and our lifestyle directly affects our biology in a very clear and measurable way. So we'll jump into that in just a moment, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life there

are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start us off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life

and in the work that you do. I think it's profound. I love it that your show is titled after it. It just reminds us of how much of our life experience is constructed by us, how much control we have over choosing what we experience. So, you know, whether it's internal things, negative or positive thoughts

and feelings and experiences, or things that happen to us, we all have bad and good all the time. And this question of what are we going to choose to focus our attention on is just so critical, can't be understated, because where we decide to put our attention is what we experience of what determines how much we're going to remember positive or negative experiences and of course build on them and capitalize on them so it just says so much about really our psychological power to choose our story in a way. Yep and your book is really fascinating because it talks about the implications of choosing that story and what that looks like. There's a great

quote that you say early in the book from a researcher by the name of George Bray and this really gets to kind of what you said in the intro about things aren't necessarily fixed. We have a tendency to think of genetic traits as being like, well, I have this genetic trait. And his phrase was genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger. And that environment is not just our physical environment, but but our mental environment as well. Absolutely, exactly. It's just so easy for us to feel that our health is determined for us, you know, by our family history, and by our genes. And what we know is that at least 50% of the variance and whether we die early, whether we get sick early from this or that is our behavior and of course what shapes our behavior

much of that is our psychological experience are volition and taking a step back from that it's our social environment our neighborhoods are relationships so there's all these factors that we can try to. factors that we can try to shape to be, you know, a better life for us and for those around us that we have control over. So we control our aging much more than we ever thought we could. We can see how people's different experiences on a daily basis are associated with some of the biological aging that they undergo. Well, let's jump into the book in a little bit more detail. What is a telomere? So people like to think of telomeres as the tips at the ends of their shoelaces.

So if you think of those plastic aglets at the ends of shoelaces, and you think of your shoelaces as the genes, the DNA that makes us who we are. And then at the very tips are these protective caps, still made of DNA but not genes. And it's very, these caps are very important to protect our genetic code from any damage, from fusions. And as our cells divide, these protective caps get shorter and shorter. So there's something that happens to all of us with age, which is telomere shortening.

And when they get to a critical shortness, the cells become old and they cannot divide any longer. And they tend to become pro-inflammatory. So they not only can't do whatever job they were supposed to do, like fighting infections, for talking about immune cells, but then they start wreaking havoc on our health by secreting inflammation into our blood.

So we really wanna keep telomeres long and sturdy and stable throughout our lifespan. And the good news is that while that genetics determines some of how long our telomeres are, it looks like our lifestyle and social factors and nutrition, all of these factors are also shaping our telomere-like. T-L-O-M-E-E-R is the correct pronunciation. Is that it?

Yes. So it sounds like a longer telomere is a better one for us and that there's lots of studies from reading the book about different things that cause us to have a longer or shorter telomere. And we can talk through what some of those are. But one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book was it says that it's been suggested that telomere length may be the holy grail for cumulative welfare. Can you talk a little bit about that? Dr. Susan Bates Yes, that was an animal researcher, Dr. Bateson, titled that as, you know, part of his paper. And it was just such a provocative thought. And then it turns out there's some data to support that.

So what telomeres are associated with so many different factors in human lives, all the exposures that we're exposed to from our environment, from chemicals, our social environment, our psychological state, our health behaviors, and they all kind of add up to shape the rate of how quickly our telomeres shorten. And when we think about, you know, can we take an person or an animal and measure their telomeres and what does that tell us about their life history? And you know, it's hard because telomeres are affected by so many things, including genetics.

We can't make really accurate direct predictions. But in general, we can look at the telomere length of a person and find that it's associated with their history, their kind of cumulative history of adversity, all of the really difficult things that happen to them. And there's a few studies on this now, even a stronger effect is what happens to us in childhood turns out to be really important in shaping our telomere length as adults. So, you know, it's a critical period of growth and vulnerability. So we really want to protect children from toxic stressors like poverty and violence and neglect,

because those are the factors that really imprint on telomeres. Now, Dr. Bateson was asking about animals and animal welfare and suggesting, why don't we apply this to animals and really look at the quality of their life, especially those who are, we control their environments that they grow up in, and they could be in factory farms, they could be in more humane conditions, and their telomeres might tell us a clue of their welfare.

So this is not science that's kind of out on the edge. This is pretty well known robust science. You wrote the book with Elizabeth Blackburn, who is a Nobel Laureate. So this idea of telomeres and their length and how that affects our overall health and the things that can improve those, this is pretty robust science, right? It is robust. I can tell you where there's questions and controversy too. What's robust is that there are so many studies showing that the length is predicted, the length matters. So in midlife, for example example shorter telomeres statistically predict. Getting diseases of aging kind of across the diseases earlier cancer is an exception so it turns out for some cancers longer telomeres put us at more risk of these cancers there is a, well, is this just kind of a factor that, you know, changes with age like so many things in our body or is it causing

aging? Is it really a mechanism? And so that's been a question for a long time and now we know that it is definitely at least a small causal part of our aging and we know that from these genetic studies. We call them Mendelian randomization studies. So people who have the genes for longer telomeres are less likely to get early heart disease or Alzheimer's dementia. Got it. I'm stepping way out of my knowledge zone here but do telomeres have anything to do with whether or not genetic mutation occurs? So it's a good question and most of us have common genes for telomeres. They might be, you know, code for short or long telomeres but they don't make a big difference.

And then there are some people who have these rare genetic mutations that cause them to have very short telomeres. So you know, maybe half the amount of telomerase, the enzyme that protects telomeres as normal people. And so we have learned from those very sad genetic conditions that people do tend to develop some, you know, pretty severe health problems like bone marrow failure, and they tend to die much earlier in life and they tend to transmit very short telomeres to their offspring. And one thing that's so interesting is that while they might transmit the genes, the mutated

genes to some offspring, other children don't get the mutation, but they still inherit the short telomeres. And what that means is that we don't have just genetic transmission, which always occurs, but we have an epigenetic or direct transmission of telomere length. If mom and dad have very short telomeres, it appears that's passed on through the sperm and egg to what the child ends up with. Let's talk briefly, you mentioned it earlier. Talk about the role of inflammation, both

in our overall health and then how that ties to telomeres. So inflammation is really important. We think that it's one of the major kind of highways of aging of how our bodies age. So when we're cut, we want to have a big inflammatory response to help us heal. But what we don't want is a slow drip of inflammation in our blood as we age. And we call that inflammatory aging. And that's what happens when our tissues get old and we call them senescent, they start secreting these inflammatory factors. And that builds up, it comes from fat and from immune cells, from bone. There are many tissues and cells

that start secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines. So when this builds up, it's feeding all of our body and organs and tissues and it's creating a fertile ground for diseases such as cancer. So we want to be doing things to reduce inflammation, like having an anti-inflammatory diet. Now that sounds fancy, and if you look at what's anti-inflammatory, it's simply this. It's a whole food, high fiber diet. It's like the

Mediterranean diet versus eating a lot of things like red meat, processed meat, soda, a lot of refined carbs, those are going to be promoting inflammation in our body. It's always interesting to me there's so much noise about diet and so many different approaches and all that but it seems like there are a couple key principles that everyone agrees on like eat less processed foods, and eat foods that are closer to being whole foods. Then there's some variations beyond that. But at least that seems to be consistent. I could not agree more. I think that everyone is confused and you know we've got some real issues in nutrition

research and one is conflicts of interest. If you look at the different sides battling. You often have food industry funding the side that says sugar doesn't cause disease etc. Yeah I agree it is it is confusing I just I always like when I can find a point of common ground among a bunch of different positions because then I can go okay well that I can at least probably you know count on to some degree. And I think, you know, these nutritional basics that you just summarize so well, they add up across whatever we're looking at. We know it's this, you know, it's this high antioxidant, high inflammatory diet, let's say Mediterranean diet that causes

less of a glucose and insulin spike. So when it's less processed, we have a better, more stable metabolic response. This is the response that's better for the heart, it's better for the brain, and it's better for the telomeres. So it lines up very nicely to be a strong, consistent story about biomarkers and early aging, as well as diseases of aging. These are all fed by the high-gmic, high carb, high meat diet,

and the opposite can help prevent them. So it is not new, people want the new exciting trend, but really, you know, eating well means going to the store, buying the fresh produce and trying to have less of the tempting, you know, what we call comfort food, not abstinence, but just less of it. You know, we do these studies trying to help people with our, you know, very understandable food drives, right? We get hooked on the highly palatable food, and so we use mindfulness skills and we try to help people deal with those cravings so that they can make the choices they want to be making. Excellent. Before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you've been listening to.

What's one thing that really landed? And what's one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection? That's exactly why I started Good Wolf Reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5,000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS and sign up.

It's free, no spam, and easy to opt out of anytime. Again, that's 1UFeed.net slash SMS. Tiny nudges, real change. Alright, back to the show. Let's talk about depression. Depression comes up in several places in the book, and you sort of summarize it up by saying the arrow likely points in both directions with depression. Short telomeres may proceed depression and depression may speed up telomere shortening. So what do we know about depression

and telomeres? Yes, this is a great question and it just shows the complexity of the mind-body connection, how factors move together. So what we know is that when people have longer depression and untreated depression without antidepressants or therapy, their telomeres tend to be shorter in a dose-response fashion. So it looks like depression is causing faster wear and tear on our cell aging, but then we also know that there are, you know, several studies that show that people at risk of depression, before they're ever depressed, tend to have shorter telomeres.

So a colleague, Ian Gottlieb, showed this with young girls. They were at risk of depression. Their mothers were depressed. They'd never been depressed. And when he looked at their stress response, they were, they had exaggerated emotional and cortisol responses to stress and they had shorter telomeres already, no depression. And the bigger their cortisol response, the shorter their telomeres. So we know that stress can kind of promote shorter telomeres as well as vulnerability

to depression. So it may be that the telomeres came before the depression. So it may be that the telomeres came before the depression, it may be that the animal studies suggest that shorter telomeres in the brain and they campus put the rats at risk of depression and when they can boost up the hippocampus with telomerase they're more resistant to depression. So there's all sorts of bi-directional pathways and just to add an even another wild card, in one recent study when researchers compared people with depression to people without depression,

so cases and controls, they found that the people with depression were more likely to have this gene that causes short telomeres. So all of a sudden now we're looking at, you know, possible genetic predisposition to have short telomeres and to have depression. Interesting. It's a complicated web and I think

these are hard to parse out in humans. We need to study people in a sense kind of across the lifespan and the next generation look at the genetics at the same time as we look at their actual telomeres. Yeah, and we're going to transition now into talking about what things people can do that can help increase telomere length. And interestingly, they're the very same things that people would do to deal with depression, to deal with anxiety. So it may be a little chicken and egg, but the good news is we don't have to have the answer in order to do the things that are beneficial.

And so the thing that I think is so fascinating about this, a lot of the concepts that we're going to talk about in a minute here are going to be things that we cover on the show fairly regularly. And reminders are always great for these things. What I loved about your book, though, and I think this one line really sums it up, it says we can change the way that we age at the most elemental cellular level. So everything that we're about to talk about are really good strategies that we've also seen in studies that are truly working at a cellular level. And I think that's such an interesting thing to take these ideas that we think, well, that works, makes my mind better, makes my mood a little bit better,

and recognize that we're really able to measure these things, the effect of them, at a true biological level. So let's start with something called the challenge response. Can you tell me a little bit about what the challenge response is and how that helps? Sure. So one of the areas of research that we've been doing that looks at the acute stress response is trying to look at how people approach a stressful situation in different ways.

And a natural evolutionary based way is when we feel our survival is threatened, physical survival is threatened or our social survival, if our ego is threatened and we feel like we're going to be embarrassed, humiliated or fail, this triggers a threat response in the body characterized by high cortisol and kind of the autonomic nervous system vasoconstricts. Those patterns of reactivity, if we have them over and over over time, they are causing more wear and tear on our body. They're making us more vulnerable to stress-induced diseases of aging. So what the kind of antidote to that is, of course, we're all going to experience stressful events, little

ones and big ones. And what we can do is try to respond with a good, strong stress response and recover quickly. And that profile is going to be related to slower aging. Now, how do we cause our stress response to recover quickly? Well, think about, you know, number one, when you approach a stressful event, you want to remind yourself that the stress response is your friend. It helps you cope and it energizes you and it, you know, helps you problem-solve better. So just those thoughts of rethinking the stress response in a positive way can help our body have a more helpful stress response. We call it the challenge response, stronger cardiac output and more adrenaline than cortisol. So we want to have a positive challenge response.

And then once the stressors over, it's very easy to ruminate about it. We call this perseverative thinking. We continue to think about it long after it's passed. That keeps up the stress response, but we can actually try to notice that we're ruminating and let the situation go and have a quicker psychological recovery, which leads to a quicker physiological recovery. So just close up, looking at your stress

response, how are you feeling? You can cope with the situation and once it's over, can you help it end with a crisp ending? You know, take a walk, get social support, do something to cut down on rumination. Now, there's other things we can do to boost our stress resilience like exercise, like getting enough sleep. These things are actually related to less rumination. So ruminative thinking is a natural habit that many of us have that we can kind of notice and try to nip in the bud more than we do. Ruminations and old friend around these parts. Yeah. There are a couple of these that fall under the category in my mind of perspective, of

getting a different perspective on things, which I always think is so helpful. And one of them is called linguistic self-distancing. Can we talk about that? Yeah, that's researched by colleagues of mine, Oz Adik and Ethan Cross. And so what they've shown is that when they bring people into the lab to kind of relive a stressful situation, if they help them take perspective on the situation, the person actually looks much more stress resilient. So they can do visual distancing, they can watch

the situation on a movie screen. They can do linguistic distancing. They describe and replay it, talking about their responses in a third person, a very analytical way that actually reduces their emotional response, gives them perspective. They can do time distancing and they can ask themselves, is this situation really going to affect me in five years? Usually the answer is no. So while it seems like a crisis at the moment, and our body's responding as if our survival depends on it,

when we remind ourselves that we are, this really in the big picture doesn't make a difference, right? And we shouldn't sweat the small things. This helps people rapidly recover from the stressful situation. So it's helpful just to kind of take a step back and you know realize it's not about avoiding stress. Stress is inevitable. We all are going to face challenges that are unpredictable, that come up at different times in life. And it's really about coping with it in a way that doesn't amplify the stress in our mind

and continue it the whole day even while we're you know sleeping we can be more kind of vigilant and aroused and really there's always the next moment when we're not coping when when an immediate crisis is over when we can find peace in that moment and we can be finding you you know, joy, even though we might be dealing with a terrible chronic situation. So there's always momentary relief and momentary absorption into the moment that is so important for our bodies and respite from chronic stress. Yeah, I love the time distancing. You don't even have to go out to five years. I think a lot of times I'm like, well, this matter in five hours, five days, five weeks, and

in a lot of cases I'm getting upset about something that in five hours I probably won't remember like being stuck in traffic or other things. So time distancing is a great one and what you were saying there about the stress response reminds me of some studies I read where it's not so much the stress that's the problem, but what we think the stress is going to do to us also. So our belief in what stress does has some of that, and that gets to the challenge response. Instead of thinking this is awful, I'm stressed, and boy, it's going to have so many bad effects on me to look at it as, okay, this is, as you mentioned, priming my body or getting me focused.

And even that, thinking of it differently, just lessens the impact that it has. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. It's beautiful. Is there anything that you think we should talk about before we wrap up? We've got just a few minutes left and I want to make sure there's anything that you want to cover that I get that in there. Eric, I would love to hear from you any reflections on the parable and what that's like to hear different interpretations and sound bites of it every day over time and how you think it relates to this book. Boy, you're turning the tables on me here. You're not supposed to

answer a question with a question, I think, is the phrase. It's interesting, the way I think it relates to the book is kind of, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that you know the parable is about making choices. To me, it's hard. And I think the reason it's a parable is because you hear it and you almost immediately understand it on one level what it means. You're like, oh, it means that I have to make choices and decisions what I do with my thoughts, my behavior and my emotions to the extent that I can work with those things I should. And I think that the part of the book that I loved was that you're covering a lot of

the same ground as far as the things that you do to work with your thoughts, your stress, your emotions. But I really love when it's that concrete ties it back to biology. And I also love that a lot of what you're showing is that these telomere lengths can be modified. So we're not just, if I just, if I have shorter telomeres doesn't mean that I'm doomed right I'm not doomed I can actually do things in my day-to-day life I can I can choose to feed the the good wolf and that will improve those telomere lengths and so that we have a choice in what we do and not only do we have a choice that choice actually makes a difference. Beautiful.

You said it so well. That is a huge theme of the telomere story and how our aging is so malleable. Lots of people like to know what their telomere length is and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't know how the tests aren't necessarily that accurate yet. And I'm the type of person who I don't really want to know mine because I know where I've been, and they're probably short. And I really like to focus on what we can do now today. And that's all we can control. And so really, even if someone has very short telomeres, because they've had a lot of childhood hardship, that's not worth measuring them to see that.

Because what matters is that what they do today can be changing up that system, can be increasing the telomerase, can be reducing the oxidative stress and inflammation. These are things we can control. Yeah, that's a great point. I was going to ask, can people measure their own? But I agree with you in general. I don't think that's a particularly useful approach. It's much more about what can I do now to improve that situation? Although it would be great to see a lengthening over time so that you knew that what you were doing was having an impact. Right, right. And I think eventually we might get there with more, you know, accurate and frequent measurements. And that would be, you know, if someone is starting a, you know, a pretty intensive program for health improvement in some way,

it would be an interesting experiment to look at pre-post. Yep, exactly. So one final question. You've talked about telomerase. Did I say that one right? Close. Telomerase. Telomerase, alright, as a chemical that helps. And is there treatments that we think are forthcoming? It's a good question and I don't have a good answer. We just don't know enough yet. We do know that at least from observational studies, we know that telomerase tends to be higher.

Well, for example, smoking decreases it and being physically active increases it. And we know from a few intervention studies that it looks like we can boost the telomerase with mind body activities like meditation and Qigong. And so that's super safe and no side effects there. And then there were supplements on the market and they just simply haven't been well tested by unbiased parties for any long term periods. So it's just a little bit of a question mark about what the risk benefit ratio is of those kind of over the counter products to increase telomerase.

And the risk is nothing to take lightly because if you have too much telomerase, if you're prone to cancer, and if a telomerase supplement could kind of push you over that threshold, then you are more at risk of cancer. So it's a possibility is all I'm saying. As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Good Wolf Reminders text list. It's a short message or two each week packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5,000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at whenufeed.net

slash SMS. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. Well thank you, Alyssa, so much for taking the time to come on. I loved the book and I'm glad we got a chance to sit down and talk about it. Thank you so much, Eric. Wonderful questions and hopefully something I've said is helpful to some of your listeners. All right, take care. Take care. Thank you so much. Okay, bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.