Dr. Elissa Epel: Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine today. My guest is doctor a lisa apple.

Doctor apple is a professor psychiatry rian behavioral sciences at the university of california and forces go SHE is also the director of the center on aging metabolize sm and emotions. Doctor apple's laboratory focuses on stress and the many impacts that IT has on our brain and body, both negative and positive. For instance, our laboratory has shown that particular forms of stress change our teams, which are component of the genetic machinery of ourselves, that impacts how quickly ourselves, and therefore, we age.

We also discuss exciting work from doctor, apple's laboratory, expLoring how stress impacts are behavioral choices, in particular, which foods we elect to eat and how we experience those foods. Today, you learn how stress and your interpretation of your stress impacts the different aspects of your biology and psychology. You'll also learn about several important stress interventions that doctor, apple's laboratory has explored, including meditation and breath work can profoundness influence the way that stress impacts your brain and body, both for Better or for worse. She's also explored how specific dietary interventions, such as omega fat acid intake, impact stress in our response to stress. And a key, an important feature, I believe, of doctor apple's work, is how stress and stress interventions very in their effectiveness, depending on whether or not the subjects in her experiments are male versus female and their social status.

By the end of today's episode, I assure you, you will have a much more thorough understanding of what stress is and how IT changes our biology and psychology, as well as the specific stress interventions that are going to be most optimal for you in reducing the negative effects of stress on the aging process and on negative behavioral choices, and also have to leverage stress in order to maximize the positive effects that stress can have on seller metabolism, mental health, physical health and performance to learn more about the work from doctor, apple's laboratory, as well as to learn more about her books entitled the telomere effect. And now more recently, the stress prescription. You can find links to those in the showed captions.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsor of today's podcast.

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Again, that drink element element dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, eda, recessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the bringing body into different states, and that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions. Those who you don't know, yogananda is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations.

And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep depressed or n sdr, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even, which is to a short ten minute session, if you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman in to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor elisa apple.

Doctor apple, welcome. Thank you. So great to have you here. We have colleagues in come in and topics of interest late to our laboratories in common. So got a lot of questions today.

I'd love to just kick off by you explaining a little bit about the different forms of stress. You know we hear stress stress as bad stress can kill us. No one likes to feel stress at sea. But as you I both know that's not the entire picture. So love for you to just educate us a bit on what stress is and what IT isn't um where IT can be problematic and where perhaps IT can .

even be beneficial. So as a stress scientist, IT is a word I use a lot but IT has to be broken down because IT has so many different kind of dimensions and meaning. So there's good bad stress.

There's acute chronic stress. And you know technically, IT just means any time we feel overwhelming that we feel like the demands are too much for our resources. So that kind of A A very technical way to put IT.

But really, so much of life is about meeting chAllenges, and we're never going to get rid of different stressful situations in life. If anything, they are increasing. And so really comes down to not the stressors of what happens to us, but really how we respond the stress response.

So that's a distinction that we're still trying to get the field to talk about stress in a more specific ways so that we can think about what what situations are in your life. They might be difficult ongoing situations like cargoes or work stress or worrying about health, your own or someones. And then there's how are you coping with IT.

So when something happens, we mounted stress response and we recover. And that's beautiful, no harm done. We need that.

That's why we're here still live. Is that survival response. It's it's the problem these days of just we keep IT alive in our head. We keep IT alive with our thoughts. Our thoughts are the most common form stress .

even though I expected we will get into tools to combat stress a little bit later.

Since you have now told us that our thoughts are the biggest um sort of propagator of internal stress, what to your knowledge is the best way or what are the best ways for us to manage over thinking and ruminating on stressful topics because I certainly experience stress and when I do I have tools related to you know breath, work, running, exercise, sleep, a non sleeps, depressed and huge fan of all these sorts of things but when we become to stress and the thinking patterns take over where the gears are turning and they won't stop turning, what does the science tell us about ways to manage those thought? Should we work with them in the sense that we try and rationalize um or understand the basis of the stress or should we try and divert our thinking away? Or is there some other two?

Yes, yes, both. And so I like to be in in three three categories. So one is we will always say, first of all, we have to have some awareness of our mind works or we are just like, you know, a subject to thinking.

Our thoughts are real thinking that is helpful to keep ruminating and problem solving because that's our tendency is to go toward whatever we think there's greater risk and to problems solve that. But you could just be stuck there all day in this kind of threat mode or red mine state. And that's just a shame.

We don't need to turn on that stress response all the time, but that's where we are a society. So that's why I I wrote the stress prescription, take any survey, even free pandemic, and people feel the majority of people feel an overwhelming amount of stress. So even this past year, forty six percent of adults report feeling overwhelmed by stress.

And then you break IT down. You're like, oh, this is really bad for Young adults and women and people of color. And we say we have this groups that are targeted for margin zone that are feeling an extremely high amount of stress in most of the suburbs. So bottom, who argue .

that most everyone is feeling more stress now? Or is IT just what do the data say?

yeah. So I think that I think that we are we come with different levels of awareness of our stress. And so when I find someone who really doesn't feel a lot of stress, sometimes I can see right through that and they're just not aware.

And sometimes IT really is true. They they're often in a different stage of life and they control their environment a lot and they've been through a lot. I mean, one of the big patterns in the population levels of stress is that the older people are less stressed period.

If for over sixty five, you have been through so much, solve so much, you just have a Better perspective on life and on stressors. And then our adults, our Young adults have like four times the level of stress as our older delt. So so we do you we don't have to wait to we get older.

But there certainly is true wisdom and resilience that comes with age for many people. I often we're so used to feeling daily stress from our urban and modern life that where we don't notice IT, we're just used to IT. And so we're going through the day with kind of like clench hands and just know for listeners is even just taking a check in now and noticing how you might be holding stress in your body.

That's a huge clue, a huge place where we accumulate tension. So we might not be aware that we're stressed, but we're punching our hands. And in fact, my taxi driver who drove me here let me know that he's exactly that point that he doesn't realize he stress until he realizes that he's tencin his shoulders and in his fist. And so great signal, you know, doing a chicken till, like, notice where in our body resulting stress is step one, to releasing IT.

So going back to this notion over thinking, what are the tools that our most efficient for dealing with over thinking or ruminating, when people just can't seem to let go of the thing that the stress ork are thinking about, not the stress in their body, but the thing that caused the stress, difficult conversation, the thing that worked to them and on social media and their personal life or professional lives, or simply out in the world.

So I I wish I had one answer, but i'm going to say lots of strategies tackle that. And so in those three bands, one or top down strategies of awareness and things that we can say to ourselves, since our beliefs and mindsets can really help us release stress, use stress more passively. The second bucket is um not that the mind changes the body, but the body changes the mind.

And those are the set of strategies that you tend to use some most right where where we're working stress out of the body, we're metabolite ing IT. We're burning IT up and we get relief changes are you know a middle a activity and moves us to more in experiential state, where where more in our smarter sy cortex. And then the third uh bucket is change the scene, just getting away from all the stress triggers that we have in our office or in in the city and being an environment that we find coming IT might even be to just be according to the house.

But in planting, what I call safety signals, we are just these animals that are condition to signals, whether where ware of IT or not. So having having things like comforting pets, pictures, smells, music, why not we need those. They help. They add up. Yeah.

I like the idea of having a small physical space, or suppose to be a large physical space, but for most people who don't have the resources, some small producing a physical space that um represents a safe zone um and creating or I should say populating that safe zone with things as he said um as a visual neuroscientists originally, I guess now I study stress um but as a visual neo sciences, we know that photographs are extremely powerful cues for the memory system, especially of actual physical photographs um and I I believe there is some work on this that if people keep a photograph of something that draws positive memories that that photograph actually they keep IT with them that actually can be a positive q for alleviating stress and just enhancing mood.

This is probably done less so nowaday because everyone keeps things on their phones and it's just kind of a scroll through. But um in any event, you know, when we talk about stress um it's clear that there's short term, medium term, long term stress. You studied all these different forms of stress um if you be so kindness to just give us an over of you you of the different forms of stress, how we can learn to recognize those and then I D love to transition from there into talking about some of the worth that you've been doing on stress and stress related eating and stress in how IT relates to aging in particular but before we do that, to make sure everyone is on the same page, um if you could just pepper our minds with knowledge about stress in all its beautiful .

and um not so beautiful for so when we think about stress, we usually think feeling stress, reporting stress and that's important. What our bodies doing is also important. It's not always related to our mind. So measuring levels of the nervous system and how vigilant we are is another way that we can understand stress, and that's particularly important.

Interesting because that told stress gets under the skin and we might not be aware we report stress, but we're still holding tension and being much more sympathetically dominated, meaning that we are our body is vigilant and scanning for cues and we don't feel. And so we are mobilizing a lot more energy than we need to. And stress is so expensive to the body, the stress response uses a tremendous amount of energy atp that's made by our media contra.

And if we have that kind of vigilant stress response on all day, we're just gonna exhausted. And we all feel exhausted at the stage of the kind of long shadow of the pandemic. And it's really no mystery because we're not good at turning the stress response of, and that's what we want to really focus, is understanding we need to mount big stress response to cope with things when we need extra energy.

But then we can actually let our body relax and we can turn that off. And that's where the rumination comes. And when we want to catch ourselves rehearsing and reliving stress or worry about the next thing saying right now i'm safe and you know there's the breathing strategies, i'm right with you where those are the most direct and path to reducing stress in the body .

period yeah our college do with special or social psychic stanford dan also colleague of years as well um has I think said at best which is that breathing is unique among the functions of the brain. IT really originates as a brain function and then extends across to the body. And that IT represents a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious.

Because at any given moment, we're breathing. And of course, at any given moment we can take control of our breathing. They're very few brain circuits that impact the body in that way.

I can't suddenly just change the my rate of digestion because I decide to. But we can do that with breathing. We will definite get into some of the um work that you've been doing on breath work particular.

I know you have a study that actually explore the window method quite directly. One of the few studies i'm aware of that done that. So we'll get to that a little bit later. Um so you described stress as a way that the body and mind mobilize energy yeah and I .

didn't quite answer your question. So there's there is that a cute stress response when everything every horn and um seller or body is having a stressed response. And that is allowing us to reorient focus problems solve.

It's really beautiful how much we can increase our capacity to do things during stress. And then with IT lasts a minutes or hours, we eventually recover. And that is um what happens all day in a small to small extent with daily stressors.

We don't necessarily get so threatened that we released a lot of porters all but our nervous system is going up and down all day. Then there are then this kind of modern stressful events that maybe take days or months to cope with. And what's important there is that noticing, like right now, and I really coping acutely with something, or can I restore? So that kind of daily restorations very important.

And then there are chronically stressful situations that going for years. Many of us, not all of us, but many of us have those in our life. These are situations, or just use caregiving as an example, that we can't change we we can't change people, we can't change certain situations or resources.

And we can be thinking about them, sonically problems solving, trying to wish things were different, or we can use acceptance, radical acceptance strategies and other strategies to live well with them. And and so that's a really important strategy for people who feel like their their life is going to be stressful forever because of extra. Why that that's not true.

You have a harder life, you're going to do more coping, but you can actually be dealing with uncontrolled of the chronic stress in ways that it's not onna take that toll on your body. I mean, I study chronic stress and how IT excelling ing. And I can tell you, there are so much variance between people. People are so different. So among caregivers, some of them look as biologically Young or Younger than our controls, people with no identifiable, big, tough situation in their life.

I love to hear about the lack of inevitability around aging and stress. I I realized that there is a big landscape of of discussion around aging and stress st to cover. But since you brought IT up um in one of your papers, there is a beautiful graph.

And since a lot of people are listening, not watching and we don't use visual diagrams for that reason, i'll trying to explain this as best I can. Um you distinguished between optimal aging, typical aging and accelerated aging. And I think everyone can imagine would want optimal aging, right, not accelerated ageing.

And what's interesting about this graph in your paper is that, well, of course, IT appears that toxic stress, chronically unmitigated stress, that makes us feel like we are at the world's mercy or the other people's mercy, will accelerate aging. Turns out that under exposure to stress leads to more rapid aging than what you describe as ideal amounts of stress. In other words, that no stresses, not the answer rather to have some stress as ideal.

If you want to have so called optimal aging, you explain a little bit about the mechanisms behind that. Um maybe this is a good opportunity also to um tell about your tea eir work. Um so the questions are how does one measure optimal versus accelerated aging? And why would I be that some stress is Better than no stress when IT .

comes to aging age? So having no stress means we're not really living like we're not engaging in the give some life which are inevitably have some chAllenging risk. And let me give you an example.

One study took um elderly people who retired and they you know society kind of labels them as you're kind of done with your meaningful work in life and um you you know you are pretty much not able to contribute to decide. I think there are so many negative therefore pes that people that kind of body and then live um in this program brought them to work in schools and two ter Young at risk students. And what happened to them is they went from feeling maybe safe and understand sed to feeling chAllenged but generated they were feeling more purpose.

They were feeling like they were growing and they were feeling like their day had more meaning. They had more relationships. They had these caring relationships with the students.

The students had all sorts of issues and troubles, drugs and and maybe not having lunch poverty. And so they felt the stress of that. But they also saw how much they could help with their support and their tutors.

And in this study, they they took images of the hippo campus. And those who engage in the program, particularly the men, actually had growth th of their hippocampus during this program. So at any stage in life, we can be growing and chAllenging ourselves, even in our much later years. And growing our brain and you know more than anyone like what does that hip camp growth mean for their well being and they're ordinary functional .

yeah it's the hippo campus across a brainer involved in formation and recall of memories, mostly formation of memories. Um the super interesting because it's so plastic, it's so amenable to the addition of new memories. I think the most striking study to me is the one and I should point out that most of the data say that the addition of new neurons is not the main reason for improvements in memory, but IT is one of them.

But rest gage south of institute did a study, and I think there really two thousands where they took terminally ill people, and these people agreed to have their bodies injected with a die that would label new neurons. And then after they died, their brains were processed, and they didn't die from the die injection, by the way, folks, they died from other causes. They were terminally ill.

And what they discovered was that even terminally ill, or or, and some of these people were quite old. Those people were still generating new neurons, especially in the context of still trying to learn and and acquire new information. So course, they're dead so they can apply that information after that. But of course, one of us can right none of the .

information that why not when you die right now. So one other example of this, my colleague David, made I, he measures daily stress for events in huge national populations. And a small percentage of people report no stressors.

And see, you wonder, like what happening? Are they not engaging in life? Are they are really not having stresses IT IT looks like they are.

It's not just that they're not getting stress by things. They're not they're not really going out and doing much. And what he found is that their level of kind of memory and cognition, cognitive health was significantly lower.

So you can imagine the hippocampus of the lack of those um europe for gender cells. They're just not stimulated. It's super interesting. I wasn't .

aware of that result. So I appreciate you sharing IT. I almost have to wonder if it's like exercise where know so many people.

I think now everybody hopefully understands s that exercises is gone, lower blood pressure, reduce resting heart rate and prove musical skeletons function and bond sy, all that stuff, but that if you took a snapshot of the bodily response during exercise, blood pressure is weigh ghe up, heart rate is weigh igh up. Stress hormones are way out court is always through the roof, drinking a hard workout immediately afterwards. And yet that sets in motion a series of adaptations that brings you to a Better place. Most of the time, I must wonder, stress is the same. So any evidence that short bouts of stress, provided that they are managed well, meaning that we don't spend the next twenty four or forty eight hours ruminating on the dresser, but that we're able to move through the dresser and resolve IT in some way that, that's actually beneficial for us because of the mobilization of energy stores and maybe maybe even changing our threshold for reacting to stressors in the future?

It's a great question, and it's one that I have been chewing on for a while with we we know, as you said, that physical stressors, when they're short, repeated like high intensity interval training, they are promoting not just a robot fitness, but stress fitness. People feel less rumination, less depression, less anxiety. So they're kind of tuning up the nervous system.

What about psychological stressors? And we, we, we know two things. So one is, I do think that there is a level of engagement with moderate stressors that when we are used to them, we get fit and our stress resilience bills, meaning we're less threatened by them.

So let me go deep into that. We can two people can approach the exact same dresser and one person is having a pretty um over reactive stress response where they basically are feeling their survival is threatened. So high court is a high via construction and uh blood pressure goes up equally in both.

But the person whose feeling super threatened either their survival or their social rival, their ego, their blood pressure, went up because of visual construction. The other person who is viewing the same stressor as I can do this, this is a great chAllenge and opportunity I have what IT takes. Those types of thoughts generate a different human dynamic response, which is actually more cardiac output.

So blood pressures going up, but in this healthier way, more oxygen to the brain, Better problem solving, you're able to maintain this positive outlook. So we've measured the threat chAllenge response in many lab studies, and we know lots of things. So if you're having more of the chAllenge at the end of IT, your lesson flamed. So just in a lab within an hour to we see that there they didn't trigger all that prone flamp response and their till mis tend to be longer, which is a measure we can talk more about. But basically, IT looks like they have a slower speed of aging.

That is super interesting. You call this a stress chAllenge response.

So we could call this kind of a two to be really simpler stic two types of psychological stress response, feeling threatened like you're gonna fail. You're embarrassed.

You know, that social pain response we know well that feels terrible um but that also that huge stress response when we feel IT in our stomach our heart is pounding it's just an over exaggerate that response biologically is different and the thoughts that go with IT are different and we recover a lots slower and then there's the chAllenge response, which is this is more of that kind of activated um excited response. And the beauty is that there are lots of studies out there done by emotions and social psychologists that tilt people toward the chinese response. We can actually promote that chAllen response. And so when you asked about like is IT good to have a repeated stress response? Yes, if it's if it's manageable, right then we're kind of building the muscle of stress resigns.

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What are the sorts of things that people I can do in order including me, I should say um can do in order to um wage that chAllenge responses is purely based on mindset like instead of saying why me, why this? Why now I can't believe this is happening. Is that a mental pivot to okay, this is a great opportunity for growth.

I don't know how to manage this, but i'll manage this. You know, you want to stop me, you got to kill me type of type of mindset is is that the switch that then the body follows? Yes, because this is an interesting instance where the most of the stress mitigation work that my lab does is focus on using the body to control the mine.

But here we're talking about the mine controlling the body first and then the body following suit, which I find equally fascinating. Um so are there some specific mental scripts that people follow? And are we all able to follow those those scripts?

Yes, to some extent, we control the script. We can use that script to preparation is going into a stressful situation and we can use IT at any point during the stress or so. Some of us are just wired to have a big threat response period.

Maybe it's you know it's epigenetics. We inherit IT. Maybe it's early trauma that has shaped us to be have this exaggerated emotional response.

And yes, we and others have found that trauma sensitizers our emotional stressed response so that we are feeling more threatened. But that's okay because that's the part we can't control. And we just have to have a lot of self compassion and awareness that, okay, this is what I do.

My body reacts like this. But what happens next? That's when we can start to use those statements. Self comforting, self compassion, distancing. There's all sorts of statements that allow us to then recover more quickly.

So when we want to shift from a threatened response to a kind of chAllenge response, are there any data that dictate whether or not we should keep those statements in our head, write them down, say them out loud? I guess what i'm trying to do here is trying to get to a little bit more of the the meat of the the actionable since since a lot of our listeners. So I think will be um as I am very excited about the idea that a mere shift in our mentality about stress can give us the opposite outcome and me before your time visual construction and information and all these bad things to put IT lightly and then in the chAllenge response to stress getting the exact opposite, more visitation, more resources used and more positive effects on the braining body so what what are some um if if you can recall from the papers if not that's fine.

but i'm just current what .

what specific .

every every statement you said Andrew is good. It's a good one. The whole trick here is that people need to find the the strength statements, the stretch shields that call them, that fit down that that feels right and that they believe.

And so there I can know I list a bunch of options in chapter three, which is called be the lion instead of the gaza. So they're blind in gaza are both know high blood pressure, high stress and the lions chasing the the goals, the gazes having this total threat. Basal construction response because um he might die, lian might get dinner, right.

So it's needing amount the stress response because it's so excited to get the tasty dinner for you know the next few days. And so the line is having that chAllenge response. And so we can remind ourselves, be the lion, it's not that we're always line or goal.

We get to shape that. And so some of those statements are, let's say, right when when we're going into IT, list your resources. Why have you ever dealt with any situation like this? Remind yourself the past successes.

Remind yourself that someone you can call or text or feel supported by remind yourself that this outcome is not an affect your life in ten years or five years. That's a distancing and perspective taking. So there's all these strategies, and you got to use what works for you telling yourself, I got this.

I can do that. I can get through IT. I have what IT takes. There's are all good shields.

And another said is we've some of us feel really stressed out by stress like once we get feel our heart racing, that leads to, oh, you know this is bad for me and so rather than than getting stressed by stress, we actually want to remind ourselves that this stressed response is empowering. This is going to help me cope. My body is excited.

My body is doing just what I should right now. So that reframing in studies by Wendy manders and others, my colleagues who do this reappraisal research, they have basically trained people to use stresses positive during the stressful situations. In the lot of people do Better, they perform Better.

They feel more positive emotion. They problems solve Better, they recover more quickly. So pretty powerful stuff.

Yeah, that is powerful stuff. I'm wonnerful. If we can talk about the relationship between stress and eating and think, it's also a great opportunity for us to talk about the opioid system. A lot of people are familiar with the so called oppoi epidemic and open sis. Sadly, far too many people are dying a 4 tonal overdoses and we all know about the oxy content epidemic and all these people addicted to opiates in that's not really what this is about。

Um what we're about to talk about is the fact that we have an opposite system within us that is neons and other sell types that can redo, excuse me, can release substances in our brain and body that make us feel less pain and make us feel sedated but at a healthy level, right? And yet there are a lot of things besides drugs that can activate this O P O I system um and excepts activate the dog's O P O I system. As far as a last red, there was a paper out recently. But also food can do IT um and again to healthy levels um provided the context is healthy, of course, what is the relationship between stress and eating and eating and the opioid system?

Stress and eating is an interesting one. So most people when they feel stressed or i'm just gonna ask, do you eat more or less when you're stressed?

Definitely I feel like I can go to three days without food when I am but I came up in a profession where sadly for me all nighters were part of the regular until pretty recently A A couple years ago when I just called an end to that um and no IT wasn't just because of procrastination. IT was just to work overload, yes, but I can go a long period of time without eating, although I love to eat. So I do point out that I do love.

And what does the body feel like when you're in that stressed date, when you're not even hungry, you kind of shut down and .

that I have enough energy from my neural resources from a gentle, and generally there was periods of time when i'm not hungry. So inside, with a hyper focus on the stressed, the deadline, whatever is in life that that needs tending to. And food just doesn't appeal to me as much IT doesn't taste is good and not as entire .

yeah so we think that your type of um body temperament is high sympathetic and so when you have a big stress response your digesting is is pretty much shut down like this would be the opposite. Eating would be the opposite of what your bodies .

telling you to do. Just forgive me for international for those of you hearing sympathetic when not time about sympathy, we're talking about the the sympathetic ARM of the automatic or a system which is the so called fighter flight as part of the paraaortic in any event start to up but want to make sure that um sometimes people here sympathy and then I think emotional sympathy um I like to think I have that too but okay so I so I can mean more towards the sympathetic meaning more alertness alisal yeah on the sea saw of the automobile system and .

I am high sympathetic racing or I lose weight when I go through like writing my dissertation. I looked like a skeleton in at the end um but that's not what most people complain about, is not wait loss most people complain about over eating or been eating when they're motion, when they're stressed. And so that's the more common pattern.

And what that that looks different both in the brain and biologically. And so what that looks like is that the stress response is driving cravings and also lets say high ensler, an instant resistance state. And what goes along with that is tending to be over way or have obesity.

And so just by weather through conditioning or genetics, having that kind of larger body with a big stressing temperament, that is a chAllenge in life. And i've been I worked with people with different eating conditions, eating disorders in eating. And IT is a um what's hard about IT is number one is very common, enormous, to just feel like you can't feel associated.

So it's a compulsive eating tendency that stress brings you to. And so so what that mean, we measure that is very easy to measure, means that people feel like um they can control their eating, they don't get full um they think about food a lot. And so stress kind of exacerbates that tendency.

And that is a it's it's a common pano type like we've studied IT and maybe fifty percent of people with the obesity have that um do lean people have that. Some not many like less than twenty percent. But what they also have is a tremendous kind of what we call dieters friend or control over they're eating.

So there's they're able to to um not over eat even though they're thinking about food a lot. So that that is you know that explains that unusual body of someone who is really more has still has some computations. So why does this matter?

This makes IT really hard to eat well, because when you stress you, you're craving the comfort food, the high fat, high sugar, high salt a depending on your temperament. That is that means with repeated bouts of stress, you're just going to be gaining way in, particularly in the intra domo area. That's what we've seen, we ve seen across sexy.

We seen in red studies and my studies, and now we've seen in people in many steps, about ten years I study this. And the question was, is what happening in people? The same thing that's happening in mice, if you stress them out and you give them oios the my develop bingeing, they get really compulsive and they get this, you know, terrible metabolic health profile metabolite syndrome where they are, they're round, you know, they're belly fat, basically expands like a cushion.

And that's because that's this really good immediate source of energy during stress. So look like we're really well wired to if our body things were under chronic stress, we're onna store stress fat or done with that so we can just mobilize at the second. And then the second question we've asked is, can you reverse that with different interventions? Can you can you block the compulsivity? So I can I can tell you what we found there, but the oppoa ist mention is certainly involved.

And in studies with um people mean people on people obesity. My colleague graduate in high yell, basically found that when you stress them out, people with obesity are having a different reward response. And there having the more instant resistant they are, the more their rewards center lights up .

during stress. And what's causing there, like, what's the chicken? What's the eggs? Because I can imagine these were people that at one time or not obese, who got stressed, the opposite system reacted in a particularly potent way to food, and they were able to clamp their stress.

And so then they become her bingers. The context of stress, yes. And that least to inlay insensitivity, exactly.

I could also imagine that they were intelligent, therefore they, you need, need more in order to feel kind of an increase in society. We know this now based on brain and body mechanisms. And then that set off a cade of things leading to A, B, C. Not that IT necessarily matters, but what's caul do we know?

I think IT really does matter. I think there's been no a mistake of kind of confounding all obesity with food addiction and and metaphor disease and it's completely hero genius. So I think it's the developmental path that you're describing, which is that um there's a tendency toward having bigger reward response and hunger during stress.

So IT becomes a way of coping a lifestyle and and not as a pathway to our obesity. And so some obese people have a just regular distressed response, but I but not all of them I mean, IT really is a certain type of person. So that's why we target people with cravings in all of our intervention studies. Now we want to know who has more the compulsive bating type, because they need a different set of skills to cope with stress and to lose weight. If that's ciro.

there's a drug um sure family with no track zone which is can block the O P O to recept. It's used to block the air quid receptor in the context of different types of addiction. Have people tried to use now track zone in the context of bingeing and doesn't help people lose weight because a IT presumably reduces some of the rewarding properties of of food.

That's one of the very few drug combinations that has been used for be getting so was a combination of now track zone and well betraying. And i'm not sure this moment how much that's favored for bin getting, but certainly the early trials showed that IT IT really does damped down on the compulsory.

interesting. So is that a commonly prescribed kit of drugs? Now for for A B, C, I know there's a lot of excitement is about these sema glue tide ah analogs because they do seem very effective in blocking hunger, especially in time to diabetics.

Feel familiar. But right there's of all the rage, most of because people saw that before and after photos of elon yet to shut off on a boat, and there were some not so nice comment to mate about them. And then sometimes later, he was quite a bit lighter and he announced he'd been taking one of the sea blue tide agonies.

yeah. yes. I really hope that we come up with safe and effective drugs. And one thing to think about is that the the chinese that we all have, particularly for a prone to obesity, is the toxic food enviro and particularly the refined sugar. and.

Regardless of what we're on, met four men or one of these drugs, we overwrite IT with our diet. And and really, the improved nutrition is only way to solve IT as a public helt problem. I mean, the drug companies are saying everyone should be everyone know the certain BMI should be on one these new drugs and it's just rubbish and it's not going to lead to long term health.

Well, I know you have a colleague there, ucsf, after Albert last year, have been talking about sugars and hint sugars for years. And the problems with that and and we don't want to demonize sugar is the only cause of the A B C epidemic, but certainly one of them, at least that's my belief.

according to the data. Yes, and row is the biggest proponent of, you know of helping people understand the big problem in the route is in the processes and the sugar and that the drugs don't touch, that we just we override effects of any drugs with our diet. And and so it's it's been A A losing battle really because of the force of big food and big pharma.

So let me go back to the the compulsivity. So we've um there are some clues, but I had to break that cycle. So one is in our weightless trials or healthy mindful eating trials, we find that mindful eating is going to causa a weight lost period with the people who benefit most from learning this kind of calm self regulation, where you check in with your hunger, you slow down, you increase your awareness of your body.

So in the recept of awareness, that type of skill is really critical for people with compulsivity. And so in our trials, we find that if they people were compulsivity, if they get that, if they get renommist to the mind for eating, they do Better in terms of their instant resistance and their glue coast and their long term weight loss. So that's one good clue. Another is the positive stress pathway looks important for breaking the compulsive eating cycle. So actually high intensity interval training or you know maybe um some of these other ways that we have been been talking about to increase the bottling stress in the short term ways to metabolite stress, nobody can help with the cravings.

So what would that look like in the context of, let's say, somebody as the opposite finot ped to me, they get stressed and they find themselves reaching for snack food or that they simply can't reach the tidy. They just want to eat, eat, eat.

What are some of the aside from now tracks on well betraying and some of these prescription approaches? Because I always say, while I value certainly value prescription drugs in certain context, I always feel like behavior should come first, do and dots, then nutrition, then supplementation, and then if and only if it's still needed prescription al drugs. But that's my bias on observations.

I'd like to think so. IT also is a starts at as zero cost endeavor. I mean, behaviors require time.

But IT certainly includes everybody, not just those that have insurance or that live a particular region of the U S. Or the world. So anyway, um that's my bias and at least for the time being, i'm sticking with IT. It's the basis of a lot of what we talk about in this park cast. But nonetheless, if somebody is finding themselves in that category of of bin eating, or heading towards a binge eating, or using food to comfort or alleviate stress, how should they intervene in their own thoughts .

and behavior? We talked about the the bends top down strategies, changing the body, changing the scene. We need all of those. I mean that the compulsive drive to eat is one of our you strongest impulses if we've developed that pathway. And so the we train people, for example, in mindful awareness of separating out emotions from hunger so they get really wrapped up together.

So just labelling how you're feeling, labelling your hundred hunger from one to ten and figure out is, am I really hungry as a bottom that helps people and if you do that check and right before you eat, that helps the most so that's the top down mindful chicken. The the other thing we help people do is like, right, the craving serve the earth. So we deal a lot with solar drinkers.

And IT is addictive and there is nothing worse than drinking suger sota for our body. So we help people by help them having them watch their craving pass and and knowing that is a matter of time that they can serve urge without jumping to consuming. And so that practice helps some people, especially with practice the push ups, that taking a walk, the changing the scene, getting away from food is always gonna a huge, strong strategy if you can get yourself away from IT.

The the problem is, as you know, is that the cravings get you to the buffet. They drive you to the the soda acta. And so just, you know, creating safe environments, but at home and in the workplace where you don't have soda is very important.

So we tried that at ucsf. My colleagues and I, including robley, the entire sugar doctor, we just saw the ability, taints of being a medical center. People come with these chronic diseases. And what are they served in the cafeteria or even at their bedside? Sugar red coke in the hospital in the hospital.

And so my colleague lunchmate, who's partly responsible for the so attacks SHE raly the all the um we went top down to administration, bottom up to the vendors, got rid of all the in all of our hospitals and campuses. And we found two things. Number one, people who were heavy drinkers lost weight in the most important place. Their waste have .

you you to drink.

So when we took IT out the workplace, they actually their health improved in. Number two, those with compulsive eating, they score high on our our little scale for um ward base drive. IT didn't help them so then we randomize half of them to get some extra boost recall motivational interviewing and we're really supporting them more and helping them you know think of goals like being with our grandchildren, not getting diabetes and and that little bit of support helps them tremendously. And so now we are trying to roll that out and you know, a big controlled trial, but at least one hundred hospitals have adopted the um stop selling sugary drinks because people don't want to be sick, but they can't help IT if they have the reward drive and if they have the complication ity. And to try there at work, we're just working against health.

Super interesting. I I think that for most of us, we think about sodas, the kind of thing that maybe we had every once in a while that we drank more when we were kids. I seem to lost my appetite for so at some .

point .

I S maybe or just at some point I started to feel like there were Better alternatives. Um and you know well .

okay well people want idea yeah well for .

confection I mean and most of my non water beverage consumption is going to be either coffee, usually black coffee nowadays. I sometimes will throw some key tones in there not because i'm on a key or jet die, but for ah do you feel like IT makes my level focus and cognition .

Better this morning?

Yeah I do use IT before podcast and we're prepping for podcast. There are a good data showing that uh we can all utilize key tones as a as a brain fuel even if for not in kito g that's clear to me based on my experience in the data as I see them and understand them or year. But mott, which is just a caffeine tea from south america, which I like very much.

However, I am a guilty of drinking the occasional diet sold every once in a while. And I know that, you know, some of my audience would just how most of, because I I don't like the taste of a sugar ery sota and actually really like the taste of diet soda. Asperity me is a particularly rewarding taste for me.

And as a consequence, I trying to avoid drinking IT more than I might have a kind of that cook once a month maximum, usually on a plane or something like that. So does the extend of IT. But if I have the choice between a really great coffee and a sota, it's gonna be coffee. You're you're Roberta a sota it's going to be your robot and or food and so do i'm onna eat instead and so that to me but I do recall you know as a teenager, sota was kind of a defauts. You are just going to like go to the soda fountain filled the drink IT felt like such a rewarding thing. And then I think the reason we're drilling into this more deeply is that sounds to me, based on what you said earlier in my read of the literature, also brings me the idea that that drinking sugar in the form of liquid is one of the worst things that we can do in terms of our bodily regulation of insulin glucose. Um it's I don't want to use what is empty I calories because it's going to loaded phrase but IT is essentially empty calories.

IT doesn't what time for calories are not empty?

Yeah I mean, there are no a and there y're no essential 的 assets and there aren't many carbhoy。 Ds, you can really um long term bout of mental or physical work. So so what do you view sota as one of the 嗯 the worst， certainly not the best, but one of the worst culprits out there? I mean, IT is really prominent.

Especially a note is also, we should include energy drinks, a lot of kids, especially males, by the way, it's almost this is crazy. It's almost ninety five percent of energy drink consumption is males interesting. And I don't know what why there is maybe the packaging or who how the marketing has been pitched. But by the way, as soon as I said that, someone will be in the youtube comments telling me it's completely force about that.

We can point you the data um so what are your thoughts on sugar y drinks and what that's doing? Um how IT do you think this is a reaction to how much stress people people are experiences as this like people's attempt to to inoculate their stress? Or is IT simply that IT tastes good and it's easy to consume and it's relatively inexpensive?

People have not and we have not released studied the sugar y drinks in the same way we have studied the comfort food and the bin getting. And so um my guess is that IT is part of a stress response, but even more than that, it's part of the hedonic cycle.

So when you get the sugar, especially the packed with cafe that's gonna a more addictive drink, you get this you know really feel good response right away and then you get the low and it's hedonic withdrawal. So which is this, you actually feel bad when it's been a while since you've had IT. And so then IT drives the compulsivity that you wanted again, because you want to you want to feel that you want to get rid of feeling bad.

So that's what happens with both food addiction, and we think that happens with sugary drinks. Now let me tell you that when you asked, is a sugary drink one of the worst things we can do for health? Yes, because sugary food doesn't go to our brain as quickly as a liquid, liquid sugar, sugar drink.

So think about cocaine and crack. Crack goes to the brain immediately, and it's that much more addictive. That's how we think of liquid sugar.

The view on sugar, I, I think, is starting to change. And I think in the years to come, provided folks like you and ultrasound continue to a be vocal about IT, which I hope you will, I think it's going to shift things quite a bit. I'd look at IT a little bit like transfer s know I was growing up, people like margin and now like transfer s are banned in many cities. Um it's have incredible things have have changed um over time. And IT requires an effort not just on social media but podcast and I think also lobbying, lobby our politicians, really getting them to understand just how pernicious the stuff is.

There's a lot of social norms that going to like what's good for for all of us as a, as a group of community. And what's personal choice is very fairy. You know, I just i've heard colleague talking about how bringing junk food or soda to work is like passive smoking. You like you're bringing something and that's gonna lute other people's health and you couldn't do IT so that that much more edge and people will fight them on that um but the the the basic reality is yeah we're going to eat the donate if they are in front of us. And so in IT is much more considered to bring a bowl of fruit.

I do love a good to .

certain certain in my brain. Glad you .

brought up smoking. I don't want to take a sof topic but long as we're venturing into these general or I should say more general and yet really important themes around public health and food, yes, i'd learned something interesting about smoking and why so few people now smoke um I always thought that the campaigns around smoking, how terrible IT is for us showing pictures of logs that are caked with all this tar and like, you know, cancer and all this stuff, was the effective message.

But what I learned was that one of the most effective messaging systems in the in the the battle against smoking was to get Young people to stop smoking, not by telling them that was bad for them, but by showing them videos of these rich men sitting round tables, cackling about the fact that they are making so much money on the health problems of other people because of smoking. In other words, what they did is they made being a non smoker anti establishment. And so I find IT very interesting.

Anytime there's something like soda or highly process ss foods that are so woven into the establishment, IT seems like the you can we can tell people until, you know, we're blowing the face about all the health concerns with with these things. You know, sugar is bad and this is bad. Highly propose food is bad.

Some people might change their behavior IT seems like for the Younger generation, the thing that's most effective is to activate their sense of rebellion. This has been true for probably hundreds of thousands of years, but certainly true in the last hundred years. And let them see that there is a very strong big food, sometimes big farmer, but certainly big food system that is working against them.

And that in order to take control of their health, actually, we want to activate their sense of rebellion. And so they like, no, i'm going to take excEllent care of myself. I'm not going to fall victim to this monetary scheme.

And here i'm not pointing spirity been with smoking. There has been seen with a number of different pharmaceuticals. Not all phmc utica are bad. This is true of of a number of different aspects of of kind of .

yeah big markets solutions. It's I pull the blinders off, let people know that we're vulnerable to all the marketing and that there's there really are suppression of data behind a lot of IT. So that is happening with um with even sora sux states who at stanford d with you has been using this method we call a dissension showing people with eating disorders how the food industry has been manipulated and has tried to design food for addiction for the highest being for the back with dopamine eta and so that has helped reduce eating disorders in these studies and IT has even helps reduce reward drive. That isn't that amazing that the distant .

could do that so interesting yeah I think what is telling us is that um few things are as strong as the um no, I won't I refuse to response in terms of changing behavior, especially when there's something to push against. So it's not just a battle with ourselves. I want to soto but i'm not onna drink IT and that becomes a what I want IT but I want IT because you are making me think I want IT I don't actually want that. So um I know maybe this is getting me back into my teenage mindset, but I think a sense of rebellion provided is in the direction of health one's own health and health of others of course um can be a positive thing.

Yeah so what we do that with the mindful eating, we really we haven't bring the junkiest process food they can think of like a twin ky and eat that really slowly and mindfully and few people finished like that actually wasn't nearly as good as the picture of IT and the idea of IT.

And so it's like that reward predictive error that you've talked about where they they think the brain is driving them to have IT because of the advertising and their expectation that they will feel good. But if they are really paying attention, that is a very disappointing experience versus we also have people saver a piece of good chocolate, whatever they like, milk or dark. And that experience teaches them to eat slowly and really enjoy small amounts of rewarding food so that they're not they don't .

need to feel full and binge. So interesting dark dark actually like a hundred percent chocolate. There's one brand of venezia an chocolate is one hundred percent, which sound you might sound awful, but it's actually quite good as IT. I think that was the first time I could actually taste the the real elements .

of the interesting yeah, that is not rewarding. Way too bitter for I need a mouth, you know give me .

some fat well, yeah, it's hard to fine, but it's out there. So while we're talking about stress eating, obesity and um here we've also brought in the discussion to include different generations through time about teens and adults. I love you to share with us your findings on this study that you did of pregnant women and how stress and pregNancy and different patterns of eating and, uh, physiological changes that people experiencing pregNancy. Could you share with us what those findings were? Because I think those relevant, not just to people who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, but everybody because I think they should light on how we managed stress and sometimes how we .

failed to manage you. So with over way at no bested, we know we can just change calories. It's just not going to work. The next stress events gona come along and people will going to go back to what their brain is driving them to do is to, you know, bench on comfort food.

And so we've done these interventions with, uh, men and women that show that we can help them regulate using some of these mindful of eating strategies, checking in. We wanted to do this with pregnant women because when you have access weight, your pregnant, you're really vulnerable to gaining excessive weighing pregNancy, which is not healthy for the mom or the the the offspring. So we we did this study.

IT took us probably ten years total to you get the ground and recruit groups of ten women who are pregnant in the same stage and give them this training in mind, leading md funereal stress reduction. And then my colleague, nicky book bush, has been following the babies for I think it's been almost ten years since then. And here's what we found.

First of all, we couldn't stop access weight gain. The women in the control group gained, about about sixty percent of them gained access way doing pregnant y and same with our mindful group. So maybe it's in the story to stop there and say, failed.

Don't do IT. There have been so many beautiful developments in the women who got the training that we just keep our, you know, being shocked by how impacted for this stress reduction training was. There was just two months of their life.

But but pregnant y is a very critical period when these women were changing their habits, and they are very motivated to help their baby. So here's what we found within the first month of the intervention. They all got this old look talas test.

So theyll get. They got a blood test to see how well their body was metabolize food, sugar. And so it's like a private diabetes test.

And what we found was that twice as many women in the no treatment control group had impaired logo tolerance during pregNancy. It's a common high risk. And half that many women had this in a mindfulness group.

So by reducing stress, they improve their instant sensitivity during preventive y to imagine what that's doing to the baby too. Then the the babies have come out with less s obesity, less illnesses in their first year of life and more this kind of healthy stress response when we've been stressed out in in the lab study. And so then eight years later, we looked at the mental health of the mom.

So right after the intervention, eight weeks later, everyone in our mindfulness stressed action to felt great. They felt less depressed. They had less stress and less things IT.

That's what you'd expect, right? And they had just gone to a weekly class. They got all the support.

But eight years later, they still showed improved mental health. Every year that we measure them, they still looked Better. So it's probably when the longest studies is looking at longer m effects of a mindfulness training.

And I don't think IT was acquaintance that was string pregnantly. I think this is a very important time to have these skills. And being in a group adds that social support piece that we know as powerful. An .

incredible result. Could you share with us what the mindfulness intervention was and when IT was initiated, when I was stopped? So talking about ten and a day of meditation as many details as you can possibly give us because I know um even though I don't think i'll ever be pregnant, I don't planned .

on IT .

and uh you never know well um yeah I zero minus one probability in my mind but anyway maybe other people have other ideas for me but um zero minus one probably in my mind and yet i'm very interested in this mindfulness intervention because is a very poor one. So much so that is mul having a multi generational impact。 So how many minutes today um how many days per weekend .

we had them they met once a week. We they have little reminder cards. I mean we need all the reminders we can you know post its on the fridge timers and our phone to do this mindful chicken.

And so they were during the week doing this chicken. And IT was simply A A A mindful check and closing the eyes and feeling their body, feeling their labelling their motion. So is mindful breathing.

And then IT was some movement, and we taught them prenatal yoga. But really any mind body movement, people like different things to gan. Um there's there's even just slow walking would have worked.

So IT was a mindful chicken. Breathe, move my body. That's what reminder card card said.

So close your eyes and look inside, do slow breathing. They also put their hands on their valleys. So they felt that they were taking care of their baby.

And then more movement, so they they did increase their walking. And the mindful of tracking ens are, as we were talking about the very beginning, I would say, necessary but not sufficient. We've gotten stopped during the day and check in and look inside.

If we're not aware of where our mind is, we are just subject to the you know believing the trustful thoughts, thinking that we need to keep ruminating. There are sticky thoughts. So the mindful checking is really important. And then I think the breathing, as we talked about, is, is probably the more direct way that they're influencing the pr nature environment, the utter n environment to reduce the stress in that the babies being exposed to and movement refocuses us from our mind and a ruminated thoughts to the experiences to what we feel in the body.

There's even been a study that showed that overweight people with lot of cravings, if they do the body, can that simply focusing on the body from the head to the toe, you know, just reminding ourselves to focus on each part of the body, breathe into a released tension. It's very basic and simple. The body scan would significantly reduced cravings. I mean, to me, that would really hard to reduce craving. So like just that, refocusing on the body took away stress, anxiety, self referential thoughts, that kind of our favorite topic, thinking about our self thinking, negative thoughts about herself to relaxing feeling, ease feeling, well being.

I can help to ask about what that body skin might have been doing at a little bit more of mechanistic level. Some of the listeners might be familiar with these terms with someone. So just briefly to find them. We can perceive things in terms of extra reception, are specially paying attention to and focusing on things beyond the confines of our skin or interaction tion. I realized, you know all this, but for their sake, no one really .

understands interior action.

Go for IT. So in interros tion, essentially the sensory, the sensory innovation of the, of the internal organs of our own skin, that includes proper reception, and in which is our knowledge or our sense of where lions are, where we are related to gravity, all that stuff.

And you know IT raises that this body scan result, that is the fact that brief body scan can reduce cravings, raises this question in my mind which is is craving a um heightened sense of interaction tion or heighten sense of extra reception. So I could think of one form of craving where for insincerely t again, donuts for me yeah is in front of me. I'm thinking that I want that and so i'm almost in complete extra reception, but i'm to IT like my internal world is tethered to the dona. It's almost like the dona is in control of me briefly and then I eat IT um but it's high act your .

prefrontal cortex it's .

hijacked everything yeah yeah and then if I do a bodies again so I am put in myself in this experiment, in this kind of hypothetical scenario, and bring myself in into the six, I do a bodies can, which without question is shifting me more towards the reception right up and focusing on my skin, my heart rate, all these things interrex tion. So I could see how that would draw my attention off of the external stimulus and reduce craving.

And that makes me wonder whether or not craving is a form of extra reception, where interaction tion is just exquisitely locked to extra reception. And if you know, because I do think this is a remarkable result, IT is very hard to stop craving. I mean, we had a guest on here, a former colleague is stanfords now at the child or surge U.

N. School medicine, which is casey helper. And I mean, they do. They literally drill down through the skull of people who have bingeing disorder and start stimulating different brain areas, because these people are so out of control in terms of their bingeing and the kind of intervention that is considered necessary for a lot of folks who, benji, so here you telling me a body scan in some individuals can reduce that and I have to wonder whether not it's um somehow breaking that interaction tive extra acceptive tether. Anyway, i'm speculating here but i'd love your thoughts on on on craving and bingo ing and breaking bingeing um do you think that there are behavioral interventions um that could be layer on top of body scans? Should we all be doing body scans routinely?

Yes, why not? And some people gona like that lying down is maybe not comfortable. And so any my body activity is going to do the same. It's going to be know I think breaking that link that you have yeah i'd find .

this the acceptive extra acceptive balancing one of the more interesting conversations these days in neuroscience because we're start finally start to understand what some of the circuit ries are, and they do linked to these reward pathways in any event um getting back to the relationship, doing stress and food and maybe even just weaving back a little bit to the opioid system.

Have there have been any long term studies of stress intervention? You know in the studies that we do in our laboratory, we get people for a month. They do one intervention, we swap them to another intervention month, we analyze data, takes a couple years to do all that.

But we write papers and we move on. Um sounds like your laboratory has been involved in doing a lot of states where examining people were a very long period of time, even their children. Uh, what can we learn about the long term outcomes of things like body scans, meditation and then we'll get grath's IT.

There haven't been that any long term studies of stress and the adventures now that you mention IT, I think the meditation studies are probably the best example. There are some studies that have either followed people who have taking up meditation or just his cross sexual studies where you compare a long term meditator to someone who's never meditated. And they are interesting.

I mean, let's talk about the cross sectional studies. You are studying someone who eats like killed chips instead of potatoes PS. So there's a lot of differences in who decides to be a meditator.

We in terms of the health and biology, we have found that there is slower biological aging and other people have found that um in these meditation interventions we do the short term ones the inflammatory pathways of gene expression are damped way down and cross section ally other people like lizer hoji have found longer till meters and the meditators versus the controls um so we we haven't really found telma length thens in our shorter meditation states but we do find boost in toomeys activity which is the ensign that protects are self aging slows, are selling ing rebuilds the kilometers so those are those are studies that suggest if someone worked in continue meditating, they might keep up that slower rate of aging. So there is one study we did, which I think was particularly fun. We went to uh retreat center, where depart proper leads this one week, transcendental meditation retreat.

So people got a montral. They were focusing for probably eight hours a day on different uh, yoga, meditation and reflective exercises. And then we had half the group just walk around resort to take walks, hear some boring health talks.

So that was our control group. And what we found from that study was that in the short round run, a week later, everyone felt fantastic. After the week, right, they were not allowed to bring their laptop and work, and they, uh this great and time filming diet and arroba tic diet.

And then the gene expression pathways were like night and day from day one to the last day. And our model of um machine learning model was able to identify people over ninety percent IT could say whether they are on day one, day seven. And the difference really emerged over the long run.

We went and we follow them about ten months later and we found that not everyone felt great. Ten months later, the group who learned meditation still had lower depression, but the control group pounds strike back up. And then we look a little bit further. And we saw at people with early adversity benefit the most from meditation condition.

Oh, what was the meditation condition? How long per day?

Yeah well so they did they learned trance and sound prior sound meditation which is similar TM where you have a your focus attention on your on a word over and over but there's also more awareness of the um the body and that was you I couldn't say how many minutes today but IT was on enough during the day okay.

so repeatedly but for a fairly short period time one week yeah right yeah. I've never done these extended meditation retreat, interested.

well.

various people in my life. I told me that I need to go to asylum meditation, but they probably were emphasizing silent part. I recommend them.

I think they're amazing ways to get into the mind and to really come the body in ways like, you know, a quantum shift in our level of stress that we don't get. It's very hard to get in short belt.

I do a daily meditation practice. It's a relatively brief meditation practice. I do tend to focus more on things like deliberate called exposure and breath work. And yes, exercise and sunlight in all all the things. Talk about the podcast, but i'm certainly not averse to doing a longer meditation or all of these um TM meditations are the silent meditations and they range from what two days to a week is that for the retreats .

you can always find a retreat that you know half a day, one day a week, two weeks. So you don't go right into a two week, you work up to us. So the longest i've ever done is a two week silent meditation retreat. And that was after, you know ten years of doing yearly shorter retreat.

And then when you you know I think that would be too hard and stressful if you haven't able to mean mediation, be stressful if you know you think that you're fAiling at IT and um you so you need to have kind of developed. The skill a little bit before you go on the the retreats. And so lots of classes can do that in online.

But I think the short bouts every day or that is what is the most important message for people for for managing daily stress and not in the stress prescription, is very much about how we can do short daily nudges to reduce our stress around sal. So breathing is the one of the best body based examples of getting right there. But there are other ways. So being in nature, that's a really strong stimulus, an environment that sends all sorts of safety signals to .

us yeah certainly is not neither or but IT seems like now is a lot of the discussion that used to be had around meditation, its ability to evoke neuropathy and things that sort has shifted over to and increased focus on psychic alex to the common theme m on this podcast. But IT just seems like you taking the pulse of social media in the landscape out there. There's so much excitement about suicide in both in micro dos and micro dos and M D M A and some of the other trials that out there that many people are trying to forget the incredibly rich and vast literature supporting the use of even brief meditation practices for reshaping the mind. So i'm glad that were talking about meditation.

But I mean, even going into plants, medicine experiences is enhanced. If you have a little bit of training in how to in meta cognition and how to view the mind and thoughts, you can observe the whole experience with that much more kind of commonness skills and wisdom, knowing this is just the mind doing this cool things. So it's not they're not separate. And then I think the the Sullivan experiences enhance daily meditation so they really go well together.

Yeah and just as a editorial on psychiatry ics, um what's interesting, I think about the clinical data is that we think of the the psychotic journey is the time in which all the changes occur because IT has all these properties of fluctuations and altered thinking and SATA that actually kind of a gravitation pull around our our ideas about what psychiatric s do.

But it's actually in the window after the psychology journey that they are actually require ing in the brain takes place. So when people take about integration afterwards, they're just time about a few hours, whether you know para shooting back down to to typical consciousness, let's call IT that but that there's is long, perhaps even weeks or month long, tail of plastic. And that's actually when most of the rewiring is happening.

And which I find really interesting, which is not unlike meditation, where, sure, in one out of meditation, you might see a adjustment of rewiring of the brain, but these, from the book, altered traits, which am a big fan of, talked about these daily repeated short meditations, or these longer TM retreats, as there sometimes called, i'm in inducing this big time rain plasticity. Well, i'm now when to have to do IT and all report back to everybody what might experience to us, although I might do IT silently. I'd love to talk a little bit about some of the other health metrics that you've explored, not just in the context of mindfulness, but i'm particularly intrigued by A A graph here.

I'm showing my really nerdy side. There's a graph in one in your papers. It's the paper twenty eighteen we will provide a link to to this in the shown note captions that people want take a look but IT essentially describes the relationship between midon real health and mood um in the context of people who have different type of mood tendencies. If you if you would be willing to just keep described the top control of that study and some of the point that you find most interesting, I think it's a fascinating study and and I am so glad you did IT.

but i'll let you tell us about IT. Yeah, we we've done these in debt studies where we are looking at people under a lot of daily demand, career givers. And then we look at, look at, you know, Normal people, parents of neurotypical children who still have a lot of stress.

But we then ask, you know, does do people undertoned stress have excelled? He jing, so we look at till mayors, epigenetics might to control health. Then what explains those who look really good, who look resilient and don't look vulnerable? And so then we can find out, like, what's the magic sauce in a day that protects them from chondrine?

Ss, so Martin bca, my colleague, who has been obsessed with my condron health as a pathway to understanding both stress and really health and disease, he has developed a way to measure medical control in health in humans, so we can measure a bunch of enzymes, and then we can adjust IT for how many many we have. So we have this really nice index we can get from the blood. And in the study of Young mothers who were who had either typical children or children with autism, we found that the caregiving moms had significantly lower damped metal congo activity.

What that means is they can't produce as much energy. So if they're feeling more exhausted from the chronic stress, we know why. I mean, IT really is a IT was quite dramatic, Martin commented. Some of those low levels even looked like people with some genetic reasons to have no medical control activity. But here's the beauty of that study.

We then get to look within their day at their mood and ask, what about the caregivers who have really great metal control enzymes and and thus should be making a lot of atp? They had more positive emotions, both waking up and in the evening, but especially in the evening. And what's so interesting that is all of of these daily diary studies of stress and mood.

One of the things we know that matters for long term health is how positive you feel at night, so especially in a stressful day. So at the end of a stressful day, can you muster some feelings of content, ease, confidence, joy to have any of that? Or has IT just wiped out your positivity? And so for people who feel either lower negative or higher positive, they tend to have Better health trajectories like a decade later, less depression, less heart disease, less early death.

So so that's why we care so much about daily moods. And in in our study, that looks like the daily mood was really quite correlated with the medical track levels that same day. Then we measured mood like, you know, days away from that and was much less correlated. So that just start first studying on this. But IT really leads us to think that our ma cona are sensitive to our thoughts and our feelings, probably on a daily basis.

incredible. So for those of us that find themselves in a in a state of chronic stress, and here i'm talking about the kind of stress that you mention before, which is there is unlikely to be a simple solution like we're just can be grappling with this thing. And you mention the words radical acceptance, which i'd like to drilling into a little bit too because is a theme in the self help literature and it's A A theme that now I think in the form mal psychology literature actually um was talking to a dialectical dialectical psychology expert recently. I think .

that's title dialect behavioral therapy. Yeah that's a common great one.

Yeah you're correct. I I was grasping and that's correct. And they were talking about some of the misconceptions about radical acceptance because I think a lot of people hear the words. Radical acceptance at least, is what they told me and think, oh, that means that you have to just accept what is and deal with IT. There's another form of radical acceptance which is erratically accept the fact.

And i'm not going to deal with this, right? I'm going to walk away from IT, but what you're talking about is chronic stress of the sort that really the stress or the fact that are very close relative or family member is dealing with a lifelong condition or the fact that we can't extract ourselves from a situation that we are not in full agency to remove the stress or the radical acceptance of that fact then can rattle IT into an understanding of, okay. And yet there are tools that we can use to not just offset the negative health effects, but maybe even thrive in the context of this, essentially turning what initially was not of as a curse into a blessing, biologically speaking.

What are the data around the practices that can help make that conversion possible? I realized there's a lot of psychological work that needs to be done on going. People need coping mechanism support groups always Better to have more social support than less, of course but are we again talking about a daily mindfulness practice or is IT daily mindfulness of a certain type? Um what do we know about best practices for mitigating these essentially non negotiable stresses?

It's it's a great question and it's not a quick answer. I think this is partly how we view life and our our purpose in our own life. What's this game that we know we were born into and even just the idea that bad thing shouldn't happen sets us up for vulnerability to fill victimize, to feel um like we can't, you know accept bad things that have happened so so just stepping back and asking everyone listening, do you have a situation in your life that is unwanted and you can change? IT could be smile could be huge.

How much time do you spend thinking about this? The more we spend time trying to problem solve or worry or just wishing things were different, the more we are creating chronics just state. And so just even taking that first kind of step back to get perspective on what are the situations in my life that stressed me out and and which of these can I circle those that I can't change?

They're still there are on my list. They are on my mind. They're still upsetting. They haven't receded in the background, haven't gone away. Just that recognition of this isn't going to go away is incredibly powerful because we can, as I say, put the baggage down and give ourselves some relief and some freedom from from the big space that holds in our mind and in our body. And this is not a one time thing, it's a practice.

Radical acceptance is something we practice over and over to help us loosen our grip on unwanted situations, on letting them control are well being and taking up you know, this mental real state that so precious our attention so I would um there are statements that we can say that help us and it's I have you know there are few metaphors so i'm an expert at this because I have a matter giver and I often need to refocus from wishing things were different, trying to solve things to really a radical acceptance of this is how things are right now. This is the reality. And by just reminding ourselves that there is freedom within that, that there are things that you can do, you can actually live Better, live well with the situation.

So let me tell you what we ve found from our character, vers. We measure where their mind is at night. We, we pay them and we say, no five minutes. How much have you been wishing things were different?

How much have you been engaged, focused on what you're doing right, right before we think you and just those two questions tell us so much about that person's while being so people. And actually, yes, the caregivers are doing more of what all call suffering, wishing things were different, not being present for their lives. But regardless of that difference whether people are caregiver or not, this negative mind warning state of not being present for your evening, wishing things were different instead of being engaged, predicts more unhappiness IT predicts shorter telemeter.

So IT IT suggests that it's a pattern that has gone on for days, months and years that has been wearing on them. And so some of the metaphors that I think are helpful for this are thinking of yourself, think of this unwanted situation and think of how your you're pulling a row at a touch your brick well and you're doing that because you care. You want things to be Better for yourself, for this person and or a group.

I mean, it's it's something you're passionate about. And so you're pulling in polling and every day you're pulling and and you can't move that brick wall. So the only thing that happening is that you're chasing your hands that tends that chronic attention.

What if you just drop the rope? I say that myself, drop the rope when I start, you know, getting going on, trying to solve unsolvable problems. The brick laws, still, there is never onna move yet.

My hands are free, and so I can be freed up to live in the ways that I do have control liver to do things that help around the edges. So I was just talking with someone who is just so concerned about their aging parents, and you them not getting the care they need, not taken care of themselves. You know, things aren't going well, but there was so little that they could do to help their parents.

And so by dropping the rope for them meant realizing their word, things they could do, being present, being loving, doing a little bit of care that they could from a distance, was all they could do. And that's enough. That's that loving presence is like a gift that we don't realize that we we always have that to give.

Where do you think the tendency for us to try and pull on brick walls comes from? I mean, it's so non adaptive um and i've also heard its day that people do this in the reverse direction to meaning in time trying to control the past through current behaviors as well as trying to control the future to give me an example .

that yeah .

this is something I learned from, I guess, we had on here on the psychiatrists to extremely skilled on trauma, which I think is the best book on trauma, Frankly. And he talked about how the limbic c system that engages these fighter flight responses has no sense of time.

And that's why developmental scripts get reactivated, in particular, parent child or caretaker child, neutral circuits that were engaged in those relationships when we were really Young, get reactivated in adult relationships. I mean, some sense IT doesn't make sense. Like why I went the human mind have separate circuits for adult, like grumman's attachment versus child.

Parent attachment is also something very friday. And yet when you look at the the neural imaging is like you get one set of circuits for understanding of relationship. Of course, you adjust according to context and they get repurposed.

You don't just set aside, say, for childhood, what he said was that olympic system and the stress system when it's activated um distorts our perception of time and that this is what he was a saying leads to the what sometimes got the repetition compulsion people trying will repeat the same place themselves into mild ly to severely traumatic circumstances over and over again despite the presence of of a trauma does not have to be childhood ROM you think well that doesn't make any sense like the most ological thing in the world, like you get burned on the stove and you keep going back to the stove and the ideas that these circuits, when they get activated, really engage entries like cognize ript to make IT very hard to escape. But it's like IT pulls you into a story that is exquisite ly hard to to to get away from and so that this repetition compulsion is an attempt to try and rewrite the story. And this is, this is the theory not just afford an psychology, but kind of modern trauma and neuroscience informed traub therapies.

In any event, as you described the this pulling on a brick wall, I find a very compelling image and one that makes total sense to try and drop the rope as you describe IT because of the incredibly high energetic demand that pulling on the rope represents. You said it's sort of a way of diverting resources towards something that has no conclusion, right? And in drop in the rope, you can divert those resources towards other things. Um so I was just curious, again, I wasn't consult of the design phase and I assume you are in there, but know I wonder what what in us A A scientists understand doing the good on can experiment here like I wonder what in us as human beings compels us to try and change what we the unchangeable.

We really, really, really love control, and we want to control the future, not just because that makes us feel powerful, unhappy, but because then we can relax if we know what's gona happen next. If it's predictable, we're that much happier. We're not vigilant.

And looking ahead and being prepared for what might happen. So let me ask you that. So I have two whole chapter s in the stress prescription. One is on uncertainty and one is on control. And this drive us crazy until we can somewhat master and understand how little control we have and how much uncertainty there is and will always be. So let me ask you this, if you couldn't plan your day tomorrow and you want IT to nose with certainty what your plans or what was gonna en, how much ease and relaxation would you feel at the not known what's going to happen tomorrow?

Very little.

So like on a one to ten scale, how much will that drive you crazy tomorrow?

Satay, flexible.

And no.

monday's, monday's are mine. I own monday. No, kate, i'm just kidding. I love monday's. It's always been my favorite the week, even when I was in school. Yeah that would be on IT, that would be a six of .

and that's not unusual. And we have a scale to measure how comfortable people are with certainty. And what we already knew was that being comfortable with uncertainty is a beautiful but rare resilience factor.

People who tolerate uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression, and when stressful things happen, they get over IT more quickly. So we measure this during the pandemic. And what we found was that intolerance of uncertainty pretty strongly predicted pandemic anxiety, P, T, S, D, depression and distress about the fires, the climate, the climate situation in in california.

So this is interesting. I mean, is this like a fixed personality and we're just stuck with our rigidity around wanning certainty? Or is this something that we like a muscle that we can build? So I think it's a latter.

And I think there are practices we can do that help us feel ease with the uncertain future. Somebody y's mindful track ens, noticing that we are Carrying around uncertainty. Stress is one way. And then reframing uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life and the freedom that we can feel when .

we realized .

we don't control tomorrow, we just go with IT and we know we do our best and what the light there is in just viewing things with curiosity and just seeing what emerges.

So even just start posture or here's an exercise for dealing with uncertainty instead of like kind of that alert posture when we're like trying to take IT all in and and predict the next second and like just lean back and take some slow breath, we know that's gonna orient us and realize that we can actually face time in that way by letting IT come to us and receiving what happens and that a completely different body stands than are usual go mode during the day. And that's just a way of saying I am in a in a receptive mode and i'm going to just be curious about what arises. And so I actually learn that on the meditation retreat because I tend to be taipei. And I leave a retreat going from like very relax to like that leaning forward, tens of like where's the to do list. And so caring with me that was just like just see, let time unfold as IT will without trying to control things.

It's really interesting. IT gets right to the harder selling that I spent a lot of time thinking about in the context of stress management and also just general thriving, which is that I think that. About half of the messages that we get relate to stress and mind body interventions relate to adopting this forward center of mass.

This idea of okay, stress can give us early dementia, stress can limor sleep, stress can impact cognition, or stress can make us more resilient. Stress can activate all sorts of positive, anti flaming, ory pathways as well that the mindset matters. And here on, i'm doing a terrible job of IT, but i'm trying to scrape off and capture the top, a control of the beautiful work of my colleague, doctor early, a chrome.

who's yes in .

this podcast, and my huge friend of her work as well. And with that mindset matters because IT shapes physiology for sure, is her data point to that. So there are these kind of forward center of mass type approaches, and these are abundant on social media. Um you know different people come to mind. Different archetypes really have emerged.

You know millions and millions of followers that are the archetypes of when chAllenger rises you smashed to IT, you go through IT right? And then on the other hand, there are these stress mitigation techniques, both mental and physical body oriented mind orient, that that are more of the sort that you described, that are they're not being back on your heels, so to speak, like letting things bother you, but are more of this receptive mode and have more than awareness mode. exactly.

And I think that since here we are at the table to researchers who focus on these issues a lot, do you think it's fair for us adopt a sort of a general framework in model that, that perhaps people going to adopt themselves if they like that, that of course, it's not a neither or but that having both of these in one's kit of tools could be valuable because one is less energetically demanding but of course offers less opportunity for agency, at least apparently. So that's the leaning back and then the other is um certainly gives an opportunity for agency. But we know from one hundred years or more of psychology and psychiatric literature and from the emerging literature on stress mitigation that it's work.

It's not something that is without a cost. You can get you far Better results than IT were you to just let stress bodoe, but that it's work. And so we have to emphasize that work in very deliberate ways. exactly.

I couldn't agree more. It's work when we know it's productive, if we should work and when we know there's a brick wall, we should let go. So I think of, I like this ford mass idea, I think of IT as you muscle IT and or you release IT.

And we need both. And so that letting go is a really important wise in a distance ning way to mitigate stress in the right situations, in the right time, and know we can't muscle through everything, right? So another way I like to think about IT is just the waves of life.

Like, I mean, we are in an ocean, and we have small ways. We have big waves. Some of these tighter ways are going to hit all of us, the global stressors that the climate disasters that will come.

And so when we're not in the middle of a wave, which is when we need to muscle IT, where between waves, how much control do we have to fight the tide there? Some, it's not black or way we we are we we can't fight a rip tide. We need to go the direction of the tide but we can have some control in our direction.

And IT kindly goes back to um our colleague Robert supports very biological basic idea of us having you know he's a little be extreme with a no freewill. We are we are influenced by all of these things around us as well as all of our biological, you know i'll say um brilliant evolutionary animal instincts. So given all of that, we have some deterministic forces on us and within that, we get to ease up between the ways when we can, we get to change our direction. Well, always, always going to be hit by the next wave. And so it's this skillful surfing or navigating that we can do Better when we realize, when we control things, when we can, when we can truly feel safe and have ease, versus when we need to kind of gently paddle.

What do you think is the value of journal? And in placing one's own narrative on stressful circumstances, especially these non negotiable circumstances, again, I am faster by these because I think it's a categories of stress is not often talked about and yet is so prominent. So people say, okay, you know, dealing with short term just okay.

Well, my life would say, like use physio gc size or raise your stress reshot and we'll get back that 能够 被 as IT relates to the work you're doing with breath work。 But so many stressors are gonna take a year, five years. We don't know, you know that the uncertainty that you mentioned earlier or the certainty that this is gonna on forever.

And so you know what is the, you know, for people that are listening to this and that I want to to start to adopt practices, do you think that spending some time creating a written or a spoken narrative is helpful? I mean, we hear this, but are there any data that support the use of journal as a, as a tool? I seem to recall that there there are a few studies out there.

but I I remember exactly. Yeah, definitely. Creating a coherent narrative is critical to our ability to make sense, find meaning, find resolution, having social identity around our lived experience, what happens to us.

So narrative is on everything right? And stress research is it's not what happens with it's how we're interpreting IT and how um how we're responding to IT. And i've i've heard you say the exact same thing when you've talked about what is stressed.

It's it's really what narrative we're creating rounded. So I think a narrative of purpose fill in the blank about what your meaningful to you. But that is why we're different than just the the um the rats that we study or the monkey is like they have these amazing stress responses that are we have them to and we can't control that. But we have the ability to do this projection to the future to ask what is our purpose in life to see and no, that we are going to die and we can have some control over how we live and maybe even how we die and how we want to be remembered that is so beautiful that helps us rise above this being monkeys and close.

I'd love before we rap for us to return to this, uh, question about breath work and the study that you're doing, what one of the i've known about your work for very long time, admire IT for very long time and one of the things that um excited me about being able identity today is that uh our laboratory study breath works, your laboratory study's breath works and and I know that you've been doing a study on this so called a wim half method, which of i'll let you familiar as our listeners to some of them are familiar with the wim half method.

Others are not. I think a lot of people think of a wim in terms of his role as the ice men because of cold exposure. And of course he has breath work practices that mirror um things like two more breathing and other things.

But maybe tell us a little bit about what you're doing there and what you're interested in discovering. I realized it's too early to give us the results, but hopefully we will come back and do that another time. But what is the study and what motivated the study? And and maybe I can convince you to give us a little teaser of what you're discovery.

So for many years, I mean, I think I um first paper when I was a graduate student with bis, Mickey was about this idea of positive physiological stress. And so i've always been wanting to really understand what's positive stress. How can we do that? And instead for many, many, too many years, i've been staying the dark side, toxic stress, trauma, caregiving and how that is can take a toll on the body without the right resilience and resources.

And now i'm very excited about the the opportunity to just focus on different ways that we can stress out our body and mind in short term bursts that might promote stress, resilience and the body base. Strategies are concrete. The quick there are their also my favor strategies.

I I probably have internalized a lot of the mindsets, and you know, the things that i've learned from meditation and what I feel the biggest pain for the buckles, if I um waking up like super gittern with A A big just response because of x or y IT is actually something like A A hit type workout or taking the dogs for like a really brisk walk, like burning up that energy. And my body is um a very big effect size for me. Persons, everyone has there, you know different ways that they can see the biggest shifts in daily stress.

So i've been looking for ways to create positive stress besides exercise. We all know exercise. And I met wim half at A A A meeting where we talked to kind of back to back. And so we hadn't I had kindly heard something about, you know, crazy ice man climbing up to him as I .

really twenty seven or more world records for that sort of thing. Yeah.

so so I got to hear, I got to do the breathing with him during this conference, and I just felt like isolation afterward. I like, what was that? And then he heard about telemeter, and he was like, I need to know if my method is affecting seldin. He loves research and so we he helped us design a study that we've been working on IT usf um with my colleagues when demanded as and aircraft has been many years and it's funded by the john w brick foundation which is very focused on what are non drug way ways that we can help meet to health. So is a very good fit for all of us to come together.

A design study and we have been basically comparing losel relaxation methods, mind fun, a slow breathing to positive stress exercise and when half method and one of the things that we've learned in a big way is that regardless of whether we're creating deep states of ease or hermetic stress in the body, that short term burst of either a obie activity or the extreme breathing, people feel Better period. So three weeks later, after this experiment of doing their practice every day, they were either randomly assigned to the high result or the low rosel. The level of stress exited.

Depression fell dramatically in everyone. So many paths to changes in stress. There are probably very different physiological pathways. And and we can talk about that more when we get to really look in death that our physiological data as well as our blood base data.

But what we do know is that the wind half method did create daily positive emotion that increased over time, just like your study on signing. And so even though there are different mechanisms, they were selectively boosting feelings of positivity. I love know that's very unusual to get a very selective positive effect.

Super interesting. I can't wait to hear more about the data. So I gather, and by the way, know is a perfectly finance I gathered that you're not can tell us about the whether or not their telma changes yet or maybe that's not possible to detect and this kind of short term study.

So what we are going to look at, we don't really think that timers can change very quickly and tolerate may. So we're gonna at mtoni al enzymes to lauries and gene expression patterns. And as you know, we can look at many different mechanisms and pathways with gene expression patterns, especially with these new kind of essays where you can look at, you know, seven thousand different proteins like the soma logic.

And so we'll get to see, well, what's the pat? You know, did we really change patterns of acute stress with these different types of stress resilience interventions? And in terms of the physiological reactivity, there are ways that we can examine both the stress response system are the sympathetic nervous system and the paraiyan athel response system.

And I will tell you that um while we're still preparing the results, there were very different profiles from the different interventions that make us think that there's a lot of specificity even though everyone feels Better. The way that they got there is very different. The way that we're impacting with the nervous system in the brain.

incredible. And I have to say when I heard that you are studying in half method, I was positively delighted because I I find that there are so few serious researchers in the realm of of modern science that are both explores and then take what they have, you know, clean from those explorations, and then take IT to the laboratory and and put rigger on those, and really trying to pass mechanism with with of course all the open minded ness to whatever the outcome happens to be right doing good science involves necessary asking questions alone but um raising hypothesis and being comfortable for those I hypotheses be correct or not correct and I find your work to be just so incredibly creative and brave in that way.

And I love the way that you've mashed different aspects of your own personal journey into these different practices. I don't know what came first the science of the practices, but I I my guesses I must say it's very refreshing and I think it's exactly exactly what the world needs right now in terms of tools for mental health and physical health because far too many studies trying isolate variables without understanding a larger context. Like what are the different types of stresses clearly you're addressing that or there's a thing breath work that some people might think you know the ice men wim off.

It's really as so Terry, kind of crazy. I'm certainly not saying that. But you say, well, what are the critical elements from that, that we might be able to extract understand this positive you stress phenomenon. So I just um I want to first of all to say thank you for doing the incredibly important work you .

do and thank you. I mean, we were so delighted to um see the paper you did with David speaker and to know that you're pursuing this path and um it's very reassuring with your rigor and your no dep. The background I I agree with these are the types of studies we need releasing the inherent power of rejuvenation that in our body is is relatively untapped in these rigorous controlled studies.

And we just can't reduce information with a drug. We can't reduce stress with a drug. We desperately need to learn how to use you the whole range of the nervous system, from the acute stress to the deep relaxation, to heal and to promote these healthy, resilient states.

Couldn't agree more. And ucsf is very, very fortunate to have you and should they ever forget that, please come to stanford instead maybe we can recruit you away from and i'm here. I'm being friendly to my colleagues that you csf quite the Better treat you right or else we're coming for you um and I also just want to thank you for taking the time today to share this information.

Also you written wonderful books. We will provide a link to the newest one and um of course q people to that because something is a very rich source of information and actionable tools that people can take in terms of mitigating stress. And I I love the idea that there's this discussion about certainty and control to elements that are very prominent in in my life Better for worse and all of .

us all of us yeah and so really .

thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for taking the time to share that work through books and through podcast and especially today on this one. I I know I speak on behalf of many, many people, and I just really want to extend .

my great thank you so much and thank you for for your podcast. Well.

it's a labor of love and it's days like today and discussions like this that make IT worthwhile.

So thank you, Sandy.

Thank you for join me for today's discussion all about stress aging in metabolize sm with doctor elissa apple. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. If you like to learn more about doctor apple's laboratories work, or if you like to learn about her books such as the team area effect and the stressed prescription, please see the links in the shown note captions.

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