Dr. Cindy Geyer
speaker
241 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Dr. Cindy Geyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The peak stress response and the recovery and how our body does that, it's like a phenomenally beautiful biological process that we are fully equipped with to have over and over without harm, without harm. And in fact, when we shape those stressors to our body to be short-term, brief stressors,
and not, you know, kind of moderate, not too extreme, they're not only not harmful, they're creating all sorts of restorative and anti-aging effects in the cell. And you write about that so well in your book. And that's just, we so easily forget like, oh, we could use this for good.
We can actually do things like HIIT or sauna or cold exposure and be conditioning our nervous system, not just our cardiovascular system, but our actual emotional and physiological stress response can get conditioned.
I think it's important to start where you did, which is naming. We're in a different era. We're in a different place. We have our personal dramas. We're trying to manage the inherent stress of life and being a human in this modern world. And then on top of that, we do have this layer of more existential stressors, of global stressors, climate change, war.
famine, drought, you know, the climate events that are going to becoming more and more frequent. And so how does our human mind deal with all of that at once? we're not quite well equipped, but we're not that far off from being able to kind of adopt a new mindset for this new era and strategies.
And uncertainty tolerance is core to how we can remind ourselves to not let this primate body overreact, create accelerated aging, make our life miserable, given that we are just surrounded by
Uncertainty of the future, volatile uncertainty, meaning not just the inherent uncertainty that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but just the dramatic shifts that we're going to see based on climate and politics and how we create societies as humans. So the ability to simply be comfortable with not knowing is now a core survival skill. And we're all different.
We've come with different levels of what we call tolerance or comfort with uncertainty. And those of us who are on the edge of it, the really actually being intolerant and feeling really anxious about when we can't, we don't know exactly our plans tomorrow, how things will go, that is a tremendous vulnerability factor for anxiety and depression. We've always known that. We measured that.
During COVID, we followed 500 people and the people who were most rigid about uncertainty and tensed up and couldn't feel ease and relaxation with uncertain situations, they had much more trauma from COVID, fear of COVID, climate distress.
It's a really good question. We all come with a different level and what creates that level? Part of it is personality and openness to new experience. Part of it is really our life experience shaping us. And so when we've had a lot of early trauma, we tend to actually have more of a threat response to things that happen and to things that haven't happened.
So that vigilance about ruminating about the past, but also worrying about the future, feeling that more is at stake, feeling more threatened. So there are lots of ways to overcome that. In your diagram of stress, in your new book coming out in February, I love your triangle of understanding all the influences on us and our aging biology.
And you had one layer of stress that people don't usually think of, which is we're born into this world wired differently because of intergenerational trauma. shaping our epigenetics, as well as our experience in the womb for nine months, the level of maternal stress that we've been exposed to.
It's absolutely real. Like, I just want to say, we actually, I mean, Rachel Yehuda's work and others have actually shown our stress response system, you know, even three generations out from being from a Holocaust survivor as a parent, as a grandparent, we are different.
And we now know the pathways, and yet we still don't take it seriously. And that's why it's called the stress prescription, because we're not going to get rid of stress, but there is a way to live with it better that is absolutely medically relevant. It's a prognostic factor for getting mental and physical illnesses. And all of the data, including a recent APA survey, show
We are more stressed now than in previous years and decades, but even worse, I think of our youths, like 70% are, you know, reporting stress that they... such extreme stress, they don't know how to manage it, it's interfering with their life. These are really serious red flags. We know what that means biologically.
It's a leading indicator to the wear, you know, the wear and tear on our cells, on our brain, the conditions we're always trying to avoid. So it's a serious prescription that we don't have to live each day with this excessive level of stress, which really rules out those states that you've been cultivating, which is the restorative states.
And it's a beautiful example you gave how you are consciously changing them. Because it's not our fault. There's no judgment. We all come out with different levels. That question about why do some people expect... negative things to happen that can't stand ambiguity, that uncertainty feels intolerable. That's part of it.
It's like partly from how our stress response systems are shaped from all these different influences before our life, including our life starting in the womb.
Yes. So you want to hear about these mind states.
Yeah, we've been thinking about stress from a different perspective, we and others in the field. So usually we think about how stressed does someone get in the moment? How quickly do they recover? And that's important. We want a quick peak and a quick recovery. And that's a healthy, resilient stress response. But it's not just the action during stress, during events, during tough times.
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