Dr. Elissa Epel
speaker
631 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 23 Jun
Dr. Elissa Epel’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 Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So those two, quiet, calming. And I think this idea that you go, go, go, go, go, go, hop in bed and turn it off like a switch, that doesn't work either. So building in a transition to rest and relaxation. If you can do an hour, that's great. And getting off the devices, not watching TV, maybe reading a book or journaling or doing something, taking a bath, stretching in the tub.
I mean, there's all kinds of wonderful ways to ease into rest.
That's my favorite as well. And then you go to your cool bedroom and you do your legs up the wall yoga, restorative yoga position and bingo, you've got your transition to rest and relaxation.
Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. So the rough analogy is this. It's funny, when they asked partners of people with insomnia how many of them were suggesting that they have a drink to go to sleep, it was about a third of them. So people think alcohol is going to help you sleep. And it might make you fall asleep. But then as it clears out of your system, there's an arousal.
It can exacerbate hypoglycemia. It makes you wake up. It's going to make sleep apnea worse. If you're a woman in midlife, oh boy, it's a bladder irritant. It's a hot flash trigger. So it's really affecting sleep in a lot of ways. The rough equivalent is there's about an hour of sedation followed by an hour of arousal.
So if you had a glass of wine at 6 and you go to bed at 10, it's probably not going to impact your sleep as much as if you have two glasses at 8 or like your late dinner last night if you had a glass or two of wine. I had a beer.
That has another impact on your sleep.
It's really interesting.
And we're all different in terms of our caffeine metabolism ability. Some people are really fast metabolizers. I happen to be one of those. But if you're a slow metabolizer,
half of your cup of coffee from noon could still be in your system at nine o'clock at night and most of the time we're not thinking back to that new cup of coffee with food it's really about quality quantity and timing of food it's all three yet another area that's impacted with the health of the gut microbiome is sleep and data is suggesting that people who eat a
A wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables tend to have better sleep quality, whereas a highly processed standard American diet is associated with more sleep disruptions and less deep sleep. So quality matters. We already touched a little bit on the timing of eating. So eating your calories earlier in the day also helps re-regulate those circadian rhythms.
clocks in the brain and the clocks in the body that are ideally going to be working in sync with each other, they're influenced by light, by movement, and by food. So when we line all those things up during the day, it's going to help us get the rest that we need at night.
Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show · Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control · 25 Nov 2024
podcast
70, 70, 70, 70.
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 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 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 wanna 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.
The question really becomes, what are you carrying in your body and mind when nothing is happening, when you are at rest, or at least you think you are? And that's a window into the unconscious level of stress that we're carrying. So when we talk about uncertainty stress, that's where it is. That's because it's a little bit vague and we can catch that.
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