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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Dr. Hyman Show · Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control · 25 Nov 2024 podcast

Mindfulness, mindful check-ins help us just in this moment, like just ask, are you tensing up? Do a check-in with your body, your hands, your face, your eyebrows. So often we are tensing up and We sometimes can identify why, and sometimes we can just remember, oh, right now, it's not only okay to relax, it's important for my body. I'm not needing to cope with something.

So it's that baseline state or rest state that we're learning is really different in people and is a sign of chronic, low-grade chronic stress that we can actually get to and release through different techniques. So red mind is what we've been discussing about coping in the moment when you're fired up and you need the energy, you need the stress response.

And we just don't want that to kind of go on and on and have sluggish recovery. But otherwise, we need that. It's beautiful. It's why we're here today. That's our survival response. And of course, we're triggering it too much as humans with an overdeveloped cortex. and the more chronic ambiguous threat we feel. So then there's yellow mind state, which is when we think we are relaxed.

It's just, how are you walking around during the day? Typical day, where are you at? What's your baseline? You probably do some monitoring, you know what your autonomic nervous system is set at. And that is probably higher than we need to be at.

And so that's what we think of as our default baseline is actually carrying around a lot of both cognitive load from our thoughts, from different information screens demands. So we're a bit activated. Then there's also the unconscious stress that we can become aware of and release. So we wanna bring down that yellow mind state to a more true resting state. And that's the green mind, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I've learned a lot from monitoring, and I think that's one way to raise awareness as well as, you know, asking ourselves to become mindful of our emotions and our bodily, where we're holding stress in the body, where we're tense.

The heart, you know, heart rate tells us a lot of things, but the heart rate variability we think is more specific to that balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic, so more uh, related to psychological stress, not just, uh, metabolic demands. So it's, it's that super interesting. So Costa Rica leads you to a different yellow mind, um, maybe green mind state, better baseline.

I monitored my, with my aura ring, I monitored my heart rate variability during a meditation retreat. And we know that when people slow their breathing immediately, they have, they can have a decrease in all the, um, the sympathetic activity markers, and sometimes in heart rate variability during studies.

So it's no mystery that doing these practices and doing them for longer can lead to these improvements. And that those are what we call deep rest states when we're really allowing ourselves to feel safe and to let down and let ourselves go into restorative mode. But I was surprised at how long my heart rate variability, my baseline heart rate variability took to change.

So it was only two weeks later toward the end of the retreat that my sleeping heart rate variability really improved.

Hmm. Yeah. We, we have these red mind states that we don't want on all day drains our batteries, stresses our mitochondria. We have data on daily mood and mitochondria showing it is really sensitive to daily affect. This was a, um, a study with Martin Picard of Columbia, and we were measuring the enzymatic activity.

And so when people woke up with more positive emotion and went to bed with more positive emotion, they had higher mitochondria, which we measured kind of in the middle of the week of monitoring. And when they, you know, particularly at night, so there's this idea of how are we recovering from the day? Can we maintain positive affect at the end of a stressful long day?

And we certainly found the chronically stressed participants, these were caregivers, had lower mitochondria overall. But this mood effect pretty much mediated that and overrode that. So that's this pointing us to, hmm, we actually know how to increase positive affect quite quickly with gratitude exercises and other ways of thinking and being.

And so how amazing to think that our mitochondrial activity might be under our control in this short-term way.

Yeah. Well, to get back to your question about the, how do we live a day without chronic stress? So we might think of red mind as like having, you know, drinking coffee all day and just keeping us in that activated mode. And we want that stress response, but we just want to, you know, use it parsimoniously, not take it for granted. When we ignore it, it can just be on all day and rush, rush, rush.

I mean, rushing and packing our day is probably the most common pernicious way that we stay in yellow and red mind.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, they don't have much of that, do they? We must look so weird to them.

Yeah, that's beautiful. So the mitochondria are... most likely, they haven't been studied to death like all the other biomarkers in terms of health behaviors and all, but they certainly are related to the hormetic stressors like exercise, increasing them. And we don't actually, we only now, I think, have really good ways to measure them in healthy humans in a monitoring way.

So we're learning more and more, but we do know that they tend to secrete the cell like lets out fragments of mitochondrial DNA into the serum during acute stress. So that's not a good thing. That's not a good sign. That's a sign that our mitochondria are, you know, overstressed and responding to stress with with this excessive what we call cell free mitochondrial DNA. So they're outside.

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