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 months

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

Yes, I think that's exactly right. And that is a new area. In 2018, we published the first paper showing that chronic stress was related to lower mitochondria. And then we were like, why didn't we measure fatigue and vitality? Because you would imagine you have low mitochondria. Some had as low as people with mitochondrial disorder.

And that is thought to be at the center of both chronic illness and mental health now, these mitochondria as the source of aging, breakdown. And so I think it's really helpful to think of our mitochondria and what gives them a boost and boosting positive affect, having more of these restorative states, but also the hormetic stressors that they probably love them.

It's interesting to think of really planning regular, like a lifestyle habit, hormetic stress episodes. So they're, you know, it's very common to be doing ice exposure or sauna or Wim Hof breathing. And those are, I mean, to be totally honest, I don't think we have many options in our toolbox for hormetic stress that we know of and we know how to use safely and find the right dose.

So we're, people experiment and It's just a new cutting edge area of stress to really understand how these are affecting aging and mental health. There is exciting work on depression and hypothermia showing that when you can raise your core body temperature, even just a few sessions, it can lead to over a month of remission from more severe treatment-resistant depression.

And of course, the cardiovascular effects are well-documented. Rhonda Patrick just wrote a beautiful review of what repeated sauna does. Oh, wow.

I'll email that to you.

Yes, it is. And, you know, it's beautiful in that it's not medical. So it's doing it's, you know, creating all of these changes in the cell in a dramatic way. Same with cold exposure, same with breath holding, extreme breathing, and then the recovery response.

So we're just we're kind of like inducing the survival response and short bursts and then the counter regulatory response, turning on the autophagy, cleaning up junk in the cell. reducing oxidative stress, free radicals. And I think in terms of the aerobic stress, I mean, we've been trained to think, you got to get into change your clothes, do 45 minutes, you got to get the endurance in.

And of course, that's important. But what we're talking about, stress fitness, you can go do something for one minute, two minutes. You change up your, your physiological state, right? You can go do jumping jacks or sprint and you don't, and you can, someone was just encouraging me. I was like, yeah, but you got to change your clothes so you can get sweaty.

And they're like, no, I do it all the time. You don't, you do it in your work clothes. So it was interesting just to think like, no, just take away all those barriers about how we think you have to be prepared for exercise and be in the right place and just do the, you know, something high intensity and,

in wherever you are briefly, probably fulfill self-conscious, but that is really changing up our state. And we also use that in different therapies that are really needing acute psychological first aid for emotion regulation. What do they do? There's all sorts of strategies that are body up like that. So ice on the cheeks is one, and as well as the pushups or jumping jacks.

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