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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're safe right now.
It's time to relax.
It's okay to relax right now.
And our cells are getting physiological signals that we don't need to be creating proteins to fight viruses, to keep our immunity up and to keep our stress response up.
And that's the exact profile that
of what are cells doing or the proteins that we make that we see during a meditation retreat.
So in meditation retreats, when we look at gene expression, we see that the body shifts toward, during a multi-day meditation retreat, so a week or less, the body shifts into creating more proteins for cell restoration, like telomerase and mitochondrial function.
and less of the proteins that are toward building up immunity and mounting the stress response.
So we get that shift toward what we call growth maintenance and repair genes or the healing process when we rest.
And if we're ripping ourselves off of relaxation and we're not getting deep rest, we are aging faster.
I think it's a brilliant place to intervene.
It's, as you said, it's the bookend that we control right before bed.
It is the...
ability to
allow our nervous system to descend into a relaxed state before sleep will directly affect our sleep physiology to be more restorative.
So some people think, you know, my head hits the pillow, I fall asleep right away, I don't need to relax before sleep.
The bottom line is a lot of that's your homeostatic drive for sleep because you have a sleep debt, right?
So you don't have trouble getting into sleep
You probably underslept.
But what is your nervous system saying to you while you sleep?
Showing 121–140 of 631 · page 7 of 32
← Previous
Next →