Whitney Pennington-Rogers

That's wonderful.

Well, David, I feel like this has been a wonderful conversation and just really grateful to you for joining us.

We have had so many member questions, so thank you to the members as well.

Thank you so much, David, for sharing all of this.

the experience of it, the torture of being stressed. Honestly, even just the word makes my heart beat a little bit faster, my shoulders tense up. Stress is a seemingly inevitable part of so many of our lives, especially if you are living a busy, fast-paced life, as I imagine many of you are. But we might be approaching it all wrong if we are just looking to sweepingly eliminate it. Maybe there are some good things stress can offer us. Maybe there is a way to use it to propel us forward,

not drag us down. And that's what our guest today is here to talk to us about. April is Stress Awareness Month, so in anticipation, we are thrilled to be joined by a woman who understands stress perhaps better than anyone. She is a Harvard physician and bestselling author of The Five Resets, Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience. Please give a warm welcome to Dr. Aditi Noorakar. It's such a pleasure to join you and the entire TED community.

Hi Aditi, thank you so much for being with us. And we have tons of questions for you. But before we really launch into that, you are a physician. I would love to understand more about your background here. There's a world of areas you could specialize in. Why did you specifically choose to focus on stress? So that's like the million dollar question. Before I became a doctor with an expertise on stress, I was a stress patient looking for answers.

Where people are saying all the time, I'm stressed. And maybe not really understanding what the meaning is behind that. So if we could just start with the basics of setting the scene. How do you define stress? What is stress? I think stress has really been vilified. And when you look at it scientifically, not all stress is created equal.

And yet there's like a gap between, okay, now what? What can we do from here? And I love the point that you made about maladaptive and adaptive stress, good stress and bad stress. So when you're feeling these things that you've just outlined, how do you know whether it is the good or the bad stress? If not looking at your life experiences, how do you know from what you're feeling that it's good or bad stress? So the first step, you know, you have to really understand, there's this fantastic concept

how you are doing with your stress. And then you see, you know, is my stress getting better using some of these interventions or is it getting worse? And so there are kind of five key questions and we can go through those if you want. This is all great and I'm so excited to hear more strategies around how we could tackle stress. And you wrote a book called The Five Resets. Could you tell us a little bit about the idea behind the book? Why did you write it?

Thank you for outlining what the five resets are. Is the thinking that taken together in that order, one, two, three, four, five, just straight through, is a tool for managing stress? Or do you think that there are certain situations where you might use reset number three and certain where you might use reset number two? How do you approach that?

which is connected to the subtitle for the book, Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience. And resilience is a word I think we hear a lot in this sort of culture of hustle culture, grinding. And when you think about resilience as it relates to stress,

begun to give us a little taste of with your five resets. So when you think about stress, what are some of the go-to techniques or practices for managing stress that you use on a daily basis or that you recommend for others to use? So I had that acutely debilitating experience of stress when I was a medical trainee, that stampede of wild horses. And I have never had an acutely debilitating experience of stress like that

I love that. And I feel like there's so many moments where when I'm stressed, I actually can catch myself holding my breath, right? And I imagine that that is a big part of what influences this breath exercise and helping you to relieve stress. Absolutely. I mean, there's kind of like three key elements when you're thinking about how to tap into your mind-body connection. There is your breath.

drop them in the chat, we'll try and get to as many as we can. But there are a couple of questions connected to what you're talking about right now, this idea of neuroplasticity and our brains constantly growing and evolving. Ken asks, how does stress affect us differently as we age, and are there different ways to handle it that are effective as our stress levels and the way we manage stress changes? Ooh, great question, Ken. Okay, so let's start a little bit, let's backtrack a little bit.

You touched on something just now, Didi, that we're seeing a lot in questions from members. Michael asked specifically in 2025, they know that they feel like every facet of life is under stress. When everything seems to be burning and there's nowhere to escape, how do you navigate that? So to your point about collective stress, how can we tackle collective stress?

But to your point that there are so many of us who might be experiencing stress around the same types of things. What role does support from others in your life, your friends, your family play in stress management? It plays a huge role, Whitney. I love this question. Loneliness, you know, let's talk about like, why is it important to feel a sense of connection? Because I think many of us with that sense of horizonless and are, you know, like,

that really it can have a profound effect and lean into those weak ties. It sounds like there's just so much that we can personally just gain from relationships with the people around us, the people that we're coming into contact with. And are there systemic things that you think organizations, governments, people can, that we should encourage the spaces that we inhabit to make more stress free, to help us manage stress in a better way?

and it is perhaps more important now than ever to really lean into that sense of self-compassion. As we're winding down here, I think there's one thing that we haven't touched upon that I know is on the minds of a lot of folks. It sort of has to deal with the way we're experiencing this, which is just thinking about technology, social media, and it's just sort of ever present in our lives and surely is a stressor for folks.

in ways that we wouldn't have seen a decade ago, two decades ago. So how do you, when you think about technology and our relationship with it, how do you think we can have a healthy relationship that supports a healthy level of stress in our life? Ooh, this is a great question. And something that we can all universally agree on. So my take on this is that every relationship in your life has a set