Dr. Elissa Epel: Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging | Huberman Lab Podcast

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Dr Alyssa eppel Dr eppel is a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco she is also the director of the center on Aging metabolism and emotions Dr eppel's laboratory focuses on stress and the many impacts that it has on our brain and body both negative and positive for instance our laboratory has shown that particular forms

of stress change our telomeres which are a component of the genetic Machinery of ourselves that impacts how quickly our cells and therefore we age we also discuss exciting work from Dr Apple's laboratory exploring how stress impacts our behavioral choices in particular which foods we elect to eat and how we experience those Foods today you'll learn how stress and your interpretation of your stress impacts the different aspects of your biology and psychology you'll also learn about several important stress interventions that Dr Apple's laboratory has explored including Med meditation and breath work can profoundly influence the way

that stress impacts your brain and body both For Better or For Worse she's also explored how specific dietary interventions such as omega-3 fatty acid intake impacts stress and our response to stress and a key and important feature I believe of Dr Apple's work is how stress and stress interventions vary in their effectiveness depending on whether or not the subjects in her experiments are male versus female and their social status by the end of today's episode I assure you you will have a much more thorough understanding of what stress is and how it changes our biology

and psychology as well as the specific stress interventions that are going to be most optimal for you in reducing the negative effects of stress on the aging process and on negative behavioral choices and also how to leverage stress in order to maximize the positive effects that stress can have on cellular metabolism mental health physical health and performance to learn more about the work from Dr eppel's laboratory as well as to learn more about her books entitled the telomere effect and now more recently the stress prescription you can find links to those in the show note

captions before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is thesis thesis makes custom nootropics and frankly I'm not a fan of the word nootropics because it translates to Smart drugs and as a neurobiologist I can tell you that our brain has neural circuits

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we have colleagues in common and topics of Interest related to our Laboratories in common so I've got a lot of questions today I'd love to just kick off by you explaining a little bit about the different forms of stress you know we hear stress stress is bad stress can kill us no one likes to feel stressed Etc but as you and I both know that's not the entire picture so love for you to just educate us a bit on what stress is and what it isn't where it can be problematic and where perhaps it can

even be beneficial so as a stress scientist it is a word I use a lot but it has to be broken down because it has so many different kind of dimensions and meanings so there's good and bad stress there's acute and chronic stress and you know technically it just means anytime we feel overwhelmed that we feel like the demands are too much for our resources so that's kind of a very technical way to put it but really so much of life is about meeting challenges and we're never going to get rid of different stressful situations

in life if anything they are increasing and so it really comes down to not the stressors of what happens to us but really how we respond the stress response so that's a distinction that we're still trying to get the field to talk about stress in a more specific way so that we can think about well what situations are in your life they might be difficult ongoing situations like caregiving or work stress or worrying about Health your own or someone's and then there's how are you coping with it so when something happens we mount a stress

response and we recover and beautiful no harm done we need that that's why we're here still alive is that survival response it's it's a problem these days of just we keep it alive in our head we keep it alive with our thoughts our thoughts are the most common form of stress even though I expected we would get into tools to combat stress a little bit later since you have now told us that our thoughts are the biggest sort of propagator of internal stress what to your knowledge is the best way or what are the best

ways for us to manage overthinking and ruminating on stressful topics because I certainly experience stress and when I do I have tools related to you know breath work running exercise sleep non-sleep deep rest I'm a huge fan of all these sorts of things but when we succumb to stress and the thinking patterns take over where the gears are turning and they won't stop turning what does the science tell us about ways to manage those thoughts should we work with them in the sense that we try and rationalize um or understand the basis of the stress

or should we try and divert our thinking away or is there some other tool that I'm aware unaware of yes yes both and right so I like to bin it in three um three categories so one is we well I'll just say first of all we have to have some awareness of how our mind works or we're just like you know a subject to thinking our thoughts are real thinking that it's helpful to keep ruminating and problem solving because that's our tendency is to go toward whatever we think there's threat or risk and to problem

solve that but you could just be stuck there all day in this kind of threat mode or red mind State and that's just a shame we don't need to turn on that that stress response all the time it's where we are as a society so that's why I I wrote the stress prescription take any survey even pre-pandemic and people feel the majority of people feel an overwhelming amount of stress so even this past year 46 of adults report feeling overwhelmed by stress and then you break it down you're like oh this is really bad for

young adults and women and people of color and so we have these you know groups that are targeted for marginalization that are feeling an extremely high amount of stress in most of those subgroups so bottom why don't you argue that most most everyone is feeling more stressed now or is it just or what do the data say yeah so I think that we come with different levels of awareness of our stress and so when I find someone who really doesn't feel a lot of stress sometimes I can see right through that and they're just not

aware and sometimes it really is true they they're often in a different stage of life and they control their environment a lot and they've been through a lot I mean one of the big patterns in the population levels of stress is that the older people are less stressed period if you're over 65 you have been through so much solved so much you just have a better perspective on life and on stressors and then our adults our young adults have like four times the level of stress as our older adults so so we do you know

we don't have to wait till we get older but there certainly is true wisdom and resilience that comes with age for many people um often we're so used to feeling daily stress from our Urban and Modern Life that we're we don't notice it we're just used to it and so we're going through the day with kind of like clenched hands and just you know for listeners just even just taking a check in now and noticing how you might be holding stress in your body that's a huge clue it's a huge place where we accumulate tension

so we might not be aware that we're stressed but we're crunching our hands and in fact um my taxi driver who drove me here um let me know that he's exactly that point that he doesn't realize he's stressed until he realizes that he's tensing his shoulders and his fists and so great signal you know doing a check-in to like notice where in our body we're holding stress is step one to releasing it so um going back to this notion of overthinking what are the tools that um are most efficient for dealing with overthinking or ruminating

uh when people just can't seem to let go of the thing that's the stress or thinking about not the stress in their body but the thing that caused the stress the difficult conversation the thing that irked them on social media or in their personal life or professional life or simply out in the world so I I wish I had one answer but I'm going to say lots of strategies tackle that and so in those three bins one are top-down strategies of awareness and things that we can say to ourselves since our beliefs and mindsets can

really help us release stress view stress more positively the second bucket is um not that the Mind changes the body but the body changes the mind and those are the set of strategies that you tend to use the most right where where we're working stress out of the body we're metabolizing it we're burning it up and we get relief changes are you know amygdala activity and moves us to more an experiential state where we're more in our somatosensory cortex and then the third bucket is change the scene just getting away from all the stress triggers

that we have in our office or in um in the city and being an environment that we find calming it might even be just be a corner of the house but implanting what I call safety signals where just these animals that are conditioned to signals whether we're aware of it or not so having having things like comforting pets pictures smells music why not we need those they help they add up yeah I like the idea of having a small physical space or I suppose it could be a large physical space but for most people who

don't have the resources some small pre-designated physical space that represents a safe Zone um and uh creating or I should say populating that safe Zone with things as you said um as a visual neuroscientist originally I guess now I study stress um but uh as a visual neuroscientist we know that photographs are extremely powerful cues for the memory system especially actual physical photographs um and I I believe there is some work on this that if people keep a photograph of something that draws positive memories that that photograph actually they keep it with them that actually

can be a positive cue for alleviating stress and just enhancing mood um this has probably done less so nowadays because everyone keeps things on their phones and it's just kind of a scroll through but um in any event you know when we talk about stress uh it's clear that there's short-term medium-term long-term stress you've studied all these different forms of stress um if you would be so kind as to just give us an overview of the different forms of stress uh how we can learn to recognize those and then I'd love to transition from there

into talking about some of the work that you've been doing on stress and stress related eating and stress and how it relates to Aging in particular but before we do that um to get make sure everyone's on the same page um if you could just uh pepper our minds with knowledge about stress and all its um beautiful and not so beautiful forms so when we think about stress we usually think feeling stress you know reporting stress and that's important what are bodies doing is also important it's not always related to our minds so measuring levels

of the nervous system and how Vigilant we are is another way that we can understand stress and that's particularly important and interesting because that's how stress gets under the skin and we might not be aware we might not report stress but we're still holding tension and being much more sympathetically dominated meaning that we're our body is Vigilant and scanning for cues and we don't feel safe and so we're mobilizing a lot more energy than we need to and stress is so expensive to the body the stress response uses a tremendous amount of energy ATP that's

made by your mitochondria and if we have that kind of vigilant stress response on all day we're just going to feel exhausted and we all feel exhausted at this stage of the kind of long shadow of the pandemic and it's really no mystery because we're not good at turning the stress response off and that's what we want to really focus on is understanding we need to mount a big stress response to cope with things when we need extra energy but then we can actually let our body relax and we can turn it off and that's

where the rumination comes and we want to catch ourselves rehearsing and reliving stress or worrying about the next thing saying right now I'm safe and you know there's the breathing strategies I'm right with you where those are the most direct and fast path to reducing stress in the body period yeah our colleague David Spiegel our associate chair of Psychiatry at Stanford and also a colleague of yours um as well um has I think said it best which is that breathing is unique among the functions of the brain because it really originates as a brain function

and then extends of course to the body in that it represents a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious because at any given moment we're breathing and of course at any given moment we can take control of our breathing there are very few brain circuits that impact the body in that way like I can't suddenly just change my rate of digestion because I decide to but we can do that with breathing we will definitely get into some of the um work that you've been doing on breath work particular I know you have a study that's

actually explored the Wim Hof method quite directly one of the few studies I'm aware of that's done that so we'll get to that a little bit later um so you describe stress as a way that the body and mind mobilize energy yeah and I didn't quite answer your question so there's there's that acute stress response when everything every hormone and cell in our body is having a stress response and that is allowing us to reorient focus problem solve it's really beautiful how much we can increase our capacity to do things during stress and then if

it you know lasts minutes or hours we eventually recover and that is um what happens all day in a small you know to small extents with daily stressors we don't necessarily get so threatened that we release a lot of cortisol but our nervous system is going up and down all day then there are then there's kind of moderate stressful events that maybe take days or months to cope with and what's important there is that noticing like right now am I really coping acutely with something or can I restore so that kind of daily restoration is

very important and then there are chronically stressful situations that go on for years many of us not all of us but many of us have those in our life These are situations I'll just use caregiving as an example of that we can't change we we can't change other people we can't change certain situations or resources and we can be thinking about them chronically problem solving trying to wish things were different or we can use acceptance radical acceptance strategies and other strategies to live well with them and and so that's a really important strategy for people

who feel like their their life is going to be stressful forever because of X or Y that that's not true you have a harder life you're going to do more coping but you can actually be dealing with uncontrollable chronic stress in ways that it's not going to take that toll on your body I mean I study chronic stress and how it accelerates cell aging and I can tell you there's so much variance between people people are so different so among caregivers some of them look as biologically young or younger than our controls people with no

identifiable big tough situation in their life I'd love to hear about the um lack of inevitability around aging and stress I I realize that there's a big landscape of of discussion around aging and stress for us to cover but since you brought it up in one of your papers there's a beautiful graph and since a lot of people are listening not watching and we don't use visual diagrams for that reason I'll try and explain this as best I can you distinguish between optimal aging typical aging and accelerated aging I think everyone I can imagine would

want optimal aging right certainly not accelerated aging and what's interesting about this graph in your paper is that well of course it appears that toxic stress chronically unmitigated stress that makes us feel like we are at the world's Mercy or the other people's Mercy will accelerate aging turns out that under exposure to stress leads to more rapid aging than what you describe as ideal amounts of stress in other words that no stress is not the answer rather to have some stress is ideal if you want to have so-called optimal aging can you explain a little

bit about the mechanisms behind that maybe this is a good opportunity also to tell us about your telomere work so the questions are how does one measure optimal versus accelerated aging and why would it be that some stress is better than no stress when it comes to aging uh ideally so having no stress means we're not really living like we're not engaging in the gifts of Life which are inevitably have some Challenge and risk and let me give you an example one study took um elderly people who retired and they you know Society kind of

labels them as you're kind of done with your meaningful work in life and um your you know you are pretty much not able to contribute to society I mean there's so many negative stereotypes that people then kind of embody and then live um in this program brought them to work in schools and tutor young at-risk students and what happened to them is they went from feeling maybe safe and under stressed to feeling challenged but generative they were feeling more purpose they were feeling like they were growing and they were feeling like their day had more

meaning they had more relationships they had these caring relationships with the students the students had all sorts of issues and troubles drugs and and maybe not having lunch poverty and so they felt the stress of that but they also saw how much they could help with their support and their tutoring and in these study they they took images of the hippocampus and those who engaged in the program particularly the men actually had growth of their hippocampus during this program so at any stage in life we can be growing and challenging ourselves even in our much

later years and growing our brain and you know more than anyone like what is that hippocampal growth mean for their well-being and their cognitive function yeah it's interesting that hippocampus of course a brain area involved in formation and recall of memories mostly formation of memories um it's super interesting because it's so plastic it's so amenable to the addition of new memories I think the most striking study to me is the one and I should point out that most of the data say that the addition of new neurons is not the main reason for improvements in

memory but it is one of them um but Rusty gauged out the Salk Institute did a study in the I think the early 2000s where they took terminally ill people and these people agreed to have their bodies injected with a Dye that would label new neurons and then after they died their brains were processed um and they didn't die from the dye injection by the way folks they died from other causes they were terminally ill and what they discovered was that even in terminally ill or or and some of these people were quite old those

people were still generating new neurons especially in the context of still trying to learn and and acquire new information so wow um of course they're dead so they can't apply that information after that but of course none of us can right none of the information but why not up to when you die right absolutely yeah absolutely one other example of this my colleague Dave Almeida he measures you know daily stressful events in huge National populations and a small percentage of people report no stressors and so you wonder like what's happening are they not engaging in

life are they really not having stressors it it looks like they are it's not just that they're not getting stressed by things they're not they're not really going out and doing much and what he found is that their level of kind of memory and cognition their cognitive Health was significantly lower so you can imagine the hippocampal you know the lack of those um neuroprogenerative cells they're just not being stimulated it's super interesting I wasn't aware of that result so I appreciate you sharing it I almost have to wonder if it's like exercise where you know

so many people I think now everybody hopefully understands that exercise is going to lower blood pressure reduce resting heart rate and proof musculoskeletal function and bone density all that stuff but that if you took a snapshot of the bodily response during exercise blood pressure is way way up heart rate is way way up stress hormones are way up cortisol is through the roof during a hard workout immediately afterwards and yet that sets in motion a series of adaptations that brings you to a better place most of the time I almost wonder if stress is the

same is there any evidence that short bouts of stress provided that they're managed well meaning that we don't spend the next 24 or 48 Hours ruminating on the stressor but that we're able to move through the stressor and resolve it in some way that that's actually beneficial for us because of the mobilization of energy stores and maybe maybe even changing our threshold for reacting to stressors in the future it's a great question and it's one that I have been chewing on for a while because we we know as you said that physical stressors when they're

short and repeated like high intensity interval training They are promoting not just aerobic fitness but stress Fitness people feel less rumination less depression less anxiety so they're kind of tuning up the nervous system what about psychological stressors and we we know two things so one is I do think that there is a level of Engagement with moderate stressors that when we are used to them we get fit and our stress resilience builds meaning we're less threatened by them so let me go deep into that we can two people can approach the exact same stressor and

one person is having a pretty overreactive stress response where they basically are feeling their survival is threatened so it's high cortisol High vasoconstriction and blood pressure goes up equally in both but the person who's feeling super threatened either their survival or their social survival of their ego their blood pressure went up because of the vasoconstriction the other person who's viewing the same stressor as I can do this this is a great Challenge and opportunity I have what it takes those types of thoughts generate a different hemodynamic response which is actually more cardiac output so blood

pressure is going up but in this healthier way more oxygenation to the brain better problem solving they're able to maintain this positive outlook so we've measured the threat challenge response in many lab studies and we know lots of things so if you're having more of the challenge response at the end of it you're less inflamed so just in the lab within an hour or two we see that there they didn't trigger all that pro-inflammatory response and their telomeres tend to be longer which is a measure we can talk more about but basically it looks like

they have a slower speed of Aging that is super interesting you call this a stress challenge response so we could call this kind of a um to to be really simplistic two types of psychological stress response feeling threatened like you're gonna fail you're embarrassed um you know that social pain response we know well that feels terrible um but that also that huge stress response when we you know we feel it in our stomach our heart is pounding it's just an over exaggerated response that response biologically is different and the thoughts that go with it are

different and we recover a lot slower and then there's the challenge response which is this it's more of that kind of activated um excited response and the beauty is that there are lots of studies out there done by emotions and social psychologists that tilt people toward the challenge response we can actually promote that challenge response and so when you asked about like is it good to have a repeated stress response yes if it's if it's manageable right then we're kind of building the muscle of stress resilience I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge

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supply of vitamin d3k2 again that's athleticgreens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2 what are the sorts of things that people I can do in order including me I should say um can do in order to wage that challenge response is this purely based on mindset like instead of saying why me why this why now I can't believe this is happening is it a mental pivot to okay this is a great opportunity for growth I don't know how I'm going to manage this but I'll manage this

um you know you want to stop me you got to kill me type of type of mindset is that is that the switch that then the body follows because this is an interesting instance where the uh most all the stress mitigation work that my lab does is focused on using the body to control the mind but here we're talking about the Mind controlling the body first and then the body following suit which I find equally fascinating so are there some specific mental scripts that people follow and are we all able to follow those those scripts

yes to some extent we control the script we can use that script to prepare ourselves going into a stressful situation and we can use it at any point during the stress or so some of us are just wired to have a big threat response period maybe it's you know it's uh epigenetics We've inherited maybe it's early trauma that has shaped us to be ex have this exaggerated emotional response and yes we and others have found that trauma sensitizes our emotional stress response so that we are feeling more threatened but that's okay because that's the part

we can't control and we just have to have a lot of self-compassion and awareness that okay the this is what I do my body reacts like this but what happens next that's when we can start to use those statements self-comforting self-compassion distancing there's all sorts of statements that allow us to then recover more quickly so when we want to shift from a threatened response to a kind of challenge response are there any data that dictate whether or not we should keep those statements in our head write them down say them out loud I guess what

I'm trying to do here is trying to get to a little bit more of the the meat of the the actionable so since a lot of our listeners so I think we'll be um as I am very excited about the idea that a mere shift in our mentality about stress can give us the opposite outcome I mean before you're talking about vasoconstriction and inflammation and all these bad things to um put it lightly and then in the challenge response to stress getting the exact opposite more vasodilation more resources used and more positive effects on the

brain and body yeah so what what are some um if if you can recall from the papers if not that's fine but I'm just curious what what those specific tools might be every statement you said Andrew is good it's a good one the whole trick here is that people need to find the the strength statements the stress Shields I call them that fit them that that feels right and that they believe and so they're you know I list a bunch of options in chapter three which is called be the lion instead of the gazelle so

the Blind and gazelle are both you know high blood pressure high stress and the Lion's chasing the gazelle but the gazelles having this total threat vasoconstriction response because um she might die lion might get dinner right so it's needing to mount the stress response because it's so excited to get the tasty dinner for you know the next few days and so the lion is having that challenge response and so we can remind ourselves be the lion we it's it's not that we're always lying or gazelle we get to shape that and so some of those

statements are well let's say right when when we're going into it list your resources why have you ever dealt with any situation like this remind yourself of past successes remind yourself of someone you can call or text or feel supported by remind yourself that this outcome is not going to affect your life in 10 years or five years that's a distancing kind of um perspective taking so there's all these strategies and and you got to use what works for you telling yourself I got this I can do it I can get through it I have

what it takes those are all good Shields and another set is you know we've some of us feel really stressed out by stress like once we get feel our heart racing that leads to oh no you know this is bad for me and so rather than than getting stressed by stress we actually want to remind ourselves that this stress response is empowering this is going to help me cope my body's excited my body is doing just what it should right now so that reframing in Studies by Wendy Mendez and others my my colleagues who do

these reappraisal research they have basically trained people to view stress as positive during the stressful situations in the lab people do better they perform better they feel more positive emotion they problem solve better they recover more quickly so pretty powerful stuff yeah that is powerful stuff I'm wondering if we can talk about the relationship between stress and eating and I think that's also a great opportunity for us to talk about the opioid system a lot of people are familiar with the so-called um opioid epidemic and opioid crisis um you know sadly you know far too

many people are dying a fentanyl overdoses and we all know about the oxy content epidemic and all these people addicted to opioids and that's not really what this is about um what we're about to talk about is the fact that we have an opioid system within us that is neurons and other cell types that can reduce excuse me can release substances into our brain and body that make us feel less pain and make us feel sedated but at a healthy level right and yet there are a lot of things besides drugs that can activate this

opioid system um I think sexo activates the endogenous opioid system as far as a last read there was a paper out recently but also food can do it um and again to healthy levels um provided the context is healthy of course what is the relationship between stress and eating and eating and the opioid system stress and eating is an interesting one so most people when they feel stressed or you know I'm just gonna ask you do you eat more or less when you're stressed less definitely I feel like I can go two three days without

food when I'm when I'm really stressed but I came up in a profession where um sadly for me all-nighters were part of the regular until pretty recently a couple years ago when I just called an end to that um and no it wasn't just because of procrastination it was just work overload but I can go a long period of time without eating although I love to eat so I do point out that I do love to eat and what does the body feel like when you're in that stress State when you're not even hungry you're

kind of shut down in your digestion that I have enough energy from my neural resources from adrenaline and generally those periods of time when I'm not hungry coincide with a hyper focus on the stressor the deadline whatever it is in life that that needs tending too and um food just doesn't appeal to me as much it doesn't taste as good and it's not as enticing yeah so we think that either type of um body temperament is high sympathetic and so when you have a big stress response your digestion is is pretty much shut down like

it would be the opposite eating would be the opposite of what your body's telling you to do I should I'm just gonna forgive me for interrupting uh for those of you hearing sympathetic we're we're not talking about sympathy we're talking about the uh the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system which is the so-called fight or flight as opposed to the parasympathetic in any event sorry to interrupt but want to make sure that um sometimes people hear sympathy and then they think emotional sympathy um I like to think I have that too but um okay

so I so I tend to lean more towards the sympathetic meaning um more alertness arousal yeah on the Seesaw of the autonomic nervous system and I I'm a High um sympathetic reactor I lose weight when I go through like writing my dissertation I look like a skeleton at the end um but that's not what most people complain about it's not weight loss most people complain about overeating or binge eating when they're emotional when they're stressed and so that's the more common pattern and what that that looks different both in the brain and biologically and so

what it looks like is that the stress response is driving cravings and also let's say high insulin or an insulin resistant State and what goes along with that is tending to be overweight or have obesity and so just by whether it's through conditioning or genetics having that kind of larger body with a big stress eating temperament that is a challenge in life and I've been you know I've worked with people with different eating conditions Eating Disorders binge eating and it is a um what's hard about it is number one it's very common and normative to

just feel like you can't feel satiated so it's this compulsive eating tendency that stress brings you to and so the so what it mean we measure this is very easy to measure it means that people feel like they can't control their eating they don't get full um they think about food a lot and so stress kind of exacerbates that tendency and that is a you know it's a it's a common phenotype like we've studied it and maybe 50 of people with obesity have that um do lean people have that some not many like less than

20 percent but what they also have is this tremendous kind of uh diet what we call dietary friend or control over their eating so they're they're able to to not overeat even though they're thinking about food a lot so that's that is you know that explains that unusual body of someone who's really more um still has those compulsive traits so why does this matter this makes it really hard to eat well because when you're stressed you Dr you're craving the comfort food the high fat high sugar high salt depending on your temperament and that is

that means with repeated bouts of stress you're just going to be gaining weight and particularly in the intra-abdominal area that's what we've seen we've seen it cross-sectionally we've seen it in rest studies in my studies and now we've seen it in people and many stuff for about 10 years I study this and the question was is what's happening in people the same thing that's happening in mice if you stress them out and you give them Oreos the mice develop binge eating they get really compulsive and they get this you know terrible metabolic Health profile metabolic

syndrome where they're they're round you know they're in their belly fat basically expands like a cushion and that's because that's this really good immediate source of energy during stress so like we're really well wired to if our body thinks we're under chronic stress we're going to store stress fat or abdominal fat so we can just mobilize that in a second and then the second question we've asked is can you reverse that with different interventions can you can you block the compulsive eating um so I can I can tell you what we found there but the

opioid system that you mentioned is certainly involved and in studies with people lean people and people with obesity my colleague rajita Sinha Yale it's basically found that when you stress them out people with obesity are having a different reward response and they're having their the more insulin resistant they are the more their Reward Center lights up during stress and what's causal there like what's the chicken what's the egg sir because I can imagine these were people that at one time were not obese who got stressed the opioid system reacted in a particularly potent way to

food and they were able to clamp their stress and so then they become or binge eaters in the context of stress yeah and that leads to insulin insensitivity exactly I could also imagine that they were insulin insensitive therefore they need to eat more in order to feel come of an increase in uh satiety because we know this um now based on brain and body mechanisms and then that set off a Cascade of things leading to obesity um not that it necessarily matters but what's causal do we know I think it really does matter I think

there's been a you know a mistake of kind of confounding all obesity with food addiction and um and metabolic disease and it's completely heterogeneous so I I think it's the developmental path that you're describing which is that um there's a tendency toward having a bigger reward response and hunger during stress so it becomes a way of coping a lifestyle and and that is a pathway toward obesity and so some obese people have a dysregulated stress response but I but not all of them I mean it really is a certain type of person so that's why

we target people with Cravings in all of our intervention studies now we want to know who has more of the compulsive eating type because they need a different set of skills to cope with stress and to lose weight if that's their goal there's a drug I'm sure you're familiar with Naltrexone which it can block the opioid receptor it's used to block the opiated receptor in the context of different types of addiction have people tried to use Naltrexone in the context of binge eating and does it help people lose weight because it presumably reduces some of

the rewarding properties of food that's one of the very few drug combinations that has been used for binge eating so it was a combination of Naltrexone and Wellbutrin and I'm not sure at this moment how much um that's favored for binge eating but certainly the early trials showed that it really does damp down on the compulsive eating interesting so is that a commonly prescribed uh kit of drugs now for for obesity I know there's a lot of excitement nowadays about these semi-glue tied yeah um uh analogs because they do seem very effective in blocking hunger

especially in type 2 diabetics I don't know if you're familiar with but right they're sort of all the rage uh mostly because people saw the before and after photos of Elon he had his shirt off on a boat and there were some not so nice comments made about him and then sometime later he was quite a bit lighter and um he announced that he had been taking one of these semi-glue tied agonists yeah yeah I really hope that we come up with um safe and effective drugs and one thing to think about is that the

the challenge that we all have particularly for prone to obesity is the toxic food environment and particularly the refined sugar and regardless of what we're on Metformin or one of these drugs we override it with our diet and and really the improved nutrition is the only way to solve it as a public health problem I mean the drug companies are saying everyone should be you know everyone with a certain I should be on one of these new drugs and it's just rubbish and it's not going to lead to long-term health well I know you have

a colleague there at UCSF um Dr Robert lustig who's been talking about sugars and hidden sugars for years and the problems with that and and we don't want to demonize sugar as the only cause of the Obesity epidemic but it's certainly one of them at least that's my belief according to the data yes and Rob is the biggest proponent of you know of helping people understand the big problem and the root is in the processed food and the sugar and that the drugs don't touch that we just we override effects of any drugs with our

diet and and so it's um It's been a a losing battle really because of the force of big food and big Pharma so let me go back to the the compulsive eating so we've we've we've um there are some clues about how to break that cycle so one is in our weight loss trials or our healthy mindful eating trials we find that mindful eating is not going to cause a lot of weight loss period but the people who benefit most from learning this kind of calm self-regulation where you check in with your hunger you slow

down you increase your awareness of your body so in terreceptive awareness that um type of skill is really critical for people with compulsive eating and so in our trials we find that if they people with compulsive eating if they get that if they get randomized to the mindful eating they do better in terms of their insulin resistance and their glucose and their long-term weight loss so that's one good clue another is the positive stress pathway looks important for breaking the compulsive eating cycle so high intensity to interval training or you know maybe some of these

other ways that we've been been talking about to increase the bodily stress in these short-term ways to metabolize stress in our body can help with the cravings so what would that look like in the context of let's say somebody um has the opposite phenotype to me they get stressed and they find themselves reaching for snack food or that they simply can't reach satiety they just want to eat and eat and eat um what are some of the aside from Naltrexone and Wellbutrin and some of these prescription approaches because I always say while I value certainly

value prescription drugs in certain contexts I always feel like behaviors should come first do's and don'ts than nutrition then supplementation and then if and only if it's still needed prescription drugs but that's just my bias based on my observations I like to think so uh it also is a uh it starts at a zero cost um Endeavor I mean behaviors require time but it certainly um includes everybody not just those that have insurance or that live in a particular region of the US or the world so anyway um that's my bias and at least for

the time being I'm sticking with it um it's the basis of a lot of what we talk about on this podcast but nonetheless if somebody is uh finding themselves in that category of binge eating or heading towards binge eating or using food to comfort or alleviate stress how should they intervene in their own thoughts and behavior we talked about the the bins top down strategies changing the body changing the scene we need all of those I mean the the compulsive drive to eat is one of our you know strongest impulses if we've developed that pathway

and so the we train people for example in mindful awareness of separating out emotions from Hunger so they get really wrapped up together so just labeling how you're feeling labeling your hunger from one to ten and figuring out is it am I really hungrier as a boredom that helps people and if you do that check-in right before you eat that helps the most so that's the top-down mindful check-in the uh other thing we help people do is like right the craving surf the herbs so if we deal a lot with soda Drinkers and it is

addictive and there is nothing worse than drinking sugar soda for our body so we help people by help um having them watch their craving pass and and knowing that it's a matter of time that they can surf the urge without jumping to consuming and so that practice helps some people especially with practice the push-ups the taking a walk the changing the scene getting away from food is always going to be a huge strong strategy if you can get yourself away from it the the problem is as you know is that the Cravings get you to

the buffet they drive you to the the soda Etc and so just you know creating safe environments both at home and in the workplace where you don't have soda is really important so we try that at UCSF my colleagues and I um including Rob lustig the anti-sugar doctor we just saw the absurdity of being a medical center people come with these chronic diseases and what are they served in the cafeteria or even at their bedside sugared Coke in the hospital in the hospital and so my colleague Laura Schmidt who's uh partly responsible for the soda

tax she rallied the all the um we went top down to Administration but bottom up to vendors got rid of all the soda in all of our hospitals and campuses and we found two things number one people who were heavy drinkers lost weight in the most important Place their waste heavy soda drinkers so when we took it out of the workplace they actually had their health improved and number two those with compulsive eating they score high on our our little scale for um reward based Drive it didn't help them so then we randomized half of

them to get some extra boost we call it motivational interviewing where we're really supporting them more and helping them you know think of goals like being with their grandchildren not getting diabetes and in that little bit of support helped them tremendously and so now we're trying to roll that out in you know a big controlled trial but at least 100 hospitals have adopted the um stop selling sugary drinks because people don't want to be sick but they can't help it if they have the reward drive and if they have the compulsivity and it's right there

at work we're just working against health super interesting I think that um for most of us we think about sodas the kind of thing that maybe we have every once in a while or that we drank more when we were kids I seem to have lost my appetite for soda at some point you just know too much teen years maybe or just at some point I I started to feel like there were better Alternatives um and you know like what well okay well people want ideas yeah well full confession I mean okay most of my

non-water uh beverage consumption is going to be either coffee um usually black coffee or nowadays I sometimes will throw some ketones in there not because I'm on a ketogenic diet but for I do feel like it makes my uh level of focus and cognition better pouring in this morning yeah I do use it before podcasts and we're prepping for podcasts it um there are good data showing that uh we can all utilize ketones as a as a brain fuel even if we're not on a ketogenic diet that's um clear to me based on my experience

and the data as I see them and understand them um or yerba mate tea which is just a caffeinated tea from South America which I like very much um however I am guilty of drinking the occasional diet soda every once in a while and I know that you know some of my audience will just gasp how could I do that but we're talking about the occasional diet soda the occasional Diet Coke mostly because I I don't like the taste of sugary soda and I actually really like the taste of diet soda Aspartame is a particularly

rewarding taste for me um and as a consequence I try and avoid drinking it more than I might have a can of Diet Coke once a month maximum usually on a plane or something like that so that's the extent of it but if I have the choice between a really great coffee and a soda it's going to be coffee or yerba mate soda it's gonna be yerba mate um or food and soda I'm gonna eat instead and so that's me but I do recall you know as a teenager soda was kind of a default you

just kind of like go to the soda fountain and fill the drink it felt like such a rewarding thing um and I think the reason we're drilling into this more deeply is it sounds to me based on what you said earlier in my read of the literature also brings me the idea that that drinking sugar in the form of liquid is one of the worst things that we can do in terms of our bodily regulation of insulin and glucose um it's I don't want to use the words empty calories because that's kind of a loaded

phrase but it is essentially empty calories it doesn't work it's harmful calories they're not empty yeah I mean there are no amino acids in there they're no essential fatty acids and there aren't many carbohydrates that you can really utilize for um long-term bouts of mental or physical work so so what do you view soda as one of the um the worst certainly not the best but one of the worst culprits out there I mean it is really prominent especially nowadays also we should include energy drinks a lot of kids especially males by the way it's

it's almost this is crazy it's almost 95 of energy drink consumption is males interesting and I don't know what what is maybe it's the packaging or who how the marketing has been pitched but by the way as soon as I say that someone will be in the YouTube comments telling me that that's completely false but we can point you the data um so what are your thoughts on sugary drinks and what that's doing um how it do you think this is a reaction to how much stress people people are experiencing is this like people's attempt

to to inoculate their stress or is it simply that it tastes good and it's easy to consume and it's relatively inexpensive people have not and we have not really studied the sugary drinks in the same way we have studied the comfort food and the binge eating and so um my guess is that it is part of a stress response but even more than that it's part of the hedonic cycle so when you get the sugar especially if it's packed with caffeine that's going to be a more addictive drink you get this you know really feel

good response right away and then you get the low and it's the hedonic withdrawal so which is this you actually feel bad when it's been a while since you've had it and so then it drives the compulsivity you want it again because you wanna not because you want to feel better you want to get rid of feeling bad so that's what happens with both food addiction and we think that happens with sugary drinks now let me tell you that when you asked is is a sugary drink one of the worst things we can do for

our health yes because sugary food doesn't go to our brain as quickly as a liquid liquid sugar a sugary drink so think about cocaine and crap crack goes to the brain immediately and it's that much more addictive that's how we think of liquid sugar The View on sugar I I think is starting to change and I think in the years to come provided folks like you and Dr lustig continue to uh be vocal about it which I hope you will um I think it's going to shift things quite a bit I look at it a

little bit like trans fats you know I was growing up people ate margarine and now like trans fats are banned in many cities um it's kind of incredible how these things have have changed um over time and it requires an effort not just on social media but podcasts and I think also lobbying uh lobbying our politicians really getting them to understand um just how pernicious this stuff is there's a lot of social norms that go into like what's good for for all of us as a as a group or community and what's personal choice it's

very fiery you know I just I've heard a colleague talking about how bringing junk food or soda to work is like passive smoking you're like you're bringing something and that's going to pollute other people's health and you shouldn't do it so that's that's much more Edge energy and people will fight them on that um but the the basic reality is yeah we're gonna eat the donuts if they're in front of us and so in it is much more considerate to bring a bowl of fruit I'm glad you brought up smoking I don't want to take

us off topic but as long as we're venturing into these general or I should say more General and yet really important themes around public health and food yes I learned something interesting about smoking and why so few people now smoke um I always thought that the campaigns around smoking and how terrible it is for us showing pictures of lungs that are you know caked with all this tar and like you you know cancer and all this stuff was the effective message but what I learned was that one of the most effective messaging systems in the

the battle against smoking was to get young people to stop smoking not by telling them it was bad for them but by showing them videos of these um rich men sitting around tables cackling about the fact that they're making so much money on the health problems of other people because of smoking in other words what they did is they made being a non-smoker anti-establishment and so I find it very interesting anytime there's something like soda or highly processed foods that are so woven into the establishment it seems like though you can we can tell people

until you know we're blue in the face about all the health concerns with with these things you know sugar is bad and this is bad highly processed food is bad some people might change their behavior but seems like for the younger generation the thing that's most effective is to activate their sense of rebellion this has been true for probably hundreds of thousands of years but it's certainly true in the last hundred years and let them see that there is a very strong um big food sometimes big Pharma but certainly big food system that is working

against them and that it in order to take control of their health actually we want to activate their sense of rebellion so that they're like no I'm going to take excellent care of myself I'm not going to fall victim to this monetary scheme and here I'm not pointing to any conspiracy I mean this has been seen with smoking this has been seen with a number of different Pharmaceuticals again not all Pharmaceuticals are bad this is true of a number of different aspects of of kind of a big markets absolutely it's like pull the blinders off

let people know that we're vulnerable to all the marketing and that there's there really are suppression of data behind a lot of it so it had it's happening with um with eating disorders too Eric Stice who's at Stanford with you has been using this method we call it dissonance showing people with eating disorders how the food industry has been manipulative and has tried to design foods for addiction for the highest bang for the buck with dopamine Etc and so that has helped reduce eating disorders in these studies and it has even helped reduce reward drive

that isn't that amazing that the dissonance could do that so interesting yeah I think uh what it's telling us is that um few things are as strong as the um no I won't I refuse to response in terms of changing behavior um especially when there's something to push against so it's not just a battle with ourselves I want the soda but I'm not going to drink it it becomes a well I want it but I want it because you are making me think I want it I don't actually want that so um I don't know

maybe this is getting me back into my teenage mindset but I think a sense of rebellion provided it's in the direction of Health one's own health and the health of others of course um can be a positive thing yeah so we do that with the mindful eating we really we have them bring in the junkiest processed food they can think of like a Twinkie and eat that really slowly and mindfully and few people finish it and they're like that actually wasn't nearly as good as the picture of it and the idea of it and so

it's like that reward predictive error that you've talked about where they they think the brain is driving them to have it because of the ad advertising and their expectation that they'll feel good but if they're really paying attention it's that it's a very disappointing experience versus we also have people Savor a piece of good chocolate whichever they like milk or dark and that experience teaches them to eat slowly and really enjoy small amounts of rewarding food so that they're not they don't need to feel full and binge oh so interesting um darker milk chocolate dark

yeah I actually like the 100 chocolate there's one brand of Venezuelan chocolate that's 100 which sound it might sound awful but it's actually quite good I think that was the first time I could actually taste the the real elements of chocolate interesting yeah that is not rewarding it's way too bitter for me I need the mouth feel you know give me some fat in it oh my well yeah it's hard to find but um it's out there I'd like to just take a brief moment and thank one of our podcast sponsors which is inside tracker

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if you'd like to try inside tracker you can go to insidetracker.com huberman to get 20 off any of inside tracker's plans again that's inside tracker.com huberman to get 20 off so while we're talking about stress eating obesity and um here we've also broadened the discussion to include different Generations we're talking about teens and adults I'd love for you to share with us your findings around this study that you did of pregnant women and how stress and pregnancy and different patterns of eating and physiological changes that people experience during pregnancy could you share with us what

those findings were because I think those are relevant not just to people who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant but to everybody because I think they shed light on how we manage stress and sometimes how we fail to manage yeah so with overweight and obesity we know we can't just change calories it's just not going to work the next stressful event is going to come along and people will you know go back to what their brain is driving them to do is to you know binge on comfort food and so we've done these interventions

with men and women that show that we can help them regulate using somebody's mindful eating strategies or checking in we wanted to do this with pregnant women because when you have excess weight and you're pregnant you're really vulnerable to gaining excessive weight during pregnancy which is not healthy for the mom or the The Offspring so we we did this study it took us probably 10 years total to you know get the Grant and recruit groups of 10 women who are pregnant in the same stage and give them this training and mindful eating mindful nutrition stress

reduction and then my colleague Nikki bush has been following the babies for I think it's been almost 10 years since then and here's what we found first of all we couldn't stop excess weight gain the women in the control group gained about about 60 of them gained excess weight during pregnancy and same with our mindful group so maybe it's end of story you'd stop there and say it fails don't do it there have been so many beautiful developments in the women who got the training that we just keep are you know being shocked by how

impactful the stress reduction training was it was just two months of their life but but pregnancy is a very critical period when these women were changing their habits and they're very motivated to help their baby so here's what we found within that first month of the intervention they all got this oral glucose tolerance test so they all had a they got a blood test to see how well their body was metabolizing food sugar and so it's like a pre-diabetes test and what we found was that twice as many women in the no treatment control group

had impaired glucose tolerance during pregnancy it's a it's a common high risk and half that many women had this in the mindfulness group so by reducing stress they improved their insulin sensitivity during pregnancy so imagine what that's doing to the baby too then the babies have come out with less obesity less illnesses in their first year of life and more of this kind of healthy stress response when they've been stressed out in in the lab study and so then eight years later we looked at the mental health of the mom so right after the intervention

eight weeks later everyone in our mindfulness stressor I can do it felt great they felt less depressed they had less stress and less anxiety that's what you'd expect right I mean they've just gone to a weekly class they got all the support but eight years later they still showed improved mental health every year that we measured them they still looked better so it's probably one of the longest studies looking at long-term effects of a mindfulness training and I don't think it was a coincidence that was during pregnancy I think this is a very important time

to have these skills and being in a group adds that social support piece that we know is powerful it's an incredible result could you share with us what the mindfulness intervention was and when it was initiated when it was stopped so we're talking about 10 minutes a day of meditation as many details as you can possibly give us because I know um even though I don't think I'll ever be pregnant I don't plan on it and uh you never know well um yeah hi zero minus one probability in my mind but anyway maybe other people

have other ideas for me but um zero minus one probability in my mind and yet I'm very interested in this mindfulness intervention because it sounds like a very potent one so much so that it's multi having a multi-generational impact so how many minutes a day um how many days per week we had them they met once a week we they had little reminder cards I mean we need all the reminders we can you know Post-its on the fridge timers on our phone to do this mindful check-in and so they were during the week doing this

check-in and it was simply um a mindful check in closing their eyes and feeling their body feeling their labeling their emotions so it was mindful breathing and then it was some movement and we taught them prenatal yoga but really any mind body movement people like different things there's Qigong um there's there's um even just slow walking would have worked um so it was uh mindful check-in breathe move my body that's what the reminder card said so close your eyes and look inside do slow breathing they also put their hands on their belly and so they

felt that they were taking care of their baby and then more movement so they they did increase their walking and the mindful of check-ins are as we were talking about at the very beginning I would say necessary but not sufficient we've got to stop during the day and check in and look inside if we're not aware of where our mind is we are just subject to the you know believing the stressful thoughts thinking that we need to keep ruminating their sticky thoughts so the mindful check-in is really important and then I think the breathing as

we've talked about is is probably the more direct way that they're influencing the prenatal environment the uterine environment to reduce the stress in that the baby's being exposed to and the movement refocuses us from our mind and our ruminative thoughts to the experiences to what we feel in the body there's even been a study that showed that overweight people with a lot of Cravings if they do the body scan that's simply focusing on the body from the head to the toe you know just reminding ourselves to focus on each part of the body breathe into

it release tension it's very basic and simple the body scan would significantly reduced cravings I mean to me that's it's really hard to reduce Cravings so like just that refocusing on the body took away stress anxiety self-referential thoughts that kind of our favorite topic thinking about ourselves thinking negative thoughts about ourselves to relaxing feeling ease feeling well-being I can't help but ask about what that body skin might have been doing at a little bit more of a mechanistic level um some of the listeners might be familiar with these terms but some won't so I'll just

um briefly Define them we can perceive things in terms of extra reception or basically paying attention to and focusing on things beyond the confines of our skin or interoception I realize you know all this but for their sake um no one really understands interoception go for it so in interception essentially the sensory the sensory innervation of the of the internal organs of our own skin that includes proprioception and which is our knowledge or our sense of where our limbs are where we are relative to gravity all that stuff and you know it raises this body

scan result that that is the fact that a brief body scan can reduce Cravings raises this question in my mind which is is craving a heightened sense of inter-reception or heightened sense of extra reception so I could think of one form of craving where for instance the donut again donuts for me is in front of me and I'm saying thinking that I want that and so I'm almost in complete extra reception but I'm Tethered to it like my internal world is Tethered to the donut it's almost like the donut is in control of me briefly

right and then I eat it um but it's hijacked your prefrontal cortex it's it's hijacked everything yeah yeah and then if I do a body scan so I'm putting myself in this experiment and it's kind of uh a hypothetical scenario I'm putting myself into this experiment I do a body scan which without question is shifting me more towards interception right I'm focusing on my skin my heart rate all these things interception so I could see how that would draw my attention off of the external stimulus and reduce craving and that makes me wonder whether or

not craving is a form of extra reception where our interception is just exquisitely locked to extra reception and if so you know because I do think this is a remarkable result it is very hard to stop Cravings I mean we had a guest on here a former colleague of mine at Stanford who's now the chair of neurosurgery at UPenn uh School Medicine which is Casey Halpern I mean they do they literally drill down through the skull of people who have binge eating disorder and start stimulating different brain areas because these people are so out of

control in terms of their binge eating I mean that's the kind of intervention that is considered necessary for a lot of folks who binge eat so here you're telling me a body scan in some individuals can reduce that and I have to wonder whether or not it's somehow breaking that interoceptive extracceptive tether anyway I'm speculating here but I'd love your thoughts on on binge on craving and binging and breaking binging um do you think that there are behavioral interventions um that could be layered on top of body scan should we all be doing body scans

routinely yes why not you know and some people aren't going to like that lying down is maybe not comfortable and so any Mind Body activity is going to do the same it's going to be you know I think breaking that link that you talked about yeah I I find this all intersective extra receptive balancing um one of the more interesting conversations these days in Neuroscience because we're starting finally starting to understand what some of the the circuitries are and they do link to these reward Pathways in any event um getting back to the relationship doing

stress and food and maybe even just weaving back a little bit to the uh opioid system have there been any long-term studies of stress intervention you know in the studies that we do in our laboratory we get people for a month they do one intervention we swap them to another intervention a month we analyze data takes a couple years to do all that but we write papers and we move on um it sounds like your laboratory has been involved in doing a lot of studies where you're examining people over a very long period of time

even their children what can we learn about the long-term outcomes of things like body scans meditation and then we'll get into breath work there hasn't been that many long-term studies of stress interventions now that you mention it I think the meditation studies are probably the best example there are some studies that have either followed people who have taken up meditation or just these cross-sectional studies where you compare a long-term meditator to someone who's never meditated and they they are interesting I mean let's talk about the cross-sectional studies you're already you know studying someone who eats

like kale chips instead of potato chips there's a lot of differences in who decides to be a meditator we in terms of the health and biology we have found that there is slower biological aging and other people have found that in these meditation interventions we do the short-term ones that inflammatory Pathways of gene expression are dampened way down and cross-sectionally other people like Elizabeth hoji have found longer telomeres in the meditators versus the controls so we we haven't really found telomere lengthening in our short-term meditation studies but we do find boosts in telomerase activity which

is this enzyme that protects our cell aging slows our cell aging rebuilds the telomeres so those are um those are those are studies that suggest if someone were to continue meditating they might keep up that slower rate of Aging so there's one study we did which I think was particularly um fun we went to uh Retreat Center where Deepak Chopra leads us one week Transcendental Meditation Retreat so people got a mantra and they were focusing for probably eight hours a day on different uh yoga meditation and reflective exercises and then we had half the group

just walk around the resort take walks hear some boring Health talks so that was our control group and what we found from that study was that in the short run a week later everyone felt fantastic after the week right they weren't allowed to bring their laptop and work and they ate this great anti-inflammatory diet an ayurvedic diet and then the gene expression Pathways were like night and day from day one to the last day and our model of um machine learning model was able to identify people over 90 it could say whether they're on day

one or day seven and the difference really emerged over the long run we went and we followed them about 10 months later and we found that not everyone felt great 10 months later the group who learned meditation still had lower depression but the control group bounced right back up and then we looked a little bit further and we saw that people with early adversity benefited the most from the meditation condition oh what was the meditation condition how long per day yeah it well so they did they learned transcendental primordial sound meditation which is similar to

TM where you have a your focused attention on your on a word over and over but there's also more awareness of the um the body and that was you know I I couldn't say how many minutes a day but it was on and off during the day okay so repeatedly but for a fairly short period of time one week yeah all right yeah I've never done one of these extended meditation Retreats are you interested well various people in my life have told me that I needed to go do a silent meditation but they probably were

emphasizing the silent part the um uh I recommend them I think they're amazing ways to get to know the mind and to really calm the body in ways like a you know a Quantum shift in our level of stress that we don't get it's very hard to get in short bounce I do a daily meditation practice but it's a relatively brief meditation practice I do tend to focus more on things like deliberate cold exposure and breath work and yes exercise and sunlight and all the things I talk about on the podcast but I'm certainly not

averse to uh doing a longer meditation are all of these um uh TMA meditations are they silent meditations and they range from what two days to a week is that well the Retreats you can always find a retreat that's you know half a day one day a week two weeks so you don't go right into a two-week you work up to it so the longest I've ever done is a two-week silent Meditation Retreat and that was after you know 10 years of doing yearly shorter retreats and then when you you know I think it would

be too hard and stressful if you haven't been able to I mean meditation can be stressful if you know you think that you're failing at it and um so you need to have kind of developed the skill a little bit before you go on the Retreats and so lots of classes can do that and online but I think the short bouts every day are that is what is the most important message for people for for managing daily stress and that's the in the stress prescription it's very much about how we can do short daily nudges

to reduce our stress arousal so breathing is one of the best body-based examples of getting right there but there are other ways so being in nature that's a really strong stimulus an environment that sends all sorts of safety signals to us yeah certainly it's not an either or but it seems like nowadays A lot of the discussion that used to be had around meditation and its ability to evoke neuroplasticity and things of that sort has shifted over to it um an increased focus on psychedelics so the common theme on this podcast but it just seems

like in you know taking the pulse of social media and the landscape out there there's so much excitement about psilocybin both in microdose and macro dose and MDMA and some of the other trials that are out there that many people are starting to forget the incredibly rich and vast literature supporting the use of even brief meditation practices for reshaping the mind so I'm glad that um we're talking about meditation but I mean even going into plants medicine experiences is enhanced if you have a little bit of training in how to in metacognition how to view

the mind and thoughts you can observe the whole experience with that much more kind of calmness skill and wisdom knowing this is just the mind doing these cool things so it's not they're not separate and then I think the the psilocybin experiences enhance daily meditation so they really go well together yeah and then just as a little editorial on uh psychedelics um what's interesting I think about the clinical data is that um you know we think of the the Psychedelic Journey as the time in which all the changes occur because it has all these properties

of hallucinations and altered thinking Etc that acts as kind of a gravitational pull around our our ideas about what psychedelics do but it's actually in the window after the Psychedelic Journey that the actual rewiring of the rain takes place so when people talk about integration afterwards they're not just talking about the few hours where they're you know parachuting back down to to uh uh typical Consciousness let's call it that but that there's these long perhaps even weeks or month-long tale of plasticity and that's actually when most of the rewiring is happening and which I find

really interesting which is not unlike meditation where sure in one bout of meditation you might see a adjustment or rewiring of the brain but at least from the book altered traits which I'm a big fan of um talked about these daily repeated short meditations or these longer TM Retreats as they're sometimes called almond inducing uh this big time brain plasticity all right well I'm now I'm gonna have to do it and I'll report back to everybody uh what my experience was although I might do it silently um I'd love to talk a little bit about

some of the other health metrics that you've explored not just in the context of mindfulness but I'm particularly intrigued by uh a graph here I'm showing my really nerdy side there's a graph in one of your papers it's the Picard paper 2018 we will provide a link to to this in the show note captions if people want to take a look but it essentially describes the relationship between mitochondrial health and mood um in the context of people who have different type of mood Tendencies if you um if you would be willing to just kind of

describe the top Contour of that study and some of the the points that that you find most interesting I think it's a fascinating study and and I I'm so glad you did it but I'll let you tell us about it yeah we've we've done these in-depth studies where we are looking at people under a lot of daily demand caregivers and then we look and look at you know normal people parents of neurotypical children who still have a lot of stress but we that we then ask you know does do people under chronic stress have accelerated

aging so we look at telomeres epigenetics mitochondrial health and then what explains those who looked really good who look resilient and don't look vulnerable and so then we can find out like what's the magic sauce in the day that protects them from chronic stress so Martin bakar my colleague who has been obsessed with mitochondrial Health as a pathway to understanding both stress address and really health and disease he has developed a way to measure mitochondrial in health in humans so we can measure a bunch of enzymes and then we can adjust it for how many

mitochondria we have so we have this really nice index we can get from the blood and in this study of young mothers who were who had either typical children or children with autism we found that the caregiving moms had significantly lower or dampened mitochondrial activity what that means is they can't produce as much energy so if they're feeling more exhausted from the chronic stress we know why I mean it's it really is a it was quite dramatic and Martin commented some of those low levels even looked like people with some genetic reasons to have low

mitochondrial activity but here's the beauty of that study we then get to look within their day at their mood and ask well what about the caregivers who have really great mitochondrial enzymes and and thus should be making a lot of ATP they had more positive emotions both waking up and in the evening but especially in the evening and what's so interesting that is all of these daily diary studies of stress and mood one of the things we know that matters for long-term health is how positive you feel at night so especially on a stressful day

so at the end of a stressful day can you muster from some feelings of content ease confidence Joy do you have any of that or has it just wiped out your positivity and so for people who feel either lower negative or higher positive they tend to have better health trajectories so like a decade later less depression less heart disease less early death so what so that's why we care so much about daily moods and in our study it looks like the daily mood was really quite correlated with the mitochondria levels that same day then we

measured mood like you know days away from that it was much less correlated so that it's just our first study on this but it really leads us to think that our mitochondria are sensitive to our thoughts and our feelings probably on a daily basis incredible so for those of us that find ourselves in it in a state of chronic stress and here I'm talking about the kind of stress that you mentioned before which is you know they're is unlikely to be a Simple Solution like we're just going to be grappling with this thing um and

you mentioned the words radical acceptance which I'd like to uh drill into a little bit too because there's a theme in the self-help literature and it's a theme that now I think in the formal psychology literature actually um was talking to a dialectical dialectical psychology expert recently I think that's the the correct title dialectical behavioral therapy correct yeah that's a common great one yeah you're correct I I was I was grasping and um that's correct and they were I'm talking about um some of the misconceptions about radical acceptance because I think a lot of people

hear the words radical acceptance at least this is what they they told me and think oh that means that you have to just accept what is and deal with it there's another form of radical acceptance which is ironically accept the fact that I'm not going to deal with this right I'm gonna walk away from it but what you're talking about is chronic stress of the sort that really the stress or the fact that a very close relative or family member is dealing with a lifelong condition or the fact that um we can't extract ourselves from

a situation that we are not in full agency to remove the stressor that radical acceptance of that fact then can ratchet into an understanding of okay and yet there are tools that we can use to not just offset the negative health effects but maybe even thrive in the context of this essentially turning what initially was thought of as a curse into a blessing at least biologically speaking what are the data around the practices that can help make that conversion possible I realize there's a lot of psychological work that needs to be done ongoing people need

coping mechanisms support groups it's always better to have more social support than last of course but are we again talking about a daily mindfulness practice or is it daily mindfulness of a certain type what do we know about best practices for mitigating these essentially non-negotiable stressors it's it's a great question and it's not a quick answer I think it is partly how we view life and our our purpose in our own life what's this game that you know we were born into and even just the idea that bad things shouldn't happen sets us up for

vulnerability to feel victimized to feel um like we can't you know accept bad things that have happened so so just stepping back and asking everyone listening do you have a situation in your life that is unwanted and you can't change it could be small it could be huge how much time do you spend thinking about this the more we spend time trying to problem solve or worry or just wishing things were different the more we are creating a chronic stress state and so just even taking that first kind of step back to get perspective on

what are the situations in my life that stress me out and and which of these can I Circle those that I can't change they're still they're on my list so they're they're on my mind they're still upsetting they haven't receded in the background they haven't gone away just that recognition of this isn't going to go away is incredibly powerful because we can as I say put the baggage down and give ourselves some relief and some freedom from from the big space it holds in our mind and in our body and this is not a one-time

thing it's a practice radical acceptance is something we practice over and over to help us loosen our grip on unwanted situations on letting them control our well-being and taking up you know this mental real estate that's so precious our attention so I would um there are statements that we can say that help us and it's I have you know there are a few metaphors so I'm an expert at this because I have I'm a caregiver and I often need to refocus from wishing things were different trying to solve things to really um radical acceptance of

this is how things are right now this is the reality and by just reminding ourselves that there is freedom within that that there are things that you can do you can actually live better live well with these situations so let me tell you what we found from our caregivers we measure where their mind is at night we we ping them and we say in the last five minutes how much have you been wishing things were different how much have you been engaged and focused and what you're doing right right before we pinged you and just

those two questions tell us so much about that person's well-being so people and actually yes the caregivers are doing more of what I'll call suffering wishing things were different not being present for their lives but regardless of that difference whether people are a caregiver or not this negative mind-watering state of not being present for your evening wishing things were different instead of being engaged predicts more unhappiness it predicts shorter telomeres so it suggests that it's a pattern that has gone on for days months and years that has been wearing on them and so some of

the metaphors that I think are helpful for this are thinking of yourself think of this unwanted situation and think of how your your pulling a rope that's attached to a brick wall and you're doing that because you care you want things to be better for yourself or this person and or a group I mean it's it's something you're passionate about and so you're pulling and pulling and every day you're pulling and and you can't move that brick wall so the only thing that's happening is that you're chafing your hands that tinge that chronic tension what

if you just drop the Rope I say that to myself drop the Rope when I start get you know getting going on trying to solve unsolvable problems the brick wall is still there it's never going to move yet my hands are free and so I can be freed up to live in the ways that I do have control over to do things that help around the edges so I was just talking with someone who's just so concerned about their aging parents and you know them not getting the care they need not taking care of themselves

you know things aren't going well but there was so little that they could do to help their parents and so by dropping the Rope for them meant realizing there were things they could do being present being loving uh doing the little bit of care that they could from a distance was all they could do and that's enough that's that loving presence is like a gift that we don't realize that we we always have that to give where do you think the tenancy for us to try and pull on brick walls comes from I mean it's

so non-adaptive um and I've also heard it stated that people do this in the reverse Direction too meaning in time trying to control the past through current behaviors as well as try and control the future um so give me an example of that yeah this is something I learned from a guest we had on here Dr Paul Conti is a psychiatrist to um extremely skilled psychiatrist who wrote a book on trauma which I think is the best book on trauma frankly um and he talked about how the limbic system that engages these fight-or-flight responses has

no sense of time and that's why developmental scripts get reactivated in particular parent child or caretaker child uh neural circuits that were engaged in those relationships when we were really young get reactivated in adult relationships I mean in some sense it doesn't make any sense like why wouldn't the human mind have separate circuits for adult like romantic attachment versus child parent attachment is all sounding very Freudian And yet when you look at the the neural Imaging it's like you get one set of circuits for understanding of relationship of course you adjust according to context and

they get repurposed you don't just set that aside say that was for childhood but what he said was that the limbic system and the stress system when it's activated um distorts our perception of time and that um this is what he was uh saying leads to the what's sometimes called the repetition compulsion people try and will repeat the same uh Place themselves into mildly to severely traumatic circumstances over and over again despite the presence of a of a trauma it doesn't have to be childhood trauma you think well that doesn't make any sense it's like

the most illogical thing in the world like you get burned on the stove or you keep going back to the stove and the idea is that these circuits when they get activated really engage entire like cognitive scripts that make it very hard to escape it's like it pulls you into a story that is exquisitely hard to to get away from it so that this repetition compulsion is an attempt to try and rewrite the story and this is this is a theory not just a Freudian psychology but kind of modern trauma and Neuroscience informed trauma therapies

in any event as you describe the this pulling on a brick wall I find a very compelling image um and one that uh makes total sense to try and drop the Rope as you describe it because of the incredibly High energetic demand that pulling on that Rogue represents as you said it's sort of a way of diverting resources towards something that has no conclusion right and in dropping the Rope you can divert those resources towards other things um so I was just curious again I wasn't consulted with the design phase and I'm assuming you weren't

either but you know what I wonder what what in US uh a scientists I'm just kind of doing the Duncan experiment here like I wonder what in US as human beings compels us to um try and change what we the unchangeable we really really really love control and we want to control the future not just because it makes us feel powerful and happy but because then we can relax if we know what's going to happen next if it's predictable we're that much happier we're not Vigilant and looking ahead and being prepared for what might happen

so let me ask you that so I have two whole chapters in the stress prescription one is on uncertainty and one is on control and these drive us crazy until we can somewhat master and understand how little control we have and how much uncertainty there is and will always be so let me ask you this if you couldn't plan your day tomorrow and you wanted to knows with certainty what your plans are what was going to happen how much ease and relaxation would you feel at the not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow very little

so like on a one through ten scale how much would that drive you crazy tomorrow Saturday so I'm a little more flexible on Monday oh no Mondays I Mondays are mine I own Monday no I'm kidding I'm just kidding I love Mondays it's always been my favorite day of the week um uh even when I was in school uh yeah that would be on it that would be a six yeah six out of ten and that's not unusual and we have a scale to measure how comfortable people are with certainty and what we already knew

was that being comfortable with uncertainty is a beautiful but rare resilience Factor people who tolerate uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression and when stressful things happen they get over it more quickly so we measure this during the pandemic and what we found was that intolerance of uncertainty pretty strongly predicted pandemic anxiety PTSD depression and distress about the fires the climate the climate situation in in California so this is interesting I mean is this like a fixed personality and we're just stuck with our rigidity around wanting certainty or is this something that we like a

muscle that we can build so I think it's the latter and I think there are practices we can do that help us feel ease with the uncertain future some of these mindful check-ins noticing that we are carrying around uncertainty stress is one way and then reframing uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life and the freedom that we can feel when we realize we don't control tomorrow we just go with it and we you know we do our best and what Delight there is in just viewing things with curiosity and just seeing what emerges

so even just our posture here's an exercise for dealing with uncertainty instead of like kind of that alert posture when we're like trying to take it all in and predict the next Second and like just lean back and take some slow breaths we know that's going to help Orient us and realize that we can actually face time in that way by letting it come to us and receiving what happens and that's a completely different body stance than our usual go mode during the day and that's just a way of saying I am in a you

know receptive mode and I'm going to just be curious about what arises and so I actually learned that on a Meditation Retreat because I tend to be type A and I'll leave a retreat going from like very relaxed to like that leaning forward tense of like where's the to-do list and so carrying with me that posture of like just see let time unfold as it will without trying to control things it's really interesting it gets right to the heart of something that I spent a lot of time thinking about in the context of Stress Management

and also just general thriving which is that I think that um about half of the messages that we get related to stress and mind-body interventions relate to adopting this forward Center of mass this idea of okay stress can give us early dementia stress can limit our sleep stress can Empower cognition or stress can make us more resilient stress can activate all sorts of positive anti-inflammatory Pathways as well that the mindset matters and here I'm I'm doing a terrible job of it but I'm trying to scrape off and capture the top uh Contour of the beautiful

work of my colleague Dr Alia Crum who's yes you know love her work feeling this podcast and is a huge fan of her work as well and with that mindset matters because it shapes physiology for sure it uh her data point to that so there are these kind of forward Center of mass type uh approaches um and these are abundant on social media um you know different people come to mind different archetypes really have emerged you know millions and millions of followers that are the archetypes of when challenge arises you smash into it you go

through it right um and then on the other hand there are the stress mitigation techniques both mental and physical body oriented mind oriented Etc that are more of the sort that you described that are um they're not um being back on your heels so to speak like letting things bulldoze you but are more of this receptive mode and of more of an awareness mode exactly and I think that um since here we are at the table to researchers who focus on these issues a lot do you think it's fair for us to adopt a sort

of a general framework and model that that perhaps people can adopt for themselves if they like that that of course it's not an either or but that having both of these in one's kit of tools could be valuable because one is less energetically demanding but of course offers less opportunity for agency or at least apparently so that's the leaning back and then the the other is certainly gives an opportunity for agency but we know from 100 years or more of psychology and psychiatric literature and from the emerging literature on stress mitigation that it's work it's

not something that is without a cost it can get you far better results than it were you to just let stress bulldoze you but that it's work and so we have to emphasize that work um in very deliberate ways exactly I couldn't agree more it's work when we know it's productive we should work and when we know there's a brick wall we should let go so I think I like this forward Mass idea I think of it as you muscle it and or you release it and we need both and so that letting go is

a really important wise you know Discerning way to mitigate stress in the right situations in the right time and you know we can't muscle through everything right so another way I like to think about it is just the waves of life like I mean we are in an ocean and we have small waves we have big waves some of these tidal waves are going to hit all of us the global stressors the the climate disasters that will come and so when we're not in the middle of a wave which is when we need to muscle

it we're between waves how much control do we have to fight the tide there some it's not black or white we we are we we can't fight a Riptide we need to go the direction of the tide but we can have some control in our Direction and it kind of goes back to um our colleague Robert sapolski's very biologically based idea of us having you know he's a little bit extreme with a no free will we are we are influenced by all of these things around us as well as all of our biological you know

I'll say um brilliant evolutionary animal instincts so given all of that we have some deterministic forces on us and within that we get to ease up between the waves when we can we get to change our Direction but we're always going to be hit by the next wave and so it's this skillful surfing or navigating that we can do better when we realize when we control things when we can't when we can truly feel safe and have ease versus when we need to kind of gently paddle what do you think is the value of journaling

and and placing one's own narrative on stressful circumstances especially these non-negotiable circumstances again I'm fascinated by these because I think it's a category of stress that's not often talked about and yet it's so prominent some people say okay you know dealing with short-term stress okay well my lab would say like use physiological size or raise your stress threshold and we'll get back to that in a little bit um as it relates to the work you're doing with breath work but so many stressors are going to take a year five years we don't know you know

the uncertainty that you mentioned earlier or the the certainty that this is going to go on forever and so you know what is the um you know for for people that are listening to this and that and want to start to adopt practices um do you think that spending some time creating a written or a spoken narrative is helpful I mean we hear this but are there any data that support the use of journaling as a as a tool I seem to recall that there are a few studies out there but I can't I can't

remember exactly yeah definitely creating a coherent narrative is critical to our ability to make sense Find meaning find resolution have a social identity around our lived experience what happens to us so narrative is kind of everything right in stress research it's it's not what happens to us it's how we're interpreting it and how we're um how we're responding to it and I've heard you say the exact same thing when you've talked about what is stress it's it's really what narrative we're creating around it so I think a narrative of purpose fill in the blank about

what your what's meaningful to you but that is why we're different than just the the um the rats that we study or the monkeys like they have these amazing stress responses that are we have them too and we can't control that but we have the ability to do this projection to the Future to ask what is our purpose in life to see and know that we are going to die and we can have some control over how we live and maybe even how we die and how we want to be remembered that is so beautiful

that helps us Rise Above This being monkeys and clothes I'd love before we wrap for us to return to this uh question about breath work and the study that you're doing one of the I've known about your work for a very long time admired it for a very long time and one of the things that um excited me about being able to sit down with you today is that uh our Laboratories studied breath work your laboratory studying breath work and um and I know that you've been doing a study on the so-called Wim Hof method

um which of I'll let you familiarize our listeners to some of them are familiar with the Wim Hof method others are not I think a lot of people think of a whim in terms of his role as the Iceman because of cold exposure but of course he has um breath work practices that mirror um things like tumor breathing and other things but maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you're doing there and what you're interested in discovering I realize it's too early to give us the results but hopefully they'll come back and

do that at another time but what is the study what motivated the study and maybe I can convince you to give us a little teaser of what you're discovering so for um I I for many years I mean I think my um first paper when I was a graduate student with Boost McEwen was about this idea of positive physiological stress and so I've always been wanting to really understand what's positive stress how can we induce it and instead for many many too many years I've been studying the dark side toxic stress trauma caregiving and how

that is can take a toll on the body without the right resilience and resources and now I'm very excited about the uh the opportunity to just focus on different ways that we can stress out our body and mind in short-term bursts that might promote stress resilience and the body-based strategies are concrete they're quick they're um they're also my favorite strategies I I probably have internalized a lot of the mindsets and the you know the things that I've learned from meditation and what I feel the biggest bang for the buck is you know if I'm um

waking up like super jittery with a big stress response because of X or Y it is actually something like a hit type workout or taking the dogs for like a really brisk walk or like burning up that energy and my body is um a very big effect size for me personally everyone has their you know different ways that they can see the biggest shifts in Daily stress so I've been looking for ways to create positive stress besides exercise we all know about exercise and I met Wim Hof at a uh a meeting where we talked

kind of back to back and so we hadn't I had kind of heard something about you know crazy Iceman climbing up the Himalayas I really had he has 27 or more World Records yeah for that sort of thing yeah so he so I got to hear I got to do the breathing with him during this conference and I just felt like Elation afterwards I was like what was that and then he heard about telomeres and he was like I need to know if my method is affecting cell aging he loves research and so we he

helped us design a study that we've been working on at UCS staff um with my colleagues Wendy Mendez and Eric Prather it's been many years and it's funded by the John W brick Foundation which is very focused on what are non-drugway ways that we can help mental health so it was a very good fit for all of us to come together and design the study and we have been basically comparing low arousal relaxation methods mindfulness slow breathing to positive stress exercise and Wim Huff method and one of the things that we've learned in a big

way is that regardless of whether we're creating deep states of ease or hermetic stress in the body that short-term burst of either aerobic activity or the extreme breathing people feel better period so three weeks later after this experiment of doing their practice every day they were either randomly assigned to the high arousal or the low arousal the level of stress anxiety and depression fell dramatically in everyone so many paths to changes in stress there are probably very different physiological Pathways and and we can talk about that more when we get to really look in depth

at our physiological data as well as our blood-based data but what we do know is that the Wim Hof method did create daily positive emotion that increased over time just like your study on sighing and so even though there are different mechanisms they were selectively boosting feelings of positivity I love that you know that's very unusual to get a very selective positive effect super interesting I can't wait to hear more about the data so I gather and by the way no is a perfectly fine answer I gather that you're not going to tell us about

the whether or not there are telomere changes yet or maybe that's not possible um to detect in this kind of short-term study so what we're going to look at we don't really think that telomeres can change very quickly and telomerase May so we're going to look at mitochondrial enzymes telomerase and gene expression patterns and as you know we can look at many different mechanisms and Pathways with gene expression patterns especially with these new kind of essays where you can look at you know seven thousand different uh proteins like the Soma logic and so we'll get

to see well what's the pat you know did we really change patterns of acute stress with these different types of stress resilience interventions and in terms of the physiological reactivity there are ways that we can examine both the stress response system sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic response system and I will tell you that um while we're still preparing the results there were very different profiles from the different interventions that make us think that there's a lot of specificity even though everyone feels better the the way that they got there is very different in ways

that we're impacting both the nervous system and the Brain incredible and um I have to say when I heard that you were studying Wim Hof method I was positively uh delighted because I uh I I find that there are so few serious researchers in the realm of of modern science that are both explorers and then take what they've um you know gleaned from those Explorations and then take it to the laboratory and and put rigor on those and really try and parse mechanism with with of course all the open-mindedness to whatever the outcome happens to

be right I mean good science involves um necessarily asking questions alone but um raising hypotheses and being comfortable for those hypothesis hypotheses to be correct or not correct and I find your work to be just so incredibly creative and brave in that way and I love the way that you've meshed different aspects of your own personal journey into these different practices I don't know what came first the science of the practices but I I have uh I have my guesses but um I must say it's it's very refreshing and I think it's exactly exactly what

the world needs right now in terms of tools for mental health and physical health because um far too many studies uh try and isolate variables without understanding a larger context of like what are the different types of stressors and clearly you're addressing that or you know there's this thing breath work that some people might think oh you know the Iceman Wim Hof it's really esoteric and you know kind of crazy um I'm certainly not saying that but you say well what are the critical elements from that that we might be able to extract to understand

this positive eustress phenomena so I just um for I want to first of all just say thank you for doing the incredibly important work you do and thank you I mean we were so delighted to um see the paper you did with David Spiegel and to know that you're pursuing this path and um it's very reassuring with your rigor and your you know depth of background I I agree with you this these are the types of studies we need we're releasing the inherent power of Rejuvenation that's in our body is UNT It's relatively untapped in

these rigorous controlled studies and we just can't reduce inflammation with a drug we can't reduce stress with a drug we desperately need to learn how to use you know the whole range of the nervous system from the acute stress to the deep relaxation to heal and to promote these healthy resilient States couldn't agree more and UCSF is very very fortunate to have you and should they ever forget that please come to Stanford instead maybe we can recruit you away from UCSF and I'm here I'm being friendly to my colleagues at UCSF but um they better

treat you right or else we're coming for you uh and I also just want to thank you for taking the time today to share this information also you've written wonderful books we will provide a link to the newest one and I'll um of course cue people to that because it sounds like a very rich source of information and actionable tools that people can take in terms of mitigating stress and I I love the idea that there's this discussion about certainty and control uh to elements that are very prominent in in my life um for better

for worse and all of us all of us yeah and so really thank you for the work you're doing thank you for taking the time to share that work through books and through podcasts and especially today on this one I I know I speak on behalf of many many people and I just really want extend my gratitude thank you so much and thank you for for your podcast well it's a labor of love and it's days like today and discussions like this that make it worthwhile so thank you thanks Andrew thank you for joining me

for today's discussion all about stress aging and Metabolism with Dr Alyssa Apple I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did if you'd like to learn more about Dr Apple's laboratory's work or if you'd like to learn about her books such as the telomere effect and the stress prescription please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and in addition

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at zero cost you simply go to hubermanlab.com go to the menu tab in the corner scroll down to newsletter you provide us your email we do not share your email with anybody and in addition to that there are samples of toolkits on the hubermanlab.com website again under newsletter and you don't even have to sign up to access those but I think most people do end up signing up for the newsletter because it's rich with useful information and again completely zero cost thank you again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Alyssa Apple all about

stress aging and metabolism and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]