Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging | Dr. Elissa Epel

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
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. Elissa Epel. Dr. Epel 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. Epel's laboratory focuses on stress and the many impacts that it has on our brain and body, both negative and positive. For instance, her laboratory has shown that particular forms of stress change our telomeres, which are a component of the genetic machinery of our cells that impacts how quickly our cells and therefore we age. We also discuss exciting work from Dr. Epel'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. Epel's laboratory has explored, including 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. Epel'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. Epel'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 and chemicals that underlie, for instance, our ability to focus or to task switch or to be creative. There is no one specific circuit or category of chemicals in the brain that allow us to be smart. thesis understands this and has developed nootropics that are customized to different types of mental operations. What do I mean by that? Well, they have formulas that can put your brain into a state of increased clarity or focus or creativity, or that can give you more overall energy for things like physical exercise. 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