Essentials: Manage Stress & Build Resilience | Dr. Elissa Epel

Andrew Huberman (0:00)

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Elissa Epel. Dr. Epel, welcome.

Elissa Epel (0:21)

Thank you.

Andrew Huberman (0:22)

So great to have you here. 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 I'd 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.

Elissa Epel (0:46)

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 technically, it just means anytime we feel overwhelmed, that we feel like the demands are too much for our resources. So that's 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 or what happens to us, but really how we respond, the stress response. So when something happens, we mount a stress response and we recover. And that's beautiful, no harm done. We need that. That's why we're here, still alive, is that survival response.

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.

Andrew Huberman (1:55)

What, to your knowledge, is the best way, or what are the best ways for us to manage overthinking and ruminating on stressful topics? Should we work with them in the sense that we try and rationalize or understand the basis of the stress, or should we try and divert our thinking away?

Elissa Epel (2:15)

I like to bin it in three categories. So one is, well, I'll just say, first of all, we have to have some awareness of how our mind works, or we're just 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 stress response all the time. But that's where we are as a society. We're so used to feeling daily stress from our urban and modern life that 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 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 clenching our hands.

Andrew Huberman (3:23)

So going back to this notion of overthinking, what are the tools that are most efficient for dealing with overthinking or ruminating 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?

Elissa Epel (3:46)

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, use stress more positively. The second bucket is 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 we're working stress out of the body, we're metabolizing it, we're burning it up, and we get relief. It changes our 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 the city and being in an environment that we find calming.