The secret to coping with stress - how to protect your brain and body, and feel calmer now | Prof Carmine Pariante

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science & Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
The wind cuts across an ancient tundra. Somewhere in the distance, a predator creeps ever nearer. An ancient human freezes, heart hammering, muscles tightening, senses sharpening. In the next few seconds, that surge of stress could mean the difference between life and death.
Hundreds of thousands of years later, the predator has changed. Now it's an overflowing inbox, a mortgage payment, a sleepless night, a meeting you were already late for. Not life and death. And yet the feeling can be the same as hearing that saber-toothed tiger's footsteps coming nearer. This powerful stress response kept us safe for thousands of years. Now it's making millions of us sick and even shortening our lives. Why does stress rip us so powerfully? Why does our body react to modern pressures as if we're still fighting for survival? What can we do to prevent this?
In this episode, we're joined by Professor Carmine Pariante, one of the world's leading researchers on stress and how it affects inflammation in our brain. Together we'll explore what happens inside the brain and body when stress strikes. Why cortisol has become the internet's favorite hormone. And where the social media posts about cortisol face and belly have any basis in science. We'll also tackle some of the biggest questions surrounding stress today. What does the latest research tell us about how it can affect us? Can it really make you feel tired and depressed, contribute to heart disease and chronic pain, even increase the risk of dementia? And perhaps most importantly, if stress is woven so deeply into modern life, what can we actually do about it?
Carmina, is stress always a bad thing?

**Carmine Pariante** (2:01)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:02)
Can enough mental stress damage my physical health? Yes.
Is cortisol something we should always be trying to lower?

**Carmine Pariante** (2:12)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:14)
Are there any evidence-based ways to reduce your stress levels? Yes.
Are stress and anxiety the same thing?

**Carmine Pariante** (2:22)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:24)
Can stress increase the levels of inflammation throughout your body? Yes.
Finally, what's one thing that most people get wrong about stress?

**Carmine Pariante** (2:35)
Guilt. They feel guilt about it rather than understanding that it's coming from outside.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:42)
I love that we're talking about stress because I think that everyone listening to this podcast knows what feeling stressed feels like. Honestly, I feel like I've been stressed since the day nine years ago when I decided to start ZOE with my co-founder.

**Carmine Pariante** (2:56)
I'm not surprised.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:58)
I definitely feel like I live with this. In the modern age, it feels like stress is coming at us from every corner. Now, I was brought up in England to believe that you should just stay calm and carry on. That since stress was in the mind, it wasn't real, it couldn't cause any physical symptoms, and basically if you could just ignore it, then that was the best thing to do and you're already starting to smile. I'm also smiling a little because over the last few years, I've been starting to reassess this upbringing that I had.
However, there is a lot of conflicting advice about stress from online influencers, and most of them have something that they want to sell. We know what it means to experience stress, but I realize as I'm saying this, I have no idea what it actually is.

**Carmine Pariante** (3:48)
Stress is every situation where the challenge that we're facing is bigger, or this is perceived as bigger than our ability to cope with it, to deal with it.
Once you interpret this way, then you know there's always a mismatch, and it's a personalized mismatch between how you are at the moment in your life, on the day, and what's happening around you. Stress is not the same for everybody.
Of course, we know this. There are aspects of stress that most of us will consider intolerable. I'm thinking about, for example, being in a war zone or being a soldier, or even if you choose to actually participate in a situation, there will be life-threatening or very stressful. And then, of course, there are situations that most people will find it not stressful, perhaps even relaxing. And then everything in the middle, like from talking to a podcast today, be talking to the public, having to give a speech at a wedding, having a difficult job performance, all of that will always be about how you, as a person, perceive that task on the day, because it also change from day to day and it change from how prepared you are and change based on what is your background, mental health and well-being at that particular moment. It's a very personal but also moment by moment definition, if you like.