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

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 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 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 impact 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 CH 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 SC 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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And conversely, Waking up involves 1 to 3 degree increases in your core body temperature. So it's very important that you control the temperature of your sleeping environment, which also includes the temperature of your mattress. That's what eight Sleep mattress covers allow you to do. So for instance, I tend to run hot during the night, so I have my mattress set to be pretty cool at the beginning of the night and then to get progressively cooler and then warm toward morning when I want to wake up. And in doing this, it's allowed me to really optimize my sleep, meaning I sleep much more deeply and I get far more rapid eye movement sleep than I ever did prior to using Eight Sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.comhuberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by HVMN Ketone IQ. Ketone IQ is a supplement that increases blood ketones. I think most people out there have heard of the ketogenic diet. However, most people out there, including myself, do not follow a ketogenic diet. Despite not following a ketogenic diet, I make it a point to increase my blood ketones through the use of ketone iq. The reason for that is that ketones are one of the brain's preferred sources of fuel. I find that by taking ketone IQ I have elevated levels of focus for several hours afterwards. It also allows me to do physical training or mental work fasted and in addition to that, I focus much better when I take ketone IQ as opposed to fasted alone. So many people like me find that whether or not they follow a ketogenic diet or a more typical diet, supplementing with ketone IQ and thereby increasing their blood ketones allows them to do more focused mental work and physical work, even when fasted or when a bit hungry. So if you'd like to try Ketone IQ, go to hvmn.com and use the code HUBERMAN to get 20% off your order. Again, that's hvmn.com and Use the code HUBERMAN to Get 20% off. 20% off. The Huberman Lab Podcast is now partnered with Momentous Supplements. To find the supplements we discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to Live Momentous spelled o u s livemomentous.com Huberman and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding. Again, that's livemomentous.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr. Alyssa Epel. Dr. Epel, welcome.

Thank you.

So great to have you here. We have colleagues in common and topics of interest related to our laboratories in common. So we'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 we hear. Stress stress is bad, stress can kill us, no one likes to feel stressed, et cetera. 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 meaning. 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 that's 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 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 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 unaware of?

Yes, yes, both. And so I like to bin it in 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 stress response all the time. But that's where we are as a society. So that's why 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, ooh, this is really bad for young adults and women and people of color. And so we have these groups that are targeted for marginalization that are feeling an extremely high amount of stress in most of those subgroups. So bottom. Yeah.

Wouldn't you argue that most everyone is feeling more stress 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'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 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. Often 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, 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 clenching our hands. And in fact, my taxi driver who drove me here 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 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 on social media or in their personal life or professional life or simply out in the world.

So 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 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. 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. It might even be just be a corner of the house, but implanting what I call safety signals. We're just these animals that are conditioned to signals whether we're aware of it or not. So 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 and creating or I should say populating that safe zone with things. As you said as a visual neuroscientist originally, I guess now I study stress. But as a visual neuroscientist we know that photographs are extremely powerful cues for the memory system, especially actual physical photographs. And 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 it actually can be a positive cue for alleviating stress and just Enhancing mood. This is probably done less so nowadays because everyone keeps things on their phones and it's just kind of a scroll through. But in any event, when we talk about stress, it's clear that there's short term, medium term, long term stress. You've studied all these different forms of stress. If you would be so kind as to just give us an overview of the different forms of stress, 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, to make sure everyone's on the same page, if you could just pepper our minds with knowledge about stress in all its beautiful and not so beautiful forms.

So when we think about stress, we usually think feeling stress, reporting stress, and that's important. What our bodies doing is also important and it's not always related to our mind. 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 gonna 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 as well 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 work that you've been doing on breath work in particular. I know you have a study that's actually explored the WIM HOF method quite directly. One of the few studies that I'm aware of that's done that. So we'll get to that a little bit later. 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 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 lasts minutes or hours, we eventually recover. And that is what happens all day. In a small to small extent 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, that we can't change, 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 so that's a really important strategy for people who feel like their life is going to be stressful forever because of X or Y. 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 love to hear about the lack of inevitability around aging and stress. I realized that there's a big landscape 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 while of course it appears that toxic stress, chronically unmitigated stress that makes us feel like we are at the world's mercy or 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? Ideally.

So having no stress means we're not really living, 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 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 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. And 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 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 this study, 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 does that hippocampal growth mean for their well being and their cognitive function?

Yeah, it's interesting. The hippocampus, of course, a brain area involved in formation and recall of memories, mostly formation of memories. 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. But Rusty Gage down at the Salk Institute did a study in, 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. 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, 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 acquire new information. Wow, amazing. 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 that.

But why not? Up to when you die, right? Absolutely. One other example of this, my colleague Dave Almeida, he measures daily stressful events in huge national populations. And a small percentage of people report no stressors. And so you wonder what's happening. Are they not engaging in life? Are they really not having stressors? It looks like they are. It's not just that they're not getting stressed by things, 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 neural progenitor 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, improve 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 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 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. 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, 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 this 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 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. To be really simplistic, two types of psychological stress response. Feeling threatened, like you're going to fail, you're embarrassed, you know that social pain response, we know, well, that feels terrible, 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 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 manageable. Right then we're kind of building the muscle of stress resilience.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic greens, you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com Huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3K2. What are the sorts of things that people I can do in order, including me, I should say 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. You want to stop me, you got to kill me type of mindset? Is that the switch that then the body follows? Because this is an interesting instance where most all the stress mitigation work that my lab does is focus 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 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 stressor. So some of us are just wired to have a big threat response period. Maybe it's, you know, it's epigenetics we've inherited. Maybe it's early trauma that has shaped us to be 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, 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 meat of the Actionable, since a lot of our listeners, I think, will be 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 were talking about vasoconstriction and inflammation and all these bad things, to 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. So what are some. If you can recall from the papers, if not, that's fine.

No, no, no, I can.

But I'm just curious 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 strength statements, the stress shields, I call them, that fit them, that feels right and that they believe. And so I list a bunch of options in chapter three, which is called be the lion instead of the gazelle. So the lion and gazelle are both high blood pressure, high stress, and the lion's chasing the gazelle. But the gazelle's having this total threat vasoconstriction response because 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. It's not that we're always lion 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 perspective taking. So there's all these strategies 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 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 colleagues who do this 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 opioid epidemic and opioid crisis. Sadly, far too many people are dying of fentanyl overdoses. And we all know about the OxyContin content epidemic and all these people addicted to opioids. And that's not really what this is about. 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. I think sex activates the endogenous opioid system. As far as I last read, there was a paper out recently, but also food can do it, and again to healthy levels, 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. So most people when they feel stressed or I'm just going to 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 really stressed. But I came up in a profession where 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. 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 needs tending to. And 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 your type of body temperament is high sympathetic. And so when you have a big stress response, your digestion 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'm just going to. Forgive me for interrupting. For those of you hearing sympathetic, we're not talking about sympathy. We're talking about the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, which is the so called fight or flight arm, as opposed to the parasympathetic. In any event, sorry to interrupt, but want to make sure that sometimes people hear sympathy and then they think emotional sympathy. I like to think I have that too. Okay. So I tend to lean more towards the sympathetic, meaning more alertness, arousal on the seesaw of the autonomic nervous system.

And I'm a high sympathetic reactor. I lose weight when I go through, like writing my dissertation. I looked like a skeleton at the end. 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 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 condition.