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

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 Doctor. Alyssa Epple. Doctor. Epple, welcome. Thank you. 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, etcetera. 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. 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 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 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. 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? 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 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 …