Elissa and Marc speak about health and well-being, and strategies we can embody to enhance and how we relate to challenges and stress, including embracing uncertainty, noticing what we can and can’t control, and finding the positive, and even excitement, in the midst of life’s challenges.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Elissa Epel, Ph.D. is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author of The Telomere Effect, and The Stress Prescription. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, at The University of California, San Francisco, where she is Vice Chair of Psychology and directs the UCSF Aging Metabolism Emotions Center. She studies how psychosocial and behavioral factors, such as meditation and positive stress, can slow aging and focuses on climate wellness.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. My guest today is Elissa Epel, PhD. She’s an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging, and a bestselling author of The Telomere Effect and more recently, The Stress Prescription.

She’s a professor and vice-chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. In this episode, we talk about health and well-being, and the importance of cultivating and embodying strategies for how we relate to challenges and stress, especially embracing uncertainty, noticing what we can control and can’t, and finding the positive and even excitement in our daily challenges. I bring you, Elissa Epel.

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[00:01:22] Marc: I’m really happy to welcome my friend and colleague, Elissa Epel. Hello, Elissa.

[00:01:28] Elissa Epel: Hello, Marc. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:31] Marc: I was just thinking that it’s great you’re one of those people who I got to teach some of your research many years before we met, back when I was teaching meditation and mindfulness to Google engineers, we would show a slide with your study about telomeres.

[00:01:51] Elissa: Which was it? Was it the dark study that showed that chronic stress damages telomeres, or was it a meditation study, by chance?

[00:01:59] Marc: It was the meditation study, right, because, always at the beginning of our sessions with Google engineers, we had to start with the science. I thought that might be great if you’d be willing to just talk a little bit about what an amazing study the relationship between the aging health telomeres and meditation.

[00:02:25] Elissa: Yes, it’s one of my favorite topics and places to go personally to really experience deep states of meditation and to try to measure, observe, monitor how our body is responding. Not that I do that often, but I certainly have had my share of wearing maybe this Oura ring or other ways of looking at our body, our sleep, and how it responds.

For me, it started about 20 years ago where I, as a mind-body researcher, really wanted to understand sensitive ways to look into the body and measure rate of aging, something sensitive way before disease. That is a really fun topic these days because there are so many ways we can look into the blood and measure aging. Back then, I was fortunate to work with Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering telomeres or the enzyme telomerase, which repairs telomeres.

Telomeres sit at the end of chromosomes. They protect them. They shorten as we age. I think the main thing about them is unlike a gene, which we can’t change, they’re really responsive to our well-being, our not just single thoughts, but more like, are we in a state of chronic stress that’s going on for months or severe depression? That’s when we see the relationships with shorter telomeres.

It didn’t take long for me to find great collaborators to study retreat studies. Cliff Saron appeared, who was doing the study of three months on a mountain, the Shambhala Retreat Center, and looking at changes in both the brain and the blood before and after this retreat. That was our first meditation study. Cliff set up a centrifusion, and we were able to look at cells and look at their aging activity, the telomerase enzyme.

That might be the study that was circulating in your slides because that was the first one and the one people remember. It simply was that the more people felt well-being, the higher their telomerase was at the end of the retreat. That applied to many ways that we think feelings of control, feelings of purpose in life, those were related to boosts in telomerase, and then the converse, feelings of stress, depression, despair, those were related to lower levels.

That was the first boost of excitement that we had, seeing that “Well, this is probably a very malleable system. It’s not just that we’re born with a level of telomeres and telomerase and then they’re stuck there our whole lives. We can actually move them around.”

[00:05:13] Marc: This is one of those areas that I find fascinating. On the one hand, there’s science, and you just mentioned science and one’s experience and the relationship between those two, right? Maybe just to back up a little bit, telomeres and telomerase, as I understand them, I picture these the end caps like of shoelaces, the end caps of our chromosomes, and that this research that you’ve been involved with is measuring– is it the length of the telomeres and that they are an indication of how people are aging and an indication of how healthy they’re working with stress?

[00:06:02] Elissa: Yes, exactly. We can measure the length of them in our blood that we’re averaging across millions of chromosomes, telomeres, and we get this nice average. I think of it as an integrative marker. It’s just counting up the influences of lifestyle, of mental health genetics. It doesn’t just reflect one thing, but we do know that when we look in large samples, we can see things pop out and say, “Wow, this is important. This is related to longer telomeres, despite all the noise, controlling for age and our body size and all.”

We can see things like, in many studies, optimism. An optimistic attitude seems to be very protective of our health and related to these longer telomeres. What that means in large studies is that, statistically, we’re going to be fighting off disease longer. We’re going to have a longer health span. That’s what we really care about, not just how long you live although it does predict longevity.

It more so predicts how well our body stays off disease. It’s, in a sense, a protective factor. What it means literally is that our cells can keep on dividing. Our replenishing cells can repair better and replicate throughout decades and decades. It’s just one marker. There’s lots of other ways that we can look at aging. There’s no one clock in the body, so we always need to put it in perspective. It is one of the clocks that we understand very well now.

[00:07:41] Marc: It’s striking to me that you did that research side by side with your new book, The Stress Prescription, which is based on a lot of the research that you’ve done but also very practical ways to implement strategies for having a healthy relationship with the stressors of our daily lives.

[00:08:06] Elissa: That’s always been my main interest, both stress, and well-being because all of the other factors that influence telomeres, they’re still important, and I’ve spent years on clinical trials looking at things like, “Oh, if you increase omegas, you can potentially lengthen telomeres, or if you are a caregiver, if you engaged in exercise over months and months, you might be able to lengthen your telomeres or love and kindness, meditation.”

These are all great hopeful data points, but understanding how stress is associated with our aging, there are just layers and layers to that because stress is not just one thing. It’s so much about our beliefs, our mindset, how we hold our body, even when we’re not stressed, and even just our beliefs about “What should life be?” Our expectations set us up, I would say, for more or less stress.

[00:09:03] Marc: In the new book, which is called Finding Clarity, I feature Homer Simpson as an expert on dealing with stress and leadership. He famously says, “Why does everything have to be so hard?” It’s exactly the kind of attitude that we’re all trying to undo. Things are hard. In life, everything has its challenges. I love that you talk about finding excitement in challenges is one, finding excitement and shifting our relationship with things that are challenging, which can be harder to do than it might seem at the surface.

[00:09:42] Elissa: Yes. Not only is life hard and unpredictable. Our minds are so messy. Our minds look for things to go wrong or chew on things that went wrong. We just carry it around with us. I’m so honored that you read The Stress Prescription and interested from your perspective, what about finding clarity and crispness as a leader? Is that related to stress?

[00:10:13] Marc: Yes, for sure. Also, I was struck by you mentioning throughout the book the practice of meditation. It’s interesting, one of the ways, a classic way that meditation is taught is that with each breath, letting go of expecting anything, now, it sounds kind of impossible, but it’s interesting to actually notice how often we are expecting things. Even a classic, I think it’s in maybe the first chapter of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind suggests that you let go of even expecting that there’s going to be another in-breath after you exhale.

That’s the radical letting go of expecting that you’re still going to be alive and that if there is another in-breath, that you’re surprised and amazed by it and like, “Oh, here I am.” This is not so easy to do. There is some sense, I think, of the power of letting go of our expectations. I think in all our relationships it’s so easy to– I often describe that when I walk into a company, it’s sometimes like a fishbowl where the water is dirty.

People don’t notice because they all have these concretized expectations of who other people are, how they’re going to respond instead of this letting go of that and this sense of letting go and allowing a sense of curiosity, which is where I start. The name of the first chapter of my book is Be Curious, Not Furious. I think everyone should have that sewn into their clothing. That’s very much related to the first three practices, especially in your book about embracing uncertainty, letting go of what you can’t control. Again, I love even just how you are very simply finding excitement in challenges, finding excitement, curiosity, not being tossed around by challenges.

[00:12:40] Elissa: Yes. Those are just such great examples of our lack of clarity of our expectations clouding us. Really, holding expectations means that we’re not really here fully present in this moment either because we have this forward-looking. I like to say we’re bracing, we’re cringing, we’re vigilant for the unexpected. Even when you just said, “Can we truly let go of expectations fully?” right now, I just felt this release even in my body.

It’s catching those ways that we hold onto our wish for control or predictability that we can catch, and we can release. That’s the beauty of having people remind us of that, Marc, like you just reminded me. It’s a great mental habit to cultivate, to catch ourselves when we are pretty much living in the future and not seeing our reality as it is. One of the things, you talk a lot about curiosity, and it is definitely an antidote to not knowing.

How do you also hold that with the dialectic that the future is not just a miracle of being alive with beauty, but it is also holding what we don’t know? That’s hard. Sadness, sorrow, hardship, adversity, so to be curious means you’re open. Does it also mean you have a slight positive bias of future?

[00:14:22] Marc: Yes, I think that way, the word “curious” or at least the way that we now use it, it does have a bit of a positive slant to it, right? You can be curious about your stress. You can be curious. I often say that when my inner critic comes up or when I’m feeling my own sense of wanting more certainty, I’m like, “Oh, wow, there I am doing that thing that I’m always teaching other people not to do. Isn’t that interesting? What is that about?”

Also, in the world of work or just our ordinary lives, I think of it, and I’m curious how this strikes you that we have to live in multiple worlds, right? We have to live in the world of, we’re trying to do things, whether it’s write a book or write a paper or grow a business or have healthy family relationships, and we have those intentions, those things that we’re wanting to do. We notice the gaps between where we are and what we’re wanting to do. We have to live in that world of recognizing the distinctions, recognizing those gaps. The other world, that world can get pretty stressful and uncomfortable.

[00:15:43] Elissa: Aspiration, ambition live there.

[00:15:46] Marc: Yes. Again, I think all those things, think achievement, and I hope that we are ambitiously trying to solve climate change, that we’re ambitiously trying to wake people up, wake ourselves up, there’s an ambition about that. At the same time, letting go of expectations and just appreciating whatever is, being curious about our expectations and curious about “How am I doing in this?”

Yes, I’m really struggling with these various aspects of my work life. Of course, I want to close those gaps. At the same time, how beautiful that I get to be curious about what’s happening and appreciate just being alive, appreciating the challenges. and again, noticing what I have control over and what I don’t have control over.

[00:16:40] Elissa: Yes, that is absolutely key to the healthy stand, this way of being that we need to cultivate. It has to be with such humility and such acknowledgment of what we think we’re controlling. Often, we can just step back and realize how much we might be expending energy on things we can’t control or outcomes that we expect that we can’t necessarily see, touch, hold onto, control.

I do think this curiosity, this stance, this mindset that’s so important for being a human in this era, for being able to feel ease, it does go along with the sacredness of everyday life. The miracle and this stepping back and having room for realizing that it really does allow us to be granular in the moment so that our narrative isn’t just about “Well, this terrible thing happened that shouldn’t, and I feel victimized.”

It’s so easy to go there, well, just even turning on the news and just feeling so down about what we see in global events and in climate. It’s too easy. It’s just a survival skill now for us to basically live in the day and the miracle of being alive right now, being able to do what we can. Climate’s a great example. I love climate as an example because like you said, on one hand, we have no control, but on the other hand, we don’t control long-term outcomes, but there’s so much that we can build our life around that has meaning, and purpose for Earth, for sustainability, even if it’s not our day job.

[00:18:21] Marc: Right. Well, I think it’s early in your book where you describe us as being related to baboons. It was a Google scientist friend of mine who was fond of saying that we are descendants of the nervous apes. I think getting to the underlying, “Well, what’s the problem?” I’m glad we’re talking about the sacred and a sacred approach to being human, and then there’s that in a way, a lot of these practices, antidotes to our expectations, and not only our expectations but our catastrophizing, right, climate change is easy to get all worked up and to be indignant and angry and fearful.

What about our grandchildren? All of that seems appropriate in many ways. I’m also curious, “What are the things that I’ve been saying?” I’m curious of, from a scientific point of view, our scanning for threats. I also wonder if this is also the inward scanning for threats. That inner critic is that same mechanism that is always looking for what can go wrong in our environment is also shining its gaze inward and always looking at checking ourselves, judging ourselves, that deep inner critic that is the nervous ape or the baboon, as you talk about.

[00:19:45] Elissa: Yes, that makes complete sense. It all goes back to that survival instinct that we’re here because we were so good at surviving because our stress response system is so fine-tuned, so fast, so prolonged more than it needs to be. I do think the inner critic, that wanting to be the first to criticize ourself or to ruminate too long on negative things is partly about our social survival, wanting to minimize risks and threats.

It’s just that we don’t realize how unproductive that is. We think it’s problem-solving or justice or all those beliefs of being flawed and being undeserving. Those are all fuel for that scanning, vigilant, being triggered by negative thoughts about the self. It’s very helpful when you go back to that we are primates, we are animals, we are monkeys in clothes because we are both. We most definitely have phenomenal wiring that we’re never going to necessarily fully overcome, meaning we’re going to respond to stressors in bigger, more exaggerated ways biologically than necessary, especially some of us.

We are just stress-sensitive. We have all sorts of reasons for that. Maybe early trauma, epigenetics that have passed on. We all have these different levels of reactivity, and that is really beautiful. It serves us beautifully in this life when we do need to respond to a threat, and we can nudge that stress response to be like, “Yes, this is really mobilizing glucose and oxygen and helping me. Thank you. Thank you to these adrenals that are working so hard.”

Those positive reframes of being the ancestor of the nervous ape, that is actually very powerful, and that’s been studied. Those positive views of stress are protective. They help us recover more quickly and problem-solve better. Just even the humor of realizing, “Yes, there it is. My heart’s racing,” and rather than going down a catastrophe of “This is bad for me. I’m not going to be able to sleep or problem-solve” or going down the path of like, “It’s amazing, and my body’s built for this and knows how to recover. This is not damaging.”

This is all about that acute stress response. Then the other piece that is beautiful about being an animal, we think we’re not, but of course, we are, the ability for us to see the sacredness and to have these communal experiences like love and purpose, and that helps us overcome. There’s almost nothing as stress-buffering as that feeling connected, social support, and feeling purpose. That helps us tolerate things like existential stressors. We overcome the animal nature in that beautiful way and especially if we focus on that.

[00:22:57] Marc: It’s interesting in a couple of things I’m thinking of. One is that when people hear mindfulness or zen, immediately, people have this sense of stress-free or calm, and I often think it’s just the opposite. It’s actually a “Bring it on, bring it on” attitude and not avoiding. We get into a lot of trouble by avoiding difficulties or avoiding conflict. This is one of those huge ones in the world of work and leadership. In my own life, I look at my own work history. The only times I’ve ever really gotten into trouble were by avoiding conflict-

[00:23:40] Elissa: Interesting.

[00:23:41] Marc: -and that I’ve had to train myself. Anytime I feel a sense of my own natural personality is I want things to be stress-free, and I tend to avoid it. Boy, it really gets you in trouble as a leader, especially managing people, running companies essential to lean in and be curious about, “Oh, there’s some conflict here. How can I skillfully address it and work with it?” even though it may feel it’s like, “Oh, yes, this is stressful, but this is good and important.”

[00:24:17] Elissa: That really helps me understand when I work with our leaders of our huge university, I just think all day. I see them when we have problems, right? All day they’re sitting there. They get to do some strategy and fun, proactive things, but mostly, the buck stops with them with all of the different interpersonal problems day after day, and I just think, “How?” Your adrenal can’t just keep responding to all that, or you wouldn’t be there. You wouldn’t last. You would burn out. What is it about taking on that role? You just described that so well of “There’s goodness here. There’s fruit here in this problem-solving.”

[00:24:54] Marc: Yes. There’s an expression, again, in the zen world, and you used the expression. It’s shifting one’s way of being in the world, shifting one’s way of being. I’m very fond of the living by vow, living by intention as opposed to living by habit, energy, or compulsiveness, or living by fear. Instead of living by fear, this kind of vow to become really familiar with and to embrace challenges, to embrace what’s stressful and hard.

[00:25:36] Elissa: How does that work for you? First of all, you described avoidance well, and we all do it. It’s our number one immediate coping response, right, is to withdraw, deny, not see, or just avoid by not engaging, really. Not engaging with stressful situations in life is an unhealthy pattern. It’s related to worse health, worse kind of cognitive aging. There’s an under-engagement issue, too. I’m wondering what the signs are when you feel, does it start in your body, you feel discomfort, and you go there with an inquiry?

[00:26:13] Marc: This is why one of the many reasons I think meditation practice is so critical in that it’s a body practice. Of course, our intellects are super powerful, but there’s something, especially in this realm of emotions, the signals we get, and to train ourselves to pay attention to those signals. I can think of many stories but one is, I can remember being in couple’s therapy, and I noticed a slight movement of my wife’s lip.

I could feel the chemistry in my body change like I had immediately assigned meaning to that she was unhappy with something, or it’s like danger. I see that in the work world and whatever world you’re with other people. Our bodies are reacting, especially to threat and especially to danger. I can remember in that moment of having this dialogue with myself feeling it and saying, “I’m curious what is happening with you right now because I’m getting some signals that you’re unhappy about something. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

[00:27:32] Elissa: Love that example. You were aware enough to actually note why you got an alarm in your body. That happens all the time, and we don’t actually notice it. We just have the alarm go off, and we’re like, “Something’s wrong. I’m feeling stressed.” One of the most important sets of coping strategies is actually to change up the environment that we’re in, change up the scenery.

It sounds like the weakest, but it’s pretty important. What I mean by that is we are just responding all the time, but he body’s definitely a number one go-to place for even registering how stressed we are. We think many of us are aware, and even more people are not aware, and they learn from like, “Oh, my hands are clenched,” or “My jaw’s hurting.” Those are the body accumulation of unconscious stress that is providing us information a little late, I would say.

Training the habit to be doing these check-ins with the body and these releases in different ways is so important, but there’s cues. We know the phone is affecting our attention when it’s in front of us, or we know that the urban landscapes are changing our brainwaves to be much more vigilant versus nature landscapes that create more of the brainwaves that reflect relaxation, and the sounds, water, for example, the sound of water.

There’s a lot of studies on nature stimuli versus urban stimuli that it should really validate us in weighing and prioritizing, creating peaceful environments with safety signals. We don’t usually think in terms of safety signals, but yes, pull our safety signals with the emotions and just how supported we feel, objects, nature, pets, for sure, sensory experiences, blankets, aromatherapy. The weighted blanket or weighted vests were just for kids, and now it’s becoming popular for adults because we are anxious, and we need all of the tools we can get, including sensory.

[00:29:36] Marc: Yes, and I think what I was also hearing in terms of changing environments within people that we work with, it’s even just changing the rules a little bit. It’s okay to express doubt. It’s okay to ask about how other people are doing personally, how you’re feeling to create– Safe environments tend to be much healthier environments to build in a lot of these strategies that you talk about in your book about working with stress.

[00:30:10] Elissa: I love that concept of the workplace as one of the safe environments. It’s not what we usually think of. Work should promote health and purpose, but it’s often that work is one of our major stressors. What is a way in our daily or more regular way that we have safety cues at work, that we reinvigorate the idea that this is a safe place or safe container?

[00:30:36] Marc: Well, I think this is why Brené Brown’s work has been so popular in that it starts with making ourselves vulnerable as a leader or whatever we’re doing in our organizations that I can admit my mistakes. I can apologize. I can talk about my own vulnerability. There are many ways to create safety, but that would be a great starting place is with our own vulnerability and people who are in leadership roles, you can transform the culture. That’s it.

If you want to change the culture, start with yourself but start by bringing in your own authenticness, genuineness, vulnerability, whatever you want to call it. It’s so related, though. What’s interesting is that these practices, it means embracing uncertainty. That’s vulnerable, let it go of what you can’t control. That means making yourself vulnerable.

[00:31:31] Elissa: Yes, taking social risks. I love that. There’s this kind of fine line. There’s venting. There’s expressing negative emotions. While we need to do that, that’s also contagious. I feel like I’ve had years of being a transmitter of stress in my workplace because I’d be in a rush. Everyone would know my deadlines. I’d be making them feel the urgency and this and that.

Then there’s the idea of modeling and sharing ways that you’re regulating and normalizing that and taking the stigma out of it. That could mean anything, sharing that you’re going to therapy or taking medication or needing your time out or mindful five minutes, whatever it is that is acceptable wording that you want to create a norm for acceptable to you. It’s like as leaders, especially, we are creating the environment. If we don’t realize the power of our modeling, we’re doing it in a passive way.

[00:32:37] Marc: Yes, it’s interesting. In the work world, there is something about, it’s a positive of working with energy, even at times working with a sense of urgency but how to do that in a way that creates vulnerability, goodness, and connection of this. I was just picturing you as you said that at times you were spreading stress, but I suspect these days, you are spreading goodness,

[00:33:03] Elissa: Maybe with some stress but I consciously do try to ask people rather than having a transactional relationship, even if you have a short meeting, starting with the person in front of you and seeing their whole and asking how they are. That always is my step one and maybe even setting an intention before a new interaction, a meeting about realizing the common goals, the wishes for wellbeing, hoping to support whatever person is coming to you. Those are other ways that I have made work more meaningful or less stressful, and it certainly helps to have relationships come first versus the transaction.

[00:33:51] Marc: Anything at all as a way of ending today that you’d like to say?

[00:33:56] Elissa: Well, thank you for bringing so much amazing wisdom about wellbeing and prioritizing wellbeing to businesses. That is sacred work in this world, and the impact is immeasurable. I just admire you, and I’m grateful for your work.

[00:34:15] Marc: Oh, thank you for the– Again, as I said earlier, I so appreciate bringing science into this realm of mindfulness, meditation, and living in a more healthier way. It just might save us the combination of the work that you’re doing.

[00:34:35] Elissa: Thank you.

[00:34:35] Marc: Thank you so much.

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[00:34:42] Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

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