Rethinking Stress: Turning a Negative into a Positive with Dr. Elissa Epel

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Elissa Epel, Ph.D., professor and vice chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the author of the book entitled The Stress Prescription. She studies how self-care practices such as meditation and positive stress can promote psychological and physiological thriving and is interested in large-scale interventions for communal well-being and health equity. Kristen and Elissa will discuss the difference between stress, anxiety, and depression (3:25), the perception of stress and your mindset (6:22), the ability to identify stress (12:55), the physiological impacts of stress (16:45), how mindset impacts stress and coping mechanisms (20:20), tools to increase our stress resilience (23:15), the traps of modernity (28:30), maternal lifetime stress exposure and telomere aging (33:32), stress impacting nutrition and overeating (37:41), the ideology of Skillful Surfing (42:58), and sleep strategies (44:49).

Resources:

The Stress PrescriptionSupport the show