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

This Huberman Lab Essentials episode revisits an earlier conversation. Andrew Huberman, who introduces himself as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, opens by challenging the usual story about stress. He lists the common view that "stress is bad, stress can kill us" and then says that this is "not the entire picture." He asks Dr. Elissa Epel to explain what stress is and isn't, when it causes problems, and when it might even help.

Epel describes herself as a stress scientist and says the word has to be broken down because it has many dimensions and meanings. There is good and bad stress, and there is acute and chronic stress. Her technical definition is the feeling of being overwhelmed, when we feel that "the demands are too much for our resources."

She argues that challenges are a normal part of life and that stressful situations will not go away. "If anything, they are increasing." So what matters most is not the stressors themselves but how we respond. A stress response followed by recovery is healthy in her account: "No harm done." She calls it a survival response and says it is why we are still alive.

According to Epel, the modern problem is that the response doesn't end. We "keep it alive in our head" and keep it going with our thoughts. Her central claim in this section is direct:

Our thoughts are the most common form of stress.

Huberman asks how to handle overthinking and rumination. He offers two options: try to rationalize or understand where the stress comes from, or steer our thinking away from it.

Before answering, Epel names a prerequisite: awareness of how our minds work. Without it, she says, we treat our thoughts as real and assume it helps to keep ruminating and problem solving. That happens because we tend to move toward whatever we see as a threat or risk. The result can be a whole day stuck in "threat mode." She calls this "a shame," because we don't need the stress response switched on all the time, yet she says that is where we are as a society.

She adds that daily stress from urban and modern life has become so familiar that we don't notice it. "We're just used to it." Her image for this is going through the day "with kind of like clenched hands." She invites listeners to check in right away on how they might be holding stress in their bodies. She calls this "a huge clue" and says we may not know we are stressed even while we are clenching our hands.

Huberman then narrows the question. He is asking less about stress held in the body and more about dwelling on what caused it, such as "the difficult conversation, the thing that irked them." Epel admits she has no single solution: "I wish I had one answer". Instead she says many strategies address it, and she sorts them into three bins.

Top-down strategies: awareness, and things we can say to ourselves. Epel says our beliefs and mindsets can help us release stress and use it more positively. The body changes the mind: she says this is the set of strategies Huberman tends to use most. We work stress out of the body, "metabolizing" and "burning it up," and get relief. She says this changes amygdala activity and moves us into a more experiential state, more in the somatosensory cortex. Change the scene: get away from the stress triggers in the office or the city and spend time somewhere calming. That could be just a corner of the house with what she calls "safety signals," such as comforting pets, pictures, smells or music.

Epel never directly picks between Huberman's two options, rationalizing or diverting. She offers a toolkit instead: the top-down bin sits closer to working with thoughts, and the change-the-scene bin closer to stepping away. In this excerpt she also doesn't cite specific studies for her claims about the amygdala and somatosensory cortex, and she doesn't rank the three bins.

Huberman notes that stress can be short-term, medium-term or long-term. Since Epel has studied all of these forms, he asks for an overview of how to recognize them.

Epel separates feeling and reporting stress, which she calls important, from what the body is doing, which she says "is not always related to our minds." Measuring the nervous system and how vigilant we are is another way to understand stress, and she says "that's how stress gets under the skin." A person might not report any stress and still hold tension and be "much more sympathetically dominated." She explains this as a body that is vigilant, scanning for cues, and not feeling safe.