Huberman - Dr. Elissa Epel: Controll Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging

Stress is the feeling of being overwhelmed, that the demands are too much for the resources.

Thoughts are the biggest propagators of stress.

Tools to deal with overthinking about stressors:

• Top down strategies (beliefs and mindsets can help us release stress and use is positively).
• Use the body to change the mind.
• Change the scene (go to an environment you find calming, safety signals like comforting pets, pictures, smells, music etc.).

Stress is very expensive to the body in terms of ATP.

Chronic stress accelerates ageing, and under-exposure to stress also leads to faster ageing than ideal amounts of stress.

We can use some mental scripts to make our mind move our body towards positive change. Some strategies involve reminding yourself of past successes, thinking that this will not matter in 10 years etc.

To break compulsive eating cycle:

• Increasing awareness about the body and do mindful eating. E.g. label how you feel and your hunger level from 1-10, whether you are really hungry or just bored, and do this just before eating.
• HIIT to increase short term stress.
• Write the craving.
• Changing the environment, taking a walk, get away from food etc.
• Eat junk food slowly, being aware of what you are actually eating (most people who ate junk food like this did not finish the meal).
• Think about the establishment perspective that other people are making money off of your health.

Mindfulness protocol during pregnancy had a significant impact on stress.

Radical acceptance of things like terminal illness of a loved one is important.

The questions "in the last 5 minutes how much did you wish if things were different", "how much have you been engaged and focused on what you are doing" tell a lot about someone's wellbeing.

Drop the rope tied to the wall (representing the thing you don't have control over) instead of trying to hold onto it when its gripping your hands, so you can be freed up and live in the ways that you have control over.

Being comfortable with uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression. Intolerance of uncertainty predicted anxiety, PTSD, depression, distress about things like the California fires. So what can we do to be comfortable with the uncertain future?

• Noticing that we are carrying around uncertainty.
• Framing uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life, and the freedom that we feel when we realize we don't control tomorrow, build curiousity to what arises.

Creating a coherent narrative (via journalling) is critical to our ability to make sense, find meaning and resolution, have a social identity around our lived experience.

Mindfulness, slow breathing and other low arousal relaxation methods vs. exericse, winhoff method and other positive stress both of these make people feel better, reduced stressed in everyone in the related study.