Dr. Elissa Epel: Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging

You asked, is a sugary drink one of the worst things we can do for our health? Yes, because sugary food doesn't go to our brain as quickly as liquid sugar ... Think about cocaine and crack—crack goes to the brain immediately, and it's that much more addictive. That's how we think of liquid sugar.

Do you have a situation in your life that is unwanted and you can't change? It could be small; it could be huge. How much time do you spend thinking about this? The more we spend time trying to problem solve or worry or just wishing things were different, the more we are creating a chronic stress state.

Being comfortable with uncertainty is a beautiful but rare resilience factor. People who tolerate uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression. And when stressful things happen, they get over it more quickly.

Stress is so expensive to the body. The stress response uses a tremendous amount of energy (ATP) that's made by your mitochondria. And if we have that kind of vigilant stress response on all day, we're just going to feel exhausted.

We've got to stop during the day and check-in and look inside. If we're not aware of where our mind is, we are just subject to believing the stressful thoughts, thinking that we need to keep ruminating.

In terms of the health and biology, we have found that there is slower biological aging... in these meditation interventions we do, the short-term ones. The inflammatory pathways of gene expression are dampened way down. And cross-sectionally, other people.... have found longer telomeres in the meditators versus the controls.

The older people are less stressed, period. If you're over 65, you have been through so much, solved so much; you just have a better perspective on life and on stressors. And then... young adults have like four times the level of stress as our older adults.

A small percentage of people report no stressors ... They're not really going out and doing much. And what he found is that their level of kind of memory and cognition, their cognitive health, was significantly lower.

The Wim Hof Method did create daily positive emotion that increased over time, just like your study on sighing. And so even though they are different mechanisms, they were selectively boosting feelings of positivity.

When you stress them out, people with obesity are having a different reward response. The more insulin resistant they are, the more their reward center lights up during stress.

Having no stress means we're not really living, like we're not engaging in the gifts of life, which inevitably have some challenging risk.