Dr. Elissa Epel
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
It's definitely playing a role. And this concept of bidirectionality, we know that sleep disruption, circadian rhythm disruption, sleep apnea is present in two-thirds of people with insulin resistance, prediabetes, diabetes. And it is a chicken and the egg thing. It is driving the bus. We used to think, well, you get the sleep apnea because you have insulin resistance and gain weight.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
But if you have disrupted sleep, your insulins are higher, your cortisol's are higher, your glucose is higher, you're looking for highly processed, quick, energy dense foods and less able to resist them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
And cancer. And dementia. And flares of autoimmune conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
And chronic pain. Yeah. And fibromyalgia. And anxiety and depression. I mean, it really affects everything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
but the more you worry about it, the harder it gets to sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Right. So I do think that there's a need to address underlying contributors to anxiety and depression, independent of their impact on sleep. So talking about what's going on, bringing in some kind of breath-based practice, whether that's yoga or Tai Chi or meditation, just to ratchet everything down. That's another important component of it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
And thirdly, you've already touched on a little bit about the dopamine with the phone, but it's also the dysregulation in our circadian rhythms. You know, we think about how there's been a lot of research about how important it is to avoid light exposure at night, for example.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
But everything we do during the day and when we do it is ultimately going to influence our ability to go to sleep when we want to and get the rest that we want to. So in other words, when we're eating all day long and snacking late at night and watching TV at night, that's signaling on our computers. That's telling our bodies and brain that it's day, it's day, it's day. So we want to actually...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
could reestablish a consistent circadian rhythm meal timing. So we're having eating earlier in the day and then building in a fasting interval before we go to bed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
No. Interestingly enough, there's as you know, there's a connection as well with digestive function that eating late at night not only disrupts your sleep, but it's contributing to higher reflux, which can also interrupt sleep. So everything's interconnected.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
It's interesting. They even looked at LED streetlights disrupting the circadian rhythm of animals and insects too. So it's not just humans that are being impacted by this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Well, one of the conditions is restless leg syndrome. It's hard to diagnose. It's more of what we call a clinical diagnosis. People describe this creepy crawly sensation in their legs or this irresistible urge to rub their feet together. Typically, it's treated with dopamine medications. It's connected to relatively low dopamine levels in the brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Dopamine, yes, revs you up, but dopamine also seems to play a role with movement. So it's treated with some of the same medications they used to treat Parkinson's disease. But it turns out that that can be more prevalent in people who have autoimmune conditions, in which case we want to address the underlying autoimmune conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
There are some nutrient deficiencies that are going to make the symptom of restless legs more significant. Low iron, low vitamin D, low folic acid, low magnesium. So we really want to look at somebody's nutritional status.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So if we identify a nutrient deficiency, for example, the next step is why? What's the why that somebody's nutrients might be low? And there we come back, like so many other things, to the function of the gut. And interestingly enough, there is a higher correlation in people who have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth also having restless leg syndrome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
maybe because it's contributing to ongoing inflammation, maybe because it's also contributing to difficulty absorbing those nutrients from your food. So we're even going to go a step further and say, is there an underlying issue with digestive function, absorption and assimilation of nutrients that are.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Right. Lead, mercury, things that that are under the radar for many, many people and unfortunately can be a problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
What happened with your sleep?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Well, I think it's the time to take a history and really understand all of the other interconnectedness that could be going on. For example, somebody with sleep concerns might also have digestive concerns, and then we might be thinking about assessing their digestive function, looking at a nutritional assessment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
But I think there's a time and a place and there's tremendous value in screening somebody with a portable sleep study because that gives you a tremendous amount of information. And we're using it, yes, to diagnose sleep apnea, but also to say, how often do you wake up during the night? How much percentage of time are you spending in REM sleep and deep sleep?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Are you tossing and turning all night long? So it can give us a tremendous overview in terms of somebody's sleep throughout the night. And from that, we can also decide, okay, what else do we need to explore?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Right, so this is somebody that, and one of the things I wanna plant the seed for is sometimes we start with what we think is the most likely issue and we gradually uncover more potential contributing issues and peel the layers of the onion. And this was a woman that I had known for years. She was pretty healthy in terms of her lifestyle. She exercised. She wasn't overweight.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
She ate a healthy diet. She didn't drink any alcohol. She was treated with antidepressants. She was on a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and Welbutrin for her depression. And she was also on hormone replacement therapy. She was post-menopausal in her 60s. And she started complaining of fatigue and difficulty concentrating and just felt scattered. And by Sundays, she would...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
had the need to take a three-hour nap. So well, that's unusual. So we did some of the usual testing for causes of fatigue. We tested her thyroid. It was OK. We looked at her iron levels or sugar levels. They were OK. So I decided to screen her with a sleep study. And it turned out you would not have looked at her and said, oh, yes, she is the poster child for sleep apnea.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
She turned out to have one of the most striking positional components to sleep apnea I've ever seen. When she was on her side, her sleep was normal, but when she was on her back, she had respiratory events that count as either a slowing of airflow or a stopping of airflow more than 60 times an hour.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
That's a lot. No wonder she was exhausted, right? So when you see a positional component like that, I have people who don't want to do a sleep study because they don't want to, I'd never wear that stupid mask. But for her, we said, okay, well, let's start with retraining you to learn to sleep on your side. And she tried that. There's some commercially available positional devices.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
There are all kinds of strategies you can do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Or the fanny pack with the pillow stuffed in it, yes. There's all kinds of strategies you could do. And of course, it's big business, right? You can buy a slumber bump or a bumper belt.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Even more sophisticated, there's now a biofeedback device that's a strap around that vibrates when you roll on your back. So it's sort of autogenic nighttime training to get you. So that's what she used, interestingly enough. And it helped a little, but she was still tired.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So as we're peeling the layers of the onion, she had some digestive symptoms, a lot of bloating, a lot of discomfort, and she had, we had done a full sleep study, she had restless legs and periodic limb movements. She turned out to have a very abnormal breath test for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Where they don't belong, right, right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Absolutely. And low iron. Her iron wasn't terribly low, but one of the sidebars here, I think the other thing we do in functional and integrative medicine is understand the difference between a normal blood test. I should put, quote, normal blood test and an optimal blood test. Ferritin is a classic example of that. Ferritin looks at your total tissue iron.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
In your iron bank, your iron stores, right. And normal can be anywhere from 15 to 250. Yeah. So it's a big range. And what we know the threshold is for somebody who's got restless leg symptoms is you actually don't want to be normal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
You want to be over a hundred because there's some evidence, even comparing it head to head with those dopamine drugs we mentioned earlier, getting somebody's ferritin over a hundred was as effective as the dopamine medications.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
That's amazing, right? As simple as correcting a nutrient deficiency, not to the normal range, but the optimal range for that condition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
And Mark, I think from the internal medicine standpoint too, it's equally important to say, don't just correct the iron, figure out the why. You don't want to miss blood loss somewhere. Yeah, she got a colon cancer. Absolutely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
know there was one other piece related to her story that i think is also important to call out addressing all of those things her sleep quality was still not what she wanted to be so we had a conversation and she relayed the fact that when she was growing up things were pretty unsettled in her home of origin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
There were a lot of late night parties, a lot of noise, and bedtime became a time where she didn't really feel safe and quiet and comfortable. So we also talked about referring her to a life management behavioral therapist to really talk about what it meant to be safe and regaining that sense of being okay being in bed. And I think that goes hidden as well that a previous
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
History of trauma or not feeling safe can also show up with insomnia and difficulty sleeping.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Sure. I think first and foremost, we have to recognize that sleep, you know, you and I trained in an era where sleep deprivation or how little sleep you could get by on was a badge of honor. Yeah. So we need to shift that internal dialogue that we all have that, oh, if I'm sleeping, I'm wasting my time and I'm not getting my stuff done.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So first, honor the importance of sleep for your overall health and well-being and even your ability to stick to your intentions around choosing healthy foods and sticking to your exercise plan. Then create a sanctuary that's really conducive for rest and relaxation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
dark, quiet, cool, ideally electronics out of the bedroom or turned off if you can, getting rid of all of the light exposures, even your chargers, you know, that had that little light.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
I had a patient who told me she traveled around with black electrical tape whenever she went to a hotel and she would put it over all the little light sources in the hotel room.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So those two, quiet, calming. And I think this idea that you go, go, go, go, go, go, hop in bed and turn it off like a switch, that doesn't work either. So building in a transition to rest and relaxation. If you can do an hour, that's great. And getting off the devices, not watching TV, maybe reading a book or journaling or doing something, taking a bath, stretching in the tub.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
I mean, there's all kinds of wonderful ways to ease into rest.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
That's my favorite as well. And then you go to your cool bedroom and you do your legs up the wall yoga, restorative yoga position and bingo, you've got your transition to rest and relaxation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. So the rough analogy is this. It's funny, when they asked partners of people with insomnia how many of them were suggesting that they have a drink to go to sleep, it was about a third of them. So people think alcohol is going to help you sleep. And it might make you fall asleep. But then as it clears out of your system, there's an arousal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
It can exacerbate hypoglycemia. It makes you wake up. It's going to make sleep apnea worse. If you're a woman in midlife, oh boy, it's a bladder irritant. It's a hot flash trigger. So it's really affecting sleep in a lot of ways. The rough equivalent is there's about an hour of sedation followed by an hour of arousal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So if you had a glass of wine at 6 and you go to bed at 10, it's probably not going to impact your sleep as much as if you have two glasses at 8 or like your late dinner last night if you had a glass or two of wine. I had a beer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
That has another impact on your sleep.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
It's really interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
And we're all different in terms of our caffeine metabolism ability. Some people are really fast metabolizers. I happen to be one of those. But if you're a slow metabolizer,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
half of your cup of coffee from noon could still be in your system at nine o'clock at night and most of the time we're not thinking back to that new cup of coffee with food it's really about quality quantity and timing of food it's all three yet another area that's impacted with the health of the gut microbiome is sleep and data is suggesting that people who eat a
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
A wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables tend to have better sleep quality, whereas a highly processed standard American diet is associated with more sleep disruptions and less deep sleep. So quality matters. We already touched a little bit on the timing of eating. So eating your calories earlier in the day also helps re-regulate those circadian rhythms.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
clocks in the brain and the clocks in the body that are ideally going to be working in sync with each other, they're influenced by light, by movement, and by food. So when we line all those things up during the day, it's going to help us get the rest that we need at night.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So sleep is when we're repairing the powers of both the mind and the body. Sleep is when we reduce inflammation, repair tissues. The discovery of the glymphatic system in 2012, 2013 is this passive channel that runs alongside our arteries and veins in the brain that fills with fluid when we're in deep sleep and allows a washing out of debris we may have accumulated during the day.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Eat Smart: Quality Foods to Improve Sleep and Reduce Stress
So all those bad thoughts get washed out. Well, not the bad thoughts. Well, the bad thoughts, no, but the amyloid plaque, that sticky plaque that we secrete in response to inflammation or injury, if it accumulates, of course, it can damage surrounding neurons and is associated with neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
We are more stressed now than in previous years and decades, but even worse, I think of our youths, like 70% are, you know, reporting stress that they, such extreme stress, they don't know how to manage it. It's interfering with their life. These are really serious red flags. We know what that means biologically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
It's a leading indicator to the wear and tear on our cells, on our brain, the conditions we're always trying to avoid. So it's a serious prescription that we don't have to live each day with this excessive level of stress, which really rules out those states that you've been cultivating, which is the restorative states. And it's a beautiful example you gave how you are consciously changing them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Because it's not our fault. There's no judgment. We all come out with different levels. That question about why do some people expect negative things to happen, that can't stand ambiguity, that uncertainty feels intolerable, that's part of it. It's partly from how our stress response systems are shaped from all these different influences before our life, including our life starting in the womb.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yes, so you wanna hear about these mind states.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yeah, we've been thinking about stress from a different perspective, we and others in the field. So usually we think about how stressed does someone get in the moment? How quickly do they recover? And that's important. We want a quick peak and a quick recovery, and that's a healthy, resilient stress response. But it's not just the action during stress, during events, during tough times.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
The question really becomes, what are you carrying in your body and mind when nothing is happening, when you are at rest, or at least you think you are? And that's a window into the unconscious level of stress that we're carrying. So when we talk about uncertainty stress, that's where it is. That's because it's a little bit vague and we can catch that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Mindfulness, mindful check-ins help us just in this moment, like just ask, are you tensing up? Do a check-in with your body, your hands, your face, your eyebrows. So often we are tensing up and We sometimes can identify why, and sometimes we can just remember, oh, right now, it's not only okay to relax, it's important for my body. I'm not needing to cope with something.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So it's that baseline state or rest state that we're learning is really different in people and is a sign of chronic, low-grade chronic stress that we can actually get to and release through different techniques. So red mind is what we've been discussing about coping in the moment when you're fired up and you need the energy, you need the stress response.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And we just don't want that to kind of go on and on and have sluggish recovery. But otherwise, we need that. It's beautiful. It's why we're here today. That's our survival response. And of course, we're triggering it too much as humans with an overdeveloped cortex. and the more chronic ambiguous threat we feel. So then there's yellow mind state, which is when we think we are relaxed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
It's just, how are you walking around during the day? Typical day, where are you at? What's your baseline? You probably do some monitoring, you know what your autonomic nervous system is set at. And that is probably higher than we need to be at.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And so that's what we think of as our default baseline is actually carrying around a lot of both cognitive load from our thoughts, from different information screens demands. So we're a bit activated. Then there's also the unconscious stress that we can become aware of and release. So we wanna bring down that yellow mind state to a more true resting state. And that's the green mind, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yeah. I've learned a lot from monitoring, and I think that's one way to raise awareness as well as, you know, asking ourselves to become mindful of our emotions and our bodily, where we're holding stress in the body, where we're tense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
The heart, you know, heart rate tells us a lot of things, but the heart rate variability we think is more specific to that balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic, so more uh, related to psychological stress, not just, uh, metabolic demands. So it's, it's that super interesting. So Costa Rica leads you to a different yellow mind, um, maybe green mind state, better baseline.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
I monitored my, with my aura ring, I monitored my heart rate variability during a meditation retreat. And we know that when people slow their breathing immediately, they have, they can have a decrease in all the, um, the sympathetic activity markers, and sometimes in heart rate variability during studies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So it's no mystery that doing these practices and doing them for longer can lead to these improvements. And that those are what we call deep rest states when we're really allowing ourselves to feel safe and to let down and let ourselves go into restorative mode. But I was surprised at how long my heart rate variability, my baseline heart rate variability took to change.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So it was only two weeks later toward the end of the retreat that my sleeping heart rate variability really improved.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Hmm. Yeah. We, we have these red mind states that we don't want on all day drains our batteries, stresses our mitochondria. We have data on daily mood and mitochondria showing it is really sensitive to daily affect. This was a, um, a study with Martin Picard of Columbia, and we were measuring the enzymatic activity.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And so when people woke up with more positive emotion and went to bed with more positive emotion, they had higher mitochondria, which we measured kind of in the middle of the week of monitoring. And when they, you know, particularly at night, so there's this idea of how are we recovering from the day? Can we maintain positive affect at the end of a stressful long day?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And we certainly found the chronically stressed participants, these were caregivers, had lower mitochondria overall. But this mood effect pretty much mediated that and overrode that. So that's this pointing us to, hmm, we actually know how to increase positive affect quite quickly with gratitude exercises and other ways of thinking and being.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And so how amazing to think that our mitochondrial activity might be under our control in this short-term way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yeah. Well, to get back to your question about the, how do we live a day without chronic stress? So we might think of red mind as like having, you know, drinking coffee all day and just keeping us in that activated mode. And we want that stress response, but we just want to, you know, use it parsimoniously, not take it for granted. When we ignore it, it can just be on all day and rush, rush, rush.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
I mean, rushing and packing our day is probably the most common pernicious way that we stay in yellow and red mind.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, they don't have much of that, do they? We must look so weird to them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yeah, that's beautiful. So the mitochondria are... most likely, they haven't been studied to death like all the other biomarkers in terms of health behaviors and all, but they certainly are related to the hormetic stressors like exercise, increasing them. And we don't actually, we only now, I think, have really good ways to measure them in healthy humans in a monitoring way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So we're learning more and more, but we do know that they tend to secrete the cell like lets out fragments of mitochondrial DNA into the serum during acute stress. So that's not a good thing. That's not a good sign. That's a sign that our mitochondria are, you know, overstressed and responding to stress with with this excessive what we call cell free mitochondrial DNA. So they're outside.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yes, I think that's exactly right. And that is a new area. In 2018, we published the first paper showing that chronic stress was related to lower mitochondria. And then we were like, why didn't we measure fatigue and vitality? Because you would imagine you have low mitochondria. Some had as low as people with mitochondrial disorder.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And that is thought to be at the center of both chronic illness and mental health now, these mitochondria as the source of aging, breakdown. And so I think it's really helpful to think of our mitochondria and what gives them a boost and boosting positive affect, having more of these restorative states, but also the hormetic stressors that they probably love them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
It's interesting to think of really planning regular, like a lifestyle habit, hormetic stress episodes. So they're, you know, it's very common to be doing ice exposure or sauna or Wim Hof breathing. And those are, I mean, to be totally honest, I don't think we have many options in our toolbox for hormetic stress that we know of and we know how to use safely and find the right dose.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So we're, people experiment and It's just a new cutting edge area of stress to really understand how these are affecting aging and mental health. There is exciting work on depression and hypothermia showing that when you can raise your core body temperature, even just a few sessions, it can lead to over a month of remission from more severe treatment-resistant depression.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And of course, the cardiovascular effects are well-documented. Rhonda Patrick just wrote a beautiful review of what repeated sauna does. Oh, wow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
I'll email that to you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
Yes, it is. And, you know, it's beautiful in that it's not medical. So it's doing it's, you know, creating all of these changes in the cell in a dramatic way. Same with cold exposure, same with breath holding, extreme breathing, and then the recovery response.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
So we're just we're kind of like inducing the survival response and short bursts and then the counter regulatory response, turning on the autophagy, cleaning up junk in the cell. reducing oxidative stress, free radicals. And I think in terms of the aerobic stress, I mean, we've been trained to think, you got to get into change your clothes, do 45 minutes, you got to get the endurance in.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And of course, that's important. But what we're talking about, stress fitness, you can go do something for one minute, two minutes. You change up your, your physiological state, right? You can go do jumping jacks or sprint and you don't, and you can, someone was just encouraging me. I was like, yeah, but you got to change your clothes so you can get sweaty.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
And they're like, no, I do it all the time. You don't, you do it in your work clothes. So it was interesting just to think like, no, just take away all those barriers about how we think you have to be prepared for exercise and be in the right place and just do the, you know, something high intensity and,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Chronic Stress: Follow These Simple Steps to Take Back Control
in wherever you are briefly, probably fulfill self-conscious, but that is really changing up our state. And we also use that in different therapies that are really needing acute psychological first aid for emotion regulation. What do they do? There's all sorts of strategies that are body up like that. So ice on the cheeks is one, and as well as the pushups or jumping jacks.