I took some notes and recorded some of my thoughts on the Huberman podcast episode with Dr. Elissa Epel: Control Stress for Healthy Eating, Metabolism & Aging, that came out on Apr 3, 2023.
The official notes from the Huberman Lab website are here.
Some of the quotes aren’t direct quotes, but my adaptation/expansion of what they said, please refer to the original source for the exact wording and full context.
The notes are fragmental and my thoughts are mostly rambling, but I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope you do too :)
Aging, mitochondria health and mood
Some points brought up by Dr. Epel:
- Aging measurement: telomeres, epigenetics, mitochondria health.
- A good indicator of long term health is how positive you feel at night
- At the end of a stressful day, can you muster the feelings of content, ease, confidence, joy; or has it just wiped out your positivity?
- Mitochondria level is correlated with our mood. Our mitochondria are sensitive to our thoughts and feelings, probably on a daily basis.
A note on mitochondria: the powerhouse or motherboard?
Dr. Chris Palmer brought up an interesting point on another episode of the Huberman podcast, that mitochondria could be more important in regulating the cells than we previously thought, and might be a crucial component in aging.
Apart from their their role in energy production, mitochondria have been found to be involved in a wide range of cellular functions including regulating cell death, controlling calcium signaling, and modulating gene expression.
Research suggested they might function more similarly to a “motherboard” in a computer, acting as a central hub that coordinates and regulates various cellular processes.
Radical acceptance: drop the rope.
The harm of not accepting and getting hooked on wishing things were different.
Dr. Epel:
What’s this game that we are born into?
The idea that “bad things shouldn’t happen” sets us up for vulnerability to feel victimized, to feel like we can’t accept bad things have happened.
The more we spend time trying to problem solve, worry or wishing things were different, the more we are creating a chronic stress state.
Wishing things were different is not being present , avoiding instead of being engaged, it predicts more unhappiness, predicts shorter telomeres.
The power of acceptance
Dr. Epel:
Among the chronical stressors, which ones can we circle “we can’t change” - they are still on the list, therefore on our minds,, still upsetting,
but just that recognition of “this is not going to go away” is powerful, cause we can “put the baggage down” and give ourselves some relief and freedom, from the space they hold in our minds and body.
It’s a practice, a muscle we can build. We have to practice again and again to loosen our grip, so they don’t control our wellbeing and taking up the mental real estate that’s so precious - our attention.
Statements that help:
- Rope attaching to wall analogy: drop the rope.
Dr. Epel:
A metaphor is pulling a rope attached to a brick wall, you can’t move the brick wall, end up only chafing your hands, so, what if you just drop the rope?
Say it to ourselves, DROP THE ROPE, when we start to getting going on solving the stressor (the unsolvable problems).
The brick wall is still there, but our hands are free.
- Re-attach ourselves to reality
Dr. Epel:
I often need to refocus from wishing things were different, trying to solve things, to radical acceptance of this is how things are, right now, this is the reality.
By reminding ourselves that there’s freedom within that is powerful, we can live better with these sometimes horrible situations.
Loving presence is a gift, we often forget that we always have that (love) to give, to ourselves, to friends, to parents.
I think our brain has a small RAM, and we should constantly remind ourselves of many things - gratitude is certainly among them.
Some statements can help reduce stress, they are like magical incantations, and somehow saying it out loud, actually hearing it makes a difference.
I wonder if this is what makes someone a “sage”, they found out those magic words or statements that can really help a lot of people.
Other statements that might help:
- We’ve beat this many times (David Goggin’s cookie jar method).
- Take a step back and distance ourselves - this is not going to matter in 10 years - Jocko Willink said on another Huberman episode that this distancing technique is his superpower.
Narrative & interpretation of stress.
Dr. Paul Conti on trauma:
The limbic system, the fight or flight scripts have no sense of time, that’s why developmental scripts get reactivated after the traumatic events. And we often have a repetition compulsion of going back to it, to try to rewrite the story.
Dr. Epel:
We really really love control, not just because it makes us feel powerful and happy, but because then we can relax.
While I can relate the love of control, and the feeling of wanting to relax, but from my own experience, that feeling might be partially a delusion.
I think the lack of motion, the “I’ll rest and just lay around doing nothing” state is something we thought we want, but inaction in a way means a death sentence to the brain - it’s painful when people fall into depression and don’t even want to move around.
I think relaxation is something the prefrontal cortex never truly wants, maybe for a while, but a full blown retirement means death.
In a recent Lex Fridman Podcast episode with Shannon Curry, she mentioned that in happy relationships, couple have “good : bad” events at about 5 : 1 ratio. I wonder what’s the ideal balance to strike there, how much should the brain relax vs in the go mode.
We love things that are predictable, we are that mush happier and relaxed when we know exactly what would happen in the future, but there’s a trouble maker itching in the background, part of us loves to be surprised, to see chaos, for that dash magic of randomness.
Dr. Epel
Being comfortable with uncertainty is a beautiful but rare resilient factor, people have high tolerance of uncertainty have much less anxiety and depression.
Reframing uncertainty as the beauty of the mystery of life.
The freedom of realizing we don’t control tomorrow, we just go with it and do our best, and what delight there is to just viewing things with curiosity.
Face time by letting it come to us, receiving what happens, it’s a different body stand (relaxed, sit back open) than our go mode. Just let time unfold without trying to control
I think once in a while, we need to relax and sit back and look further to see the big picture and find out the right direction to go, but we’ll mostly be in the dopaminergic moving forward state.
Dr. Epel:
So much of stress is about the narrative, it’s how we interpret it. A narrative of purpose, that’s what sets us different from the mice and monkeys, we share the same set of stress of responses and we can’t control that, but we have this ability to do this projection to the future, to ask what is our purpose in life, to see and know we are going to die and we have some control over how we live and how we want to be remembered. Exercise can burn off that jittery.
Stress and eating
For most people, stress lead to food craving and overeating. (Sapolsky framed the question in this way: “Why is it that when we feel like nobody loves us, we eat Oreo cookies?”)
Dr. Epel:
The body scan, breathing and mindfulness helps reduce craving. If we sit down and really “savor” some junk food, eat it as slowly as we can, really drink that coke one sip at a time, we’ll realize it’s not that good, it’s not as good as we imagined.
Huberman mentioned whether it’s breaking the interoceptive / exteroceptive balance. When we are fully focused on that donut, we are in full exteroceptive mode, and if we try to turn the attention inside to our body, it might help pull us out of the craving.
Book resource on meditation: Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, by Daniel Goleman, Richard J. Davidson
Psychedelics and brain plasticity
Huberman:
We think the psychedelic journey is when all the changes occur, because all the hallucinations and alternate thinking - the gravitational pull psychedelics do, but it’s actually in the window after the psychedelic journey that the actual rewire of the brain takes place -
when people talking about integration afterwards, they are not talking about the few hours parachuting back down to typical consciousness, but there’s a week or month long tail of plasticity, that when most of the rewiring happens.
I think sometimes traumatic events or some major life changes can have similar effects, something shocking happens and it “opens up” plasticity (a lot of times it’s acute pain), the brain is marked for changes, but the actual rewiring of synapses or even growth of neurons happens gradually in the months to come.