Elissa Epel on Telomeres and How our Choices Affect Them and our Health

The One You Feed

Eric Zimmer

Education, Self-improvement, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Buddhism, Mental Health

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dr. Elissa Epel knows a lot about the science of stress. As a health psychologist, she specializes in research surrounding the role Telomeres and their length play in our body's response to stress. In this episode, she explains how the choices we make emotionally, about our thought patterns, our lifestyle etc directly affects our biology in a very clear and measurable way. It turns out, our thoughts and our behavior have a measurable impact on our biology at a cellular level and there are things that we can do to make that impact a positive one. When it comes to telomeres, in most cases, the longer the better and you can do things to impact that variable of length starting today. She is the coauthor with Nobel winner Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier and Longer

This episode is sponsored by Health IQ. Get lower rates on life insurance if you are health conscious. Get free quote here

In This Interview, Elissa Epel and I Discuss...

The Wolf Parable
Her book, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier and Longer
That genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger
How at least 50% of the variance of whether we die early, get sick etc is our behavior, which is shaped by our psychological experience
What a telomere is and their role in aging
Keeping them long, and sturdy and stable throughout our lives
That in mid-life, shorter telomeres predict getting diseases of aging, earlier (cancer is an exception)
That telomere length can be epigenetic
The role of inflammation in our health
Inflamm-aging
An anti-inflammatory diet
Depression and telomere length
The challenge response
That not ruminating on a stressor can lead to a quicker psychological recovery which leads to a quicker physiological recovery
Linguistic Self Distancing = improved stress resilience
It's not about avoiding stress, it's about coping with stress in a way that doesn't amplify the stress in our mind in a prolonged way
Time distancing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I really like to focus on what we can do now today, and that's all we can control.
0:13.7	Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of
0:18.8	the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true,
0:26.0	and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
0:32.0	self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do, we think things that
0:38.7	hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking, our actions matter. It takes
0:45.2	conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how
0:51.0	other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
1:11.0	Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Alissa Eppel, a health psychologist
1:16.6	focusing on stress pathways. For the past 15 years, she has studied stress in the lab and in the
1:22.7	field using naturalistic stressors and associations within an early aging syndrome. Dr. Eppel
1:28.7	studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University and clinical and health psychology
1:34.8	at Yale University. She also completed an NIMH-funded postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF where she has
1:41.8	stayed on as faculty in the Department of Psychiatry. Her new book is The Telomere Effect,
1:47.6	a revolutionary approach to living younger, healthier, longer. Our sponsor on this episode is Health
1:53.8	IQ. To see if you qualify and get your free health quote, go to healthicute.com slash wolf or
2:01.2	mention the promo code wolf when you talk to a health IQ agent. And here's the interview with Dr.
2:07.2	Alissa Eppel. Hi Alissa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much Eric. Your book is called The
2:13.5	Telomere Effect, a revolutionary approach to living younger, healthier, and longer. And it's a
2:20.9	fascinating book to me because really a lot of it talks about how the choices we make emotionally
2:27.2	about our thought patterns and our lifestyle directly affects our biology in a very clear and
2:33.3	measurable way. So we'll jump into that in just a moment. But let's start like we normally do with
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Eric Zimmer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Eric Zimmer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.