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

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

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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

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