— Inner Mastery, Outer Impact —
Master Your Inner Core with our 9-day Reflection Journey
Elissa Epel is a renowned health psychologist, and an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is Vice Chair of Psychology and directs the Aging Metabolism Emotions Center. She studies the environmental, psychological, behavioral, and social factors that impact cellular aging (such as telomeres, inflammation, and mitochondria), and how self-care practices such as meditation and positive stress can promote psychological and physiological thriving. She uses science as a north star, guiding us in the context of other sources of contemplative wisdom.
Elissa co-wrote the New York Times best-seller The Telomere Effect with Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn (translated into 30 languages) and recently also released her new book, The Stress Prescription. Her research has been featured in venues such as TEDMED, 60 minutes, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and science documentaries.
How is ancient wisdom influencing and advancing modern science to improve public health and happiness? How are scientists being able to tell that stress accelerates the aging process, cutting short the deeply purposeful lives we were meant to live? How can we bring more grace in not just our epic moments but in our everyday moments of stress as well?
This episode offers key insights on:
Greetings and a warm welcome back to Intersections, where our aspiration is to dissolve the boundaries. Dissolve the boundaries between science and spirituality, East and West, profit and purpose, inner and outer. Any of these confining silos that limit us from seeing life to its fullest possibilities and seeing our own potential to its fullest possibilities.
Today, I have in our midst Dr. Elissa Epel, who in so many ways epitomizes this quest for intersecting, of dissolving boundaries. And you will see why as we get into the conversation. She is a scientist but with a very deep spiritual core. She is someone who has been able to dissolve these boundaries between the present, the here, the now and the physical signals we are getting today and the future, the decades forward into a life, where our aging process for example might manifest.
Dr. Epel is the professor and vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California in San Francisco. She is an internationally renowned health psychologist. She has conducted pioneering research into how stress impacts our health, all the way down to the cellular level. Her award winning research has been featured in TEDMED, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many TV and science documentaries. Along with the Nobel Laureate, Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Epel is the co-author of a New York Times bestseller, The Telomere Effect, and her next book, The Stress Prescription, is scheduled for release this month.
Dr. Epel, it is a joy and a pleasure to have you in our midst. Welcome to Intersections!
It is so fun to be here in dialogue with you. I love the name of your podcast, because it just describes what we should be talking about these days instead of siloed information, really the full of a picture as we can get of reality and of how humans need to be guided at this moment in time.
I'm so glad you said that. I remember early in my life, going to school, everything was organized on the basis of courses, subjects or topics, and each of them was meant to be like a discrete and separate thing, and you had to wear that biology hat and the math hat like an hour later and the history hat. Then I look at history and how some of these times of tremendous creative ferment that have happened in the advancement of civilization in history, where you look at ancient times, the Indus Valley, ancient India, Egypt or Greece or the renaissance period. They've always been periods, where like-minded people have come together from various professions and disciplines and cross-fertilized ideas and aspirations and sought to manifest the same timeless, eternal truths in unique ways in their own dispositions and disciplines. But that cross ferment is so important, isn't it?
It is. It's where the magic happens.
You were just telling me about a visit you had to Dharamsala. Here you are, as this esteemed scientist doing path breaking work in science, and yet you spoke so fondly about a visit to this remote little community in India, where the Tibetans have come and settled and where there is one luminary. Perhaps you can talk about your conversations with him, His Holiness, for a moment.
It has been such a broadening experience to learn about ancient wisdom about our body, about our mind, and then put on a scientific lens and just ask, this sounds right. Can we look at this and measure this with our materialistic methods? If we have measures of these things and show and reveal how true this is from the Western scientific materialistic perspective. And so, that's kept a lot of us busy. I think what's remarkable is that the science of joy, happiness and the science of health, both validate some of the fundamental truths that the Dalai Lama has been talking about his whole life.
So for example, when we were in Dharamsala, we were there for a mind and life dialogue, and he's been in dialogue with scientists for 30 years. That knowledge base of science has been guided by his wisdom, by ancient wisdom from Indian sages like Shantideva, his own teacher. And so much of science has evolved to illuminate some of these principles. The first thing he said to us was, "The best medicine is inner peace, is inner comfort, not outer comfort." And that's what I've been studying for 25 years. That's where the Happiness Science is right now. It is understanding that our happiness, when it depends on external circumstances, comfort, getting to this next achievement, this next level, this acquisition, that is the lure of happiness, the illusion of happiness that doesn't manifest. And some of the unhappiest people are searching for happiness in those ways.
I love this fusion that is starting to happen between these two disciplines that until recently were seemingly at odds with each other. I share a reflection about that in my book, "Inner Mastery, Outer Impact" that both science and the domain of religion and spirituality are evolving and reforming themselves in some beautiful ways. Science is becoming so much more open to these deeper intangible things and striving to find a way to get material measurements out of them. Then, on the other hand, spirituality, to the extent it was in the past, represented more through religion, tended to take a dogma-based approach at times. And it's opening itself up to recognizing that actually, if you really look at the timeless roots, to me, the pure words of the prophets, they were always not as much about power and privilege lying at some lofty levels of institutions and religion, but really, the divine spark that lies within each of us. And the quest and the responsibility and the opportunities and possibilities there are for us to find our way to a more enlightened place from within, from being guided by our own inner voice. And to that end, opening itself up to more of a logical, fact based, experiential, experimental quest that people can take on, which as you perhaps know, is at the foundation of practices like yoga and Buddhism, and to me, really even the mystics across Christianity and Judaism and Islam.
Yes. Beautiful! And how you mentioned some of the universality over time and over history that humans come to that are from different cultures or religions or perspectives. But it's about the commonalities of being human and trying to transcend our survival animal tendencies to really be our best conscious selves. And that's another thing that we know and feel, which is we all have our lineage, and we come from our different histories with different epigenetics and we're shaped by the narratives as well as the transmitted biological influences. And yet above all of this, across these religions, we have these vast commonalities and universal truths about humans that transcends religion. And that's another thing that His Holiness has tried to remind us of so many times, which is this is not about religion. This is the religion of kindness that we need to embrace.
And you are along with the spiritual truth seeking, you're a scientist. You're a truth seeker from the scientific pathway. To that end, I want to highlight for our listeners one of the really beautiful, powerful breakthroughs that you and your research partners have arrived at. Usually, it's not easy to take things that have to do with the less tangible, the more ephemeral, the more metaphysical, and translate them into physiological evidence about what's happening to our bodies. And I feel like with the telomere discoveries that you've had, you're helping us get there. You are getting science to help inform and guide and show physiological glimpses to us of things that are otherwise coming from more subtler planes. I'm thrilled about that. I'm cheering on you and other scientists, too, in the years and decades and centuries ahead to keep helping to close the gap between the metaphysical and the physical.
Could you talk a little bit about your work on telomeres, perhaps in a basic kindergarten way and help our listeners understand the beauty and the breakthrough of what you've discovered there about what it takes to age gracefully?
It has been exciting to be able to be at the stage in science, where we can just take blood and learn so much about someone's biological age, mental health and physical health. And when we look inside the cell, there are many different aging mechanisms that we can study so easily now. And so as you mentioned, I've been studying telomeres, one mechanism of aging for about 18 years, and we know a lot about them now. And there are other aging mechanisms in the cell, like the epigenetics and the level of inflammatory reactivity of a cell, and the level of mitochondrial health in a cell. All of these mechanisms are one system, really. They're related to each other. They talk to each other. When one goes bad, it makes the other sick and the cell can age prematurely. And so, it is, they tend to tell the same story. The story is that, when we are exposed to chronic toxic stress, stress that goes on and on or traumatic stress, and we are imprinted with some post trauma symptoms, especially during childhood. These are related to accelerated aging according to our telomere length, according to our epigenetic clocks, and often our level of inflammation as well. Several years ago, we looked at the mitochondrial activity and found that chronic stress dampened those batteries in our cells. The energy that we depend on for everything, for stress and for every move we make. We're just so fundamentally wired and connected from the cell, from the molecular mechanisms happening in our cells all the way to our mind states.
The hard part has been, what can we measure about our consciousness and mind states, and so we do the best we can. Neuroscience has been very illuminating about brain pathways and brain structure, and then we can try to measure things like mind wandering. I've been measuring positive and negative mind wandering. How much are you present and engaged in what you're doing versus how much are you somewhere else, not paying attention to thoughts like I wish I was somewhere else. It's a form of suffering really. And that is related to shorter telomeres to have a lot of that negative mind wandering.
The meditation field has been really making a lot of progress. We will always be hindered by the fact that we can teach people meditation, but we don't know what is happening in their mind during it and how to measure states of consciousness and mindfulness. So we have our measures. They're limited. We do pretty well given what we can measure. But of course, we're missing aspects like what does it mean to be grounded and embody our emotions and to really be in touch with our emotional state, to read our emotions and our body. We know these are important. We know these are contemplative. This is training that we get from contemplative wisdom that helps us navigate stressors in life.
And I think some of the very interesting edges of how we can understand the mind body connection better are really going to understanding how much do we feel interconnectedness with the world versus in a small self-state when we're ruminating and anticipating the threat state, it's really a barrier to us seeing reality as it is and seeing how we're connected to our body, to each other and to the Earth. And just the concept of interoceptiveness has also become quite important in Mind-Body Medicine. The ability to really be aware of our body states and be able to report them, that's yet another skill that meditators are very good at. They are training in interoceptive awareness.
Yeah. I'm trying to unpack what you've just shared. It seems from what you're saying, as we get to higher levels of attunement and awareness, it starts to help us get more harmonized and in touch, first with our own bodies as perhaps the initial first home that our spirit is settled into. And then from there in our communities and the world at large at some level, and perhaps at some point, it will also expand to a place where we recognize that this is the way through which we get our planet a little bit more harmonized and attuned with the rest of the universe. Who knows what that relationship is like?
Yes, exactly. How did we get here, where we have created a sick planetary health. It's the opposite of what we're talking about, the threat state that makes us view in-group, out-group, be competitive and think that we need to acquire more and more from the Earth, the extraction that we've done on the Earth. So this is why so many of these universal truths point us to compassion, to interconnection. We so easily lose that when we are stressed out or when we're in a stressed state. And we can't really see that reality that's not material, that's not so visible and measurable. That's partly why I wrote "The Stress Prescription," because most people are much more stressed out on a daily basis than they need to be. That can really impair our ability to feel connection to our body and to other people. Just even acknowledging how serious stress is for impairing our lives, why would we want to live every day in a rush and focusing on threats which blind us to all of the beauty and miracles in life.
I want to go into stress at a broader level and immediately applicable level for any or all of us as you've so beautifully laid out a seven day kind of prescription to more, as you call it, joy and ease in your book, "The Stress Prescription." Let's get there in 5 minutes.
Before we get there, just to close out on this topic of the telomere research and aging, one of the things I find very valuable there for us to reflect on regardless of the age we're at today, is that we're all going to face that moment and it is so easy to just deflect that kind of thinking or think that that's a different group of people. I sometimes use this analogy with my students. I say, "Imagine if I was a travel agent. I came to you and I said, hey, you know, Covid is wrapping up, now you can travel again. There's this amazing Disney like amusement park that I can send you to. Let me tell you what you're going to get there if you are willing to go there. You start there and then this amazing ride will come. After that, you can have this beautiful walk. Then there will be this parade, and they'll say, Oh, wow! Really? Cool. And then there will be this beautiful bountiful lunch, and then in the last hour, things will happen, and then you leave." And then they might ask me, "Okay, what things will happen?" I say, "No, no, we don't want to talk about it. Let's not talk about the last hour." They say, "No, I want to hear about the last hour." And what if I say, "Oh, in the last hour, you'll lose a lot of people in your friend circle who were there with you and it might be a struggle. There might be a lot of pain, and so you will leave with just a lot of pain.
Who would want to go on that ride? All of us would say, forget the rest of the joy, I don't want to end with an hour of torture.
If we can look ahead and think about the arc of the whole day for an amusement park day, why don't we do that for our own lives and say, "Why would I want to end up in the last decade of my life really struggling with things like my mental health, my physical health, my incapacity to handle the fact that I've had to walk away from positions of power and privilege and visible glory and all of that." I have to gracefully find my way to let the light within me finally quieten down and exit from here to wherever it is that I might end up next.
Why don't we pay attention to that as much? So, I love that about your earlier work. I know that you have broadened it to really think about this in a much more immediate context for us. But that's important too, isn't it? For us to be planful and anticipating? That's the whole Buddha story. The 3 great signs. Prince Siddharth, where he was a prince doing really well, cruising through life, beloved wife and son and loving parents and power ahead of him. Then he saw old age, disease and death. Just seeing that in others, he anticipated, "Oh, wow! That's going to come to me, too at some point. I didn't realize that. Well, if it is, then I need to find an answer to making that process be something that is joyful and something I can embrace and accept and perhaps even move on from."
Yes. That part of the answer is reminding ourselves on a daily basis, disease, aging and death are real. They are inevitable. They can be part of my day. The idea that living with the reality of death can help us live a deeper life. It is something that we do not practice here. Death is the most uncomfortable concept to imagine, to remind ourselves of death. And yet, that is where the light is shining, on how we should live right now.
Do you use death practices and how often do you think of the impermanence of this life with this body?
Are you asking me, Elissa?
Yes. It is not natural. I'm asking you because it would need to be a conscious effort that you have gone there and incorporated that as part of a mind habit or a view.
Yeah. You know, I was very young when I got very fascinated by death. India is a culture where it's a little bit more sort of comfortable, in the way we basically deal with the process of cremation. For example, it's a very direct experience, very visceral experience. I lost my father a few years ago, and I remember that moment where we were cremating his body and early the next morning, you go to the cremation ground as members of the family in particular, because it still has a little bit of patriarchal kind of structures in it, the sons go. So I went. I was picking up his ashes and there were even some remnants of bones that hadn't fully burnt out. Then you put them in a casket and then you hold that and you take that to a holy river in India and surrender it there so that the remains of his body are getting taken away by the spiritual waters. But, when I was picking up those ashes and finding these little bones, I was being guided to doing that because I hadn't done that as much in the past with any other loved one. Even with all the grief and the sense of loss, which is there for my father's embodied being that had now gone and his spirit had moved on, there was a smile on my face like, "Hitendra, do you realize, how seriously we all take this body and how seriously we all identify the individual with the body? You have done it for your whole life. You identified your father's spirit with this body, and you realize how in an instant it can be taken away. Don't you feel that your father hasn't disappeared? There is no way that force, that power, that grace could have just disappeared in an instance. That just cannot be a law of nature. But yes, the body can disappear in an instant. It has happened here and it's trying to teach you."
Those were the thoughts that were going through my mind at that moment. It was a beautiful lesson for me just to be reminded of activating one's beliefs. I've always had these beliefs of the transference of the spirit over time and the impermanence of the body. But having to experience that is a powerful lesson. I've actually written about it. The power of using death as a teacher, as a way to constantly be reminded about looking for the timeless truths rather than the ephemeral.
Wow! That's such a beautiful example of seeing his bones and that Earth material. Is this my father? That's another way that I use to remind myself, I mean, these bones are part of Earth. They're not Elissa Epel, the construct of walking around with this body and this identity. This is one view, one mindset, one way. Then if we can re-shift our lens and realize, "Wow, I get to be this person with this body, that is of the Earth, has these lineages that will go on and on through Earth and Earth material. But really, it's all about the preciousness of getting to walk the Earth in a body." The body has this expiration date, and so it helps us just refocus on today. That's all we're certain of. The future is always uncertain. The volatile uncertainty we have now with the way the world is, is even stronger. I think just being now in my second half of life and having seen more death and sickness, having people I love die early, tragically, suddenly commit suicide, dealing with mental illness, all of that just is such phenomenal reminders to appreciate being able to live right now and being able to live now when the Earth needs such love, purpose, compassion in our own ways. Whatever we can do in this sphere that we can influence, the bubble that we live in locally, but now we're so connected, it's quite mind blowing to me.
Wow! That is so inspiring. You reminded me of another metaphor that I find very helpful on this front. That's really this Shakespearean kind of thought about all the world's a stage, and all men and women are merely players, as he says. They have their exits and their entrances and all of that.
The other day, I was just walking here in Manhattan, and I was just trying to visualize that for myself, that this body, this role, this name Hitendra and all of that is an identity I've taken on to play a certain role at this point in the stage, in the arena of the Earth and the planet. I meant to do my best to play a good role. Then to your point, that you said so thoughtfully, the body has an expiration date. And so, this role has an expiration date.
Yes. We all do. It's still hard to talk about, and it does help us focus on living our purpose each day. The telomere story points to this, too. So as you were saying, the telomeres are, in a sense, a crude little clock of projection of how many times can these immune cells keep dividing? And that tells us a little bit about the other cells across the body that are correlated. We can get a glimpse if we care to. What we've learned from the studies, is that we know the health behaviors, what's good for the heart, what's good for the brain is good for the telomeres. Again, it's just an example of these forces of health, of feeling safe, of keeping down the stress response, the inflammation, the cortisol, the oxidative stress. These are the common paths to staying well. When it goes awry, when we have toxic health behaviors or especially toxic stress, which shapes our health behaviors, we're creating this pro-aging environment. Therefore, the telomeres are a very crude indicator of how soon people will leave the healthspan and enter the disease and how soon they'll die. But at an individual level, it's not so helpful. They're not very accurately measured and predictive. I haven't measured mine, but I do know I've had a lot of wear and tear, trauma, chronic stress and situations I can't control. It really helps me focus on the challenge of living your best life despite sadness, despite suffering, despite having situations that you can't possibly change, that cause you sadness.
How do we live with that? All of the Buddhist wisdom has helped me so much. It really comes down to healthspan and purpose on a daily basis, not focusing on longevity. Longevity is beautiful and it can come with taking care of extending our body's expiration date. The beauty of focusing now in the day is that what we do each day really does matter to the body and we measure that in different ways and it's exciting to see how things like mitochondria enzymes respond to positive and negative mood, at least in our cross-sectional studies. We see that telomerase responds to stress as well. That's an enzyme that can change within minutes. Telomerase is an enzyme that protects telomeres. So there are all sorts of systems in our body besides the stress response that show us how each day we're nudging our cellular well-being with our lifestyle, with our mind. And that is great because we have more control than we think. And yet, we can get so easily focused on how many years we could live and wanting longevity for this particular body.
The anti-aging field has really become a little bit bifurcated, where much of the field, the money making part, is focused on how can I extend my longevity? Can I live to 150? The other half is focused on, can we reduce suffering and improve the health of everyone, the public health aspect of it? And so, I'm somewhere in the middle where I study the individual on how we can slow aging, but really focusing on healthspan, quality, purpose.
It reminds me of this quote from Viktor Frankl. I don't know if you're familiar with him, man's search for meaning, he is a Holocaust survivor, great psychotherapist and logotherapist. He said, "We are creating a world where we all have means to live, but we don't necessarily have meaning to live for."
One thing I like to do is study people from history who have left a luminous mark in some regard, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt. One thing that struck me at some point in studying them which really changed my whole attitude towards life in some ways is that, I used to think that the ideal life is a long life and one where you work really hard and then at some point you earn the right to retire, to play golf, to rest on our laurels, to bask in the glory of what it is that you've done. I guess the first transformation I went through is that I read this book on Michelangelo. I was in Florence after I got inspired by reading this book on Michelangelo, and I saw how he kept striving to do his life's best work up until his late 80s or early 90s. He'd outlived around 14 popes. And he still has these unfinished works of sculpture that he left behind. Because for him, he found his passion and after that, why would he not want to do that till his dying breath? He just wanted to constantly do that.
So that was 'aha' for me. I want to find that kind of purpose in life, where I would want to do it in the best way I can until my dying breath. The next evolution of that, which has come about is, I saw it with people like Martin Luther King, Lincoln and Gandhi. They were developing a lot of enemies with the kind of positions they were taking for the quests they were going after. They were constantly at threat like somebody might assassinate them. Gandhi was of course, for example, asked, "How do you feel about the fact that you could be assassinated for your views and thoughts and all that?" He said, "I'm not afraid at all because I know that basically at any point where the creative power out there feels that whatever it is that he or she wanted from me, when that work is done, then they'll pull me away. Why should I be here for one more moment after whatever service that I had to perform is done."
If you think about it, all 3 of these people, Martin Luther King, Lincoln and Gandhi, achieved a certain sort of milestone. Of course, it wasn't the complete ideal, perfect society that they wanted to create. But they achieved a certain milestone. Lincoln had his moment with the Civil War coming to an end, The Union Army arriving at that victory. The Congress was able to pass a constitutional amendment to the right to abolish slavery. Gandhi saw India through to a peaceful resolution of his independence struggle. There was all this warring and bloodshed going on. Then Martin Luther King had achieved some phase of that struggle for civil liberties. All three of them got nipped in the bud relatively prematurely. They got taken away by assassinations. But their lives were beautiful.
We look back at their lives and we celebrate their lives. They didn't have to necessarily live till 95 or 100 to be able to have had a good life. They had a beautiful life.
It's a very dramatic example. Impact and purpose versus expiration date. That's a beautiful example.
Yeah. Let's come now to more about "The Stress Prescription." One of the things I really like about your ideas and thoughts on this topic Elissa, is that you highlighted how stress researchers are often focused on big stressful events, but then you said, "It may be far more telling to focus on how relaxed or vigilant one is under normal circumstances at baseline, to see how we are holding on to stress in our minds."
Yes, this is a point that just fascinates me. It's a recent development in the stress field to become aware that it's not necessarily the most revealing and interesting thing to see how stressed someone gets in the middle of a stressor, a life event or a lab stress? We really focus on these controlled situations and we love to stress people out and see how high their cortisol is, their nervous system, how quickly they recover. We have learned a lot and that is interesting to see. We know a healthy response is a big stress response and a quick recovery. That's youthful. That's a picture of resilience. But, what happens when we think we're relaxed? What's happening right now in the bodies of all of us? What happens to our stress level when nothing is happening? That's the window into what we're carrying into unconscious stress, into our stress baseline.
For example, my stress baseline has been very high. I would go through years of not managing the day so that it has periods of ease and of true present-minded living, because I view time as a commodity. I still do. I try not to. This is a conscious effort to change my time use, but filling time so intensely to get more done, so many discoveries to make, so many roles we want to fill in life. It's very easy to be rushed and overdo it, and then everything is just a higher baseline of stress. We measure daily stress in people. It's one of the most common complaints I get. Too much to do. I'm rushing, I'm late. All of that is just fabricated. We create our day and our schedule mostly when we have control over our job.
We really want to know how much stress are you holding right now when you don't have demands? How clenched are you? How much tension do you have in your body? And what's that about? Let's name it. Let's ask, is there something you're aware of, you are worrying about? Or, often if this is more pervasive uncertainty stress of the future? We all have that. As a human mind, we don't like uncertainty. We want control. That is something that we can actually name and recognize and then actually release some of that unconscious tensing up we have about the unknown future.
That's a practice, that's a meditation, that's a check-in we can do several times a day and it doesn't take long to just ask, "What am I expecting right now? Can I actually breathe slower? Can I release what I'm carrying?"
I love that. I'm going to tie it to some ideas that I've been inviting our MBA students at Columbia and executives that we teach at Mentora Institute to consider. The language they're drawn to is around leadership. I have sought to bring a fusion between leadership and spirituality. The way I do that is to redefine what it means to be a leader as opposed to it being an outer dispensation, it becomes an inner choice. It's about taking on any cause or any moments in your life, any meeting, any project, any responsibility, any role, and seeing it through the lens of some common shared purpose that you're seeking to manifest between you and another. The common shared purpose being human connection, joy sharing and memory building for the future. Or, it could be a moment of parenting, or it could be a big speech you're giving at work or a hard conversation you have to have with a subordinate. There is a common purpose of what you're trying to get to, and then can you bring out your best and can you help the other person bring out their best? You take some ownership also of doing your best to bring out their best. That's great leadership, having a common purpose and seeking to bring out the best in you and the best in others.
Then I say it to your point that it's not just merely about trying to focus on these leadership moments, because when you do this, then life becomes leadership. Then essentially what you're trying to do is actually, put more leadership into every moment. That's what I'm hearing from you. It's not these epic moments of stress, but these everyday moments, and how much grace are we bringing to these everyday moments. Now that I think about it, I feel like that's the samurai kind of discipline, which is, you want to be doing amazing magical things in these battlefields of life, but the point is that unless in the background, backstage and moment by moment aspects of your day, you're doing things to constantly hone that craft and sharpen that sword, when the battles come, you're really not fully prepared for it.
I love that! How much grace can we bring to the moment? The point really is about this dynamic balance of leading, being on the battlefield. Recovery, restoration and rejuvenation. Our bodies and our minds need that balance of both positive stress and really letting go. That is a key to dealing with really difficult challenges. We need both. It's not all muscle. It's partly seeing what we don't control and being able to breathe into that and being able to accept that.
Something that came to mind when we were talking about leadership and the way you defined it is the focus on the common purpose, the connection, working together, heart connection. That's very beautiful. There's also a maybe less glamorous leadership model that I'm sure you have also analyzed. Again, it's a bit of that competitive acquisition model of using people and time as a commodity. I love retreat centers. That is when I can really get in touch with what we were talking about, really understanding and seeing reality as it is and reflecting on life and stepping back from the routine life.
When I was young, I grew up in Carmel, which is near Big Sur and near Iselin, and I was in the hot spring tub with a bunch of adults who worked there for years and years. They shared with me in their conversations something I never forgot, which was that so much of the time they're trying to help someone. They're people of means, very wealthy people who have spent their life acquiring wealth with complete adrenaline and competition focus. These are CEO level people leading large companies, and they come toward the end of life with the worn out body, with conditions and their goal is to restore. Their goal is to regain their health because they have all the money they could hope for and the sadness of seeing that over and over and wanting to say to them, you didn't get the message early. You missed the boat. You didn't have those sacred moments in every day of spaciousness, of purposeness, of ease. How can you regain that?
I have a bit of a more optimistic view, which is even in late life, everyday matters. Health is so iterative that we can always make improvements. But it did just strike me of that pattern of the loss to regain with the insight that came too late.
Wow! That is so powerful. I agree with you. I think we all have to embrace that paradox, which is, on the one hand, to do that fast forwarding and visualize and look at those periods of a life and get motivated and drawn to wanting to in a sense to recalibrate the present moment in a way that will allow us to create a pathway towards a much more healthier outcome at that stage. And yet, on the other hand, regardless of where you are and what stage you are, be in a position to make peace with the past and just seek to maximize the possibilities of the moment because the human spirit has so much capacity to renew itself. Regardless of what pathway you've had in life, there is at least the meaning and the possibilities left for what you're going to manifest.
I'll give you an example. I was very blessed to see when I was growing up, a deep spiritual quest that my father and my mother took on. It had a big influence on my own life. At the same time, my father came from a little bit of a command and control kind of a culture, both in the patriarchal system. I remember when we would go and sit at the dining table, if anybody was sitting there on the one end of it, he would say, "You need to get up from there. That's the head of the family. That's my chair." There was that part to him. And yet, he was very sweet, very loving. We had a beautiful unfoldment over the course of our time together in our relationship. At the same time, he also was in the Indian Police. Again, command and control was kind of the structure that he was used to. Therefore, he was used to exercising power as a way to help manifest whatever good purpose he wanted to in a given moment. As he was aging and retired, he started to realize that approach just wasn't working as well, because people were not willing to at this point, really just accept and agree because it's coming from a force of authority. He had to build a new muscle. The new muscle, a much more empathetic engagement and finding a way to tell the story in a way that actually appeals to the other person's sensibilities and values. Meet them where they are and sweetly and gently draw things out of his daughter or of me, etc. This was all happening as his 70s and early 80s were unfolding.
I remember there was this one beautiful moment where one of the things my mother had always wanted from him is more of a sense of ornamentation in life. For her, gifts, special days like birthdays and anniversaries mattered a lot. He had come from a very basic culture growing up in an underprivileged community, a small village. I don't even really know what my grandfather's vocation was, but it was very humble. There was this one time, after all these years of never really engaging with that, he calls her and he wishes her a warm and happy birthday, hugs her and gives her a beautiful, lavish gift. She was in tears about that. Then he died 6 days later because that was his last few days on Earth, which we were not aware of. He was actually in pretty good health. He was in his mid-80s, though, when that happened. It was all very beautiful in many regards.
I use that story to tell myself that a heart is always expanding, even until its last beat.
Beautiful! And that's what you do. You help people see that there's an unlimited path of growth that you don't just finish a degree and then you have knowledge, expertise and that's it, that you're equipped for life.
You say something really beautiful in your book. It reminds me of some things that I've heard from our mutual dear friend, Dr. Dan Siegel as well about the plane of possibility. If I were to quote you, you say, "The future we are entering requires all our resources to survive and to thrive together. When we can come to a place of resilience and equanimity, we more fully enter an important state called the plane of possibility that we can break out of our personal thinking habits, understand our interconnectedness, and see new possibilities." Can you talk about that a little bit?
Thank you for bringing out that quote. That's exactly what I mean when I said that daily stresses are really impairing our lives collectively. If we can lift the dark veil of daily stress, particularly threat stress, that's where we can live, where we can see more clearly our true purpose and that miracle of getting to have this life with each fresh day so that we can actually be really living our purpose in a way that is manifested for us with what is in front of us. Maybe that's that conversation and connection and how we're influencing others with ripples of love, compassion, deep listening, advice and support. There are so many ways we have influence.
I love Dan Siegel's model of the plane of possibility, because we all have this possibility of living that deeper life and purpose. But if we're in a state of stress, we don't see it and so we don't actually step into that plane and take the opportunities that are in front of us. There is this tremendous openness and open field that is in front of all of us that I really hope that I can step into more in my daily life. My goal in "The Stress Prescription" is just simple daily practices, very short, but that nudge us into that state toward the plane of possibility, towards seeing reality as it is with the sadnesses that we have, with the pain and suffering, but equally or more so with the beauty of being alive, of our compassionate nature as humans. Seeing all of that in front of us, it's so easy to forget that and not see it. Of course, the news and the media point us toward the threat-stressed mind, the dark veil, the waiting for the next thing to happen and wanting to be vigilant and prepared.
I love this thing. What you're saying now is, this notion of mastering stress is not just a critical requirement to survive, but really an enabler of thriving. This plane of possibility to me, is really about maximizing the gain, not just minimizing the pain in some ways.
I want to share a quick little story with you. Over the last several weeks, I have been arriving at the early stages of a breakthrough really of sorts, where I've sought to be teaching leadership to my executives and to our students. The challenge there ultimately ends up being the last mile. You can give people all these tools, ideas and inspiration in a classroom, but then you're like a Broadway performer, you're giving them the high, but then they're leaving and two years later, it just becomes a fond memory. How do you actually help them get to embody and create habits and ultimately transform themselves in lasting ways? That has been a challenge that I've been grappling with over the last few years, and I ultimately built this digital tool. This time around, I felt confident and comfortable in it and said, "Okay, let's take a plunge, let's take some risks and it actually required my students as part of the grading for the class, that they're going to have to just use this tool and they're going to have to use it 8 or 10 times." What the tool does is, it invites them to take the things they've learned and then plan how they're going to engage in critical events in their life.
Let's say, there's a negotiation coming up with a business partner or some set of interviews they are going to do or some presentation they have to do or something. You pick one of those events, you set a clear goal for it that I want to go there and inspire these people or handle this conflict better or build more trust with this individual or be able to have a candid conversation about something which is a sensitive matter. Just typical things that do happen in the workplace and in life. So they pick a goal from a pull down menu, and then we recommend to them 2 or 3 actions they could perform, like appreciate the person before you start the conversation or share a personal story from your side or empathize before you actually engage in your agenda or fuse opposites. Find something true in what they're saying and something true in what you're saying, etc. We have a bunch of these things in our leadership toolkit. They get guidance on 2 or 3 of these and then they can prepare these. They're also given an invitation if they want to set like 15 minutes of time on the calendar before the meeting as a pause, they can do a little bit of guided meditation during those 15 minutes on those very actions that they can visualize that they're going to use in that meeting. They can set an affirmation and intention for the meeting. That's it. Then they go in and do the meeting, and after that they just review and reflect for 5 minutes how it went.
This sounds absolutely transformational.
That's what I wanted to share with you. We are literally at that threshold where I've gotten my first data set of about 400 or 500 of these data points across these students, about 8 to 10 events across about 40, 50 of them. And as I'm looking through it and I'm seeing their term papers at the end with their reflections, it's blowing my mind. They are saying, "Oh, wow! I never expected it. I never thought that this could do it for me. But I ended up having this breakthrough at the meeting. I never thought that I should actually bring kindness into this conversation, but I did, and this person opened up. I achieved just so much more than I would have otherwise and etc."
I'm seeing all of this happen. I wanted to share this with you because I think it perfectly plays to almost empirical evidence in support of this idea of the plane of possibilities.
The fact that while it's true that it's going to take years for us to fully re-grove our brains to get to His Holiness like state, but the point is, we actually have a little bit of that holiness within us today, and we use it from time to time in our special moments with friends or a loved colleague. But then we lose it from time to time in our other travails through life, where we don't realize that we actually bring some kindness into that and bring some understanding to that. When we open ourselves up to that, we pause and do it, magical breakthroughs can happen in the moment.
It's a very emerging level of ideas and thoughts I'm getting.
I'm just blown away by this idea. You are operationalizing and concretizing the ability to co-create and have this emergent work between people. I've got to try this. Is this a platform other people can try yet?
Literally, this is so new. My team is analyzing the data right now, so give me another couple of weeks.
I will come back to you. I do want to mention how we live in the plane of possibility. It's partly the path to having this social tipping point that you were implying of the evolution of our consciousness and how we're ever going to change as a larger group. I really think that because of how our brain works, we need coaching in the moment like that. The idea that as we're doing our most purposeful work, we can bring all of those qualities into the interaction is exactly on the money. That's just on the bull's eye. I'm so excited to hear about that. Dan Siegel did just publish "Intra-Connected" which really is fleshing out the whole paradigm that we've been talking about, that we can see these connections and the intersections that are really there. So it's quite a case for this paradigm shift.
We need to strive to find ways to combine forces. Come together and bring our best gifts and ideas and create some shared platforms through which we can really work on scaling some of this. I'm inspired by that. Thank you for tuning into the possibilities that I'm seeing also in making more practical and accessible ideas.
Well, I've ended up here because this is what the body is telling us. All of the health literature points to these aspects of emotional well-being, which includes spirituality, purpose, compassion, life satisfaction, quality social connections, all of these joys in life are what is promoting our body's ability to stay well. They're just so connected. The world is going to survive the planet, but these are the same qualities that drive positive health that we need to really save our species and save planetary health. All arrows are pointing in one direction.
Very powerfully put. As we get closer to the end of our time together on this podcast, I want to highlight for our listeners the power and prescriptive potential of your book, "The Stress Prescription" and for those of you who are interested in more the whole anti-aging kind of work and research as well, then there is the more classic first contribution from Elissa and your popularization of science, which is the telomere effect. "The Stress Prescription" has so much simplicity, structure, practical tools, immediately applicable ideas around the infusion of greater joy, the taming of uncertainty, taking over a greater sense of agency within your sphere of influence. There are so many elements here which really deeply resonate with my quest for searching the timeless truths and success principles for life and leadership. I would encourage any or all of us to look into this for yourselves.
Kudos to you, Elissa for continuing to do profound and beautiful science, but also bringing it out in a very codified, practical, engaging and storytelling rich form that you have.
Thank you so much. I did finally develop a website, just put it up and it does have what the two books and retreats have, but it also has updated resources, favorite timeless books and retreat centers, etc.
Wonderful. If you want to just highlight any other ways that they can access your information.
What I meant was not my books. I do have the two books on there, but I also have resources from my teacher, who I've learned from.
Wonderful! As we start closing this out, I'd love to turn the conversation a little bit more into your personal journey. By the way, I noticed that you spend time at Woods Hole. When I was studying at MIT, there was a friend of mine who was also at MIT. There was this Woods Hole Institute, which is an MIT and Woods Hole collaboration. He used to work there. So I've made many trips there and have fond memories of Woods Hole.
Can you share with us just some insight into what were one or two of the most formative influences in your life that ultimately when you look back and connect the dots, have led you to pursue this path of deep engagement with some of the most critical questions in humanity, a desire to serve, support and advance human well-being? And yet, to do that from a place of deep scientific rigor and also an embrace of the spiritual traditions. What were those formative forces that have helped you here?
It is most likely the fusion of the environments I was exposed to as a child. My mother was a therapist who was deeply immersed in the human potential movement. So just being surrounded by books from big thinkers about how we have so much unrealized potential that we can work toward and step into. Then my father's influence brought us every summer to Woods Hole. He was a biology professor. Woods Hole is a marine biology center of the world. Every summer I would be in the classroom learning about organisms and how they survive and looking under the microscope at marine organisms and the miracles of all of those different species and their survival. I think really the fusion of this kind of fascination with how the mind works, the potential of the mind and how it is intricately connected to our own biological mechanisms that have evolved over time to be so robust. We'll never stop learning about the ways that our cells are infinitely adaptable.
How we age is just fascinating to me. It has always been a question of both curiosity about the mind body connection as well as delight and interest in how my own mind body connection works. I remember discovering different exercises when I was young. My mother was a big time meditator, and so she always shared practices with us. My experience of energy or Chi in the body, particularly from yoga and movement meditation, it's very salient to me from a young age of discovering, "Wow! There's power here, there's mystery here in the body," that made me very curious. So I headed off to medical school and I thought that was my path. I just got so entranced by understanding healing and cases across cultures of dramatic healing and the power of beliefs that I took a turn and went into what was a new field back then called Health Psychology.
You have shared with us a little capsule of the steps and pieces that brought you to the present moment in this life. My hypothesis, since we are having a fairly open hearted dialogue, is that there are prior chapters to this. You are an old soul and who knows what you've done in my kind of frame of thinking in past lives that led you to be drawn to that environment and those parents and that capacity in this life to very quickly activate those impulses that are probably very deeply rooted in you to want to do this kind of work. That's beautiful!
Let's end our conversation today. I want to express collectively, on behalf of my listeners and myself, a debt of gratitude to your parents for having been who they are and for having raised you in the way they have that is now manifesting into so much support and help for so many in the world.
Thank you so much. Well, my main hat is humility about what we can and can't know. I will say, I love your comment and I have no judgment, no opinion, no insight, except for the mystery of understanding our existence, our transmission across deep time, and just humility. I don't have answers, but I love to know that all of these are possibilities.
That's a beautiful response. In fact, in my book, I talk about how I have been benefited by the contrarian belief that we only live once. Because sometimes when you think in reincarnation terms, you can get a little lazy to say, "I've always got my next life to reform myself." And then when you think about it, "No, I only have this life as Hitendra in the year 2022, I only have this moment, this moment will not come. Maybe another life will come, but not this moment." So actually putting on that more finite frame can actually be an activator of a greater sense of just deference and appreciation for maximizing the possibilities of the moment.
You just said something that I try to hold on to, which is so undeniably true that it helps us with our understanding of reality and impermanence, which is that this moment will never come again. This day is absolutely unique and it will be gone. So, there's the plane of possibilities right in front of us.
It's so beautiful. I wanted to end by inviting you to take one of the crown jewels in your book, "The Stress Prescription" which is your focus on helping us also think in the right way in our relationship with joy. You share the story about this beautiful man, Brian, who you've known, who, I think speaks to that very thing that you talked about, about sanctifying the moment, sanctifying the day. I let you choose which aspect of your thinking and experiencing around this quest for joy you'd want to perhaps leave as a final parting gift for our audience, and then they can go back to your book to do more of the reading of this.
One insight that you can share as to how to think in the right way in your relationship with the pursuit of joy for any of us.
I really resonate to the idea that joy and suffering are inextricably intertwined. For me, I don't feel much predominance of high arousal joy states that might be idealized but aren't really realistic, but more so the deep content of doing purposeful work with others. That common goal that you were talking about is a type of joyous energy that really I find rejuvenates me and helps put stress in perspective. And so I most definitely have situations that I can never change, that bring me sorrow, sadness. And that actually is something that helps me refocus on what I do have, gratitude. Gratitude as an antidote to stress, the appreciation of the beauty and love that is there and really the privilege in life of getting to work on something that you care about so much. So many people don't get to choose their daily work that way. So I really appreciate being able to work with people on issues that I care about so much and I get so much joy from that.
Thank you for that, Elissa. I think that's a beautiful message for us to close out our fleeting finite, and yet so rich time together. Wishing you all the best in the work and the journey that you're on, both personally and professionally. I know much good is yet to emerge from all of that for so many of us, and we are much looking forward to the continuing trajectory of what you're doing in this very pivotal moment in history.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much. This was a very different conversation. I appreciate you and what you're bringing together so much.
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