Chronic Stress Ages You. Here’s How To De-Stress for Longevity. | Elissa Epel

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Sep 1, 2025

Elissa Epel, a professor at UCSF and expert in stress and aging, discusses how chronic stress can accelerate aging and how we can take control to reverse its effects. She shares insights on telomeres, emphasizing their importance for longevity and how lifestyle changes can protect them. Epel introduces practical techniques like short meditation and breathing exercises to manage stress, reframing it as a challenge to enhance resilience. She also highlights the role of deep rest and mindful eating in promoting cellular health.

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INSIGHT

Cells Listen To Your Life

Telomeres are protective caps on chromosomes that shorten with age and stress and can be rebuilt by the enzyme telomerase.
They act as sensitive sensors to psychological and physiological stress, linking lifestyle to cellular aging.

INSIGHT

Stress Speeds Cellular Aging

Chronic stress accelerates telomere shortening and damages mitochondria, reducing cellular repair and energy.
These aging processes interact and compound, causing earlier disease and fatigue.

ADVICE

Small Habits Protect Telomeres

Make small, consistent lifestyle changes like eating more fruits, Mediterranean-style foods, and omega-3s to protect telomeres.
Daily meditation and dietary shifts produce measurable improvements in inflammation and telomere length over time.

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How to reduce negative thoughts, get deep rest, and improve cellular health.

Elissa Epel, Ph.D., is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author of The Telomere Effect, and The Stress Prescription. 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.

In this episode we talk about:

What telomeres are
Why chronic stress accelerates our rate of aging – and how to reverse it
How we have way more control over aging than we think
Small, consistent lifestyle changes we can make to promote longer telomeres
The role of existential stress
Meditation retreats as a reset for the nervous system
How even 5-minutes of daily meditation can help
Breathing practices that increase vagal tone
Deep rest, and other states of mind that are crucial for cellular repair and growth
How to counteract the impacts of stress eating
How to reframe stress as a challenge
And much more

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