Essentials: Manage Stress & Build Resilience | Dr. Elissa Epel

It's really interesting.

It gets right to the heart of something that I spend a lot of time thinking about in the context of stress management and also just general thriving, which is that I think that about half of the messages that we get related to stress and mind-body interventions relate to adopting this forward center of mass.

This idea of when challenge arises, you smash into it, you go through it.

On the other hand, there are these stress mitigation techniques, both mental and physical, body-oriented, m- mind-oriented, et cetera, that are more of the sort that you described that are, um, they're not, um, being back on your heels, so to speak, like letting things bulldoze you, but are more of this, uh, receptive mode.

Do you think it's fair for us to adopt a sort of a general framework and model that, that perhaps people can adopt for themselves if they like, that of course it's not an either/or, but that having both of these in one's kit of tools could be valuable? Um, because one is less energetically demanding, but of course offers less opportunity for agency.

Mm-hmm.

Um, or at least apparently so.

That's the leaning back.

And then the, the other certainly gives an opportunity for agency, but we know from 100 years or more of psychology and psychiatric literature [laughs]-

Mm-hmm

... and from the emerging literature on stress mitigation, that it's work.

It's not something that is without a cost.

Mm-hmm.

It can get you far better results than it were you to just let stress bulldoze you-

Yeah

...

but that it's work, and so we have to emphasize that work, um, in very deliberate ways.

When we know it's productive, we should work, and when we know there's a brick wall, we should let go.

So I think of it, I like this forward mass idea.

I think of it as you muscle it and/or you release it, and we need both.

And so that letting go is a really important, wise, you know, discerning way to mitigate stress in the right situations in the right time.

And you know, we can't muscle through everything, right? So another way I like to think about it is just the waves of life.

Like, I mean, we are in an ocean, and we have small waves, we have big waves.

We're always gonna be hit by the next wave, and so it's this skillful surfing or navigating that we can do better when we realize when we control things, when we can't, when we can truly feel safe and have ease, versus when we need to kind of gently paddle.

For people that are listening to this and that, and want to start to adopt practices, do you think that spending some time creating a written or a spoken narrative is helpful? I mean, we hear this, but are there any data that support the use of journaling as a, as a tool?