Practical Steps to Transform Stress into Strength

Stress has become a normal part of our lives. Join us for this conversation with Dr. Elissa Epel, author of the Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease, as she shares practical ways to navigate adversity to live a happier and healthier life. We can’t avoid stress but we can embrace it and transform it.

Elissa Epel Ph.D

Elissa Epel, PhD is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author of The Telomere Effect, and now 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 UCSF Aging Metabolism Emotions Center. She studies how psychosocial and behavioral factors, such as meditation and positive stress, can slow aging and focuses on climate wellness.

WEBSITE: ElissaEpel.com Social Media: Elissa Epel
#KriyaYoga #stress #stressresponse #meditiaton #selfreflection #relaxation

THE YOGA HOUR TEAM COMMENTS: Elissa Epel brings together decades of research on stress for us to live happier and healthier lives in her book, The Stress Prescription. Listeners will appreciate learning about the different types of stress, the four different mind states, and some practical tools to lessen chronic stress.  Her research even shows how effective meditation is reducing stress, as we know from our own practice through Kriya Yoga. I am confident this conversation will get listeners thinking more about how stress impacts their lives and the simple steps they can take to turn stress into strength. 

DR. TRUJILLO’S COMMENTS: I really appreciated the way that Dr. Epel integrates science along with helpful techniques to allow us to better deal with stress and live a happier and healthier life.  Her view that stress can be positive in that it prepares our mind and body for what we need to do is helpful.  I appreciated that she suggested questions to ask ourselves as a way of reducing stress when we have too many balls in the air.  I found Dr. Epel’s depictions of the four states of mind in response to stress can be useful: Red Mind (acute stress), Yellow Mind (baseline cognitive mode), Green Mind (rest), and Blue Mind (deep rest). She points out that in our chronically stressful world, we often don’t get beyond Red Mind and Yellow Mind.  This conversation can help us to change that.