The secret to coping with stress - how to protect your brain and body, and feel calmer now | Prof Carmine Pariante

Growing up, many of us were taught to just stay calm and carry on - as if stress was all in the mind, with no real effect on the body. But chronic stress can change your brain, raise your risk of heart disease, and even shorten your life. In this episode, we ask: what happens when a stress response built to last minutes never switches off? Today, Professor Carmine Pariante, one of the world's leading researchers on stress, helps us understand what’s happening in your body during a stressful moment and why chronic stress disrupts sleep, appetite, and energy levels. Carmine also explains how worried you should be about cortisol, and whether "cortisol face" and "cortisol belly" are backed by evidence. By the end, you’ll understand why stress can be so powerful, when it becomes harmful, and have some evidence-based ways to manage it. Next time you reach for wine, your phone, or something sweet after a hard day, ask yourself: is this helping you cope, or helping you avoid how you feel? 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Build healthy habits. Download the ZOE app today and start your trial for just £2.30 for your first week. 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Intro 01:10 Should you be aiming for zero stress? 06:13 Inside your fight-or-flight response 11:19 Can stress actually cause a heart attack? 13:15 Why your stress response won't switch off 15:33 Why stress eating isn't a willpower problem 17:15 Why emotional stress feels physical 21:00 The earliest sign of chronic stress 22:05 There's no such thing as "it's all in your head" 25:15 Stress causes the same inflammation as a cold 29:54 The blunt truth about chronic stress 31:07 How stress clogs your arteries 32:55 Why chronic stress can steal your joy 35:10 What a brain scan reveals about chronic stress 37:07 Is "cortisol face" actually real? 38:49 Does the viral cortisol cocktail actually work? 41:20 Why control is the key to coping with stress 42:46 How singing for one hour lowered cortisol 45:15 Why exercise is such powerful stress relief 47:57 Foods with the strongest evidence against stress 49:45 Why alcohol doesn't actually relieve stress 50:58 Is your phone making your stress worse? 54:04 The first thing to do when stress overwhelms you 56:06 Why modern life never switches your stress off 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Mentioned in today's episode Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity, The American Journal of Psychiatry (2025) Implementing a group singing intervention for depression, Frontiers in Medicine (2024) The Relationship between Diet and the Occurrence of Depressive Symptoms, Nutrients (2023) Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Zoe, Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  The wind cuts across an ancient tundra. Somewhere in the distance, a predator creeps ever nearer. An ancient human freezes, heart hammering, muscles tightening, senses sharpening. In the next few seconds, that surge of stress could mean the difference between life and death.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Hundreds of thousands of years later, the predator has changed. Now it's an overflowing inbox, a mortgage payment, a sleepless night, a meeting you're already late for. Not life and death, and yet the feeling can be the same as hearing that saber-toothed tiger's footsteps coming nearer. This powerful stress response kept us safe for thousands of years. Now it's making millions of us sick and even shortening our lives. Why does stress grip us so powerfully? Why does our body react to modern pressures as if we're still fighting for survival? What can we do to prevent this?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  In this episode, we're joined by Professor Carmina Pariante, one of the world's leading researchers on stress and how it affects inflammation in our brain. Together, we'll explore what happens inside the brain and body when stress strikes, why cortisol has become the internet's favourite hormone, and whether social media posts about cortisol, face and belly have any basis in science. We'll also tackle some of the biggest questions surrounding stress today. What does the latest research tell us about how it can affect us? Can it really make you feel tired and depressed, contribute to heart disease and chronic pain, even increase the risk of dementia? And perhaps most importantly, if stress is woven so deeply into modern life, what can we actually do about it?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Carmina, is stress always a bad thing?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Can enough mental stress damage my physical health?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Is cortisol something we should always be trying to lower?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Are there any evidence-based ways to reduce your stress levels?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Are stress and anxiety the same thing?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Can stress increase the levels of inflammation throughout your body?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  And finally, what's one thing that most people get wrong about stress?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Guilt. They feel guilt about it, rather than understanding that it's coming from outside.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  I love that we're talking about stress because I think that everyone listening to this podcast knows what feeling stressed feels like. And honestly, I feel like I've been stressed since the day nine years ago when I decided to start Zoe with my co-founder.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  I'm not surprised.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  So I definitely feel like I live with this. And in the modern age, it feels like stress is coming at us from every corner. Now, I was brought up in England to believe that you should just stay calm and carry on. And that since stress was in the mind, it wasn't real. It couldn't cause any physical symptoms. And basically, if you could just ignore it, then that was the best thing to do and you're already starting to smile. And I'm also smiling a little because over the last few years, I've been starting to reassess, you know, this upbringing that I had. However, there is a lot of conflicting advice about stress from online influencers. And most of them have something that they want to sell.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Like, we know what it means to experience stress, but I realise as I'm saying this, I have no idea what it actually is.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Stress is every situation where the challenge that we're facing is bigger, or this is perceived as bigger than our ability to cope with it, to deal with it. Once you interpret it this way, then you know there's always a mismatch. And it's a personalised mismatch between how you are at the moment in your life on the day and what's happening around you. Stress is not the same for everybody. And of course, we know this, you know, there are aspects of stress that most of us will consider intolerable. And I'm thinking about, for example, being in a war zone or, you know, being a soldier.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Or even if you choose to actively participate in a situation that would be life-threatening or very stressful. And then, of course, there are situations that most people will find it not stressful, you know, perhaps even relaxing. And then everything in the middle, like, you know, from talking to podcasts today, be talking to the public, caring to give a speech at a wedding,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  having a difficult job performance, all of that will always be about how you, as a person, perceive that task. On the day, because it also changes from day to day. And it changes from how prepared you are and changes based on what is your kind of background, mental health and wellbeing at that particular moment. It's a very kind of personal, but also kind of moment-by-moment definition, if you like.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  What you're saying is stress is when the problem that I feel that I'm dealing with right now is bigger than I'm convinced that I can deal with?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And often it is bigger than you can deal with it. Sometimes it's bigger than you think you can deal with it. Other times, it is really bigger than what you can do about it.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  So let's take an example. I mean, you mentioned a war zone, but I maybe want to go back into like my mental model of this, which is like our ancestors being chased by a lion. Can you explain a little bit about what's happening in my brain, you know, as that lion is starting to come towards me?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I mean, by the time the lion comes towards you, probably your brain almost kind of goes into automatic functioning and is your body taking over. Your sympathetic nervous system gets activated. So this is a kind of direct system that originates from the brain and makes your heart beat faster, brings more blood to your muscles, kind of prepares you for the immediate run or fight. It also activates the immune system. These are the cells that we use in our daily lives to fight infections. And of course, you want to be able to fight infection, to have an immune system that is primed to fight because we are going to be injured, you know, it's a lion in front of us.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Even if we run away, we're going to have injured by, you know, the running in a field. And if you get caught, of course, it will be the interest of the fight. So immune system gets activated. A few minutes after that, cortisol kicks in. Cortisol is a hormone, so it's not directly produced by, if you like, the brain or the central nervous system, but it's downstream to the activation of the brain. And it's produced by a small organ, which is called the adrenal gland, which actually sits on top of our kidney, left and right. Cortisol goes straight into the bloodstream, produce more glucose, so more sugar in the blood. That's the basis of energy, which will really need it.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  It kind of also helps shutting down blood flowing organs that we really don't need. So, you know, we don't need blood in the stomach because digestion is not a priority when we have to fight our life. And in the brain, cortisol kind of helps focus on the task ahead. So typically, it kind of narrows the focus of our attention so that you almost become unaware of things that are not really important, except, of course, the lion or what you need to do to fight or run. This is more or less what happens. Now, as much as I love the predator models, we need to remember that these are models of acute stress. All of us will encounter acute stress.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I mean, they're very unlucky, we encounter severe acute stress, you know, being in a car crash or being assaulted, being exposed to violence. And a lot of us will have intermediate acute stress. But the problem with today's society is much more about chronic stress. So the question is how a body that was really created for stress, so they would only last 15, 20 minutes, half an hour. So the time that you either fight the lion or run away from the lion, how does that body, that stress reaction, deal with the fact that today's stresses are mostly psychosocial and continuous, rather than acute and disappearing after 20 minutes?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  I have this vision in my mind now, all these things being switched on in my body, you know, the point that I see this lion in the distance coming towards me. I'm really interested to follow up now, actually, on what you're saying about how that might be the same or different in my modern life.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  I feel, though, that I get very anxious if I know I'm going to be late for a meeting, for example, right? Which feels like that's completely different from a lion. But I definitely think, oh, I'm feeling stressed, I'm going to be late. Is that a completely different set of things that are going on inside my body? I'll never forget the moment that everything shifted for me. I was at a public talk on nutrition, listening to a speaker explain that my gut had trillions of microbes in it and that these bugs shaped every aspect of my health. That speaker was Professor Tim Spector, one of the world's top 100 scientists, who became my co-founder here at Zoe. Nine years later, Zoe runs the world's largest gut health research study. And the conclusion is simple: gut health is health.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  How you feel, your long-term health and your digestion are all shaped by the state of your gut. As a listener to this show, you know how important it is to feed your good gut bugs. But I suspect that, like me, you have a busy schedule. And often you feel you haven't given them all the different plants they crave. And that's exactly why we created Daily 30. It's a gut health supplement packed with over 30 plants that you sprinkle onto any meal. It tastes great, adds a satisfying crunch and gives your gut the diversity it craves. Finally, a healthy, happy, that's easy to stick to. I should know, I take it every day. And because we're Zoe, we don't just guess, we test. We put our original Daily 30 formula through a randomised controlled trial, the gold standard of testing.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  The results blew us away and proved it supports your digestion, energy and gut health. That trial helped us develop the formula we have today. Today, Daily 30 is a non-negotiable daily habit for me. So don't put your health off for the future. Go to zoe.com/daily30 and try it today.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  No, it's just quantitatively different. You have an increase in pro-inflammatory signal. So your inflammation in the blood. So your immune system activation goes up even if you're doing an exam, for example. And your cortisol goes up if you're late and you're really worried about it. And your heart will be, you know, beating faster if you're anticipating a difficult meeting with your boss. So these mechanisms operate. The magnitude of the intensity, of course, is much higher when we are facing a real life-threatening situation versus a mildly challenging or just kind of worrying concern.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  There's a range to this as well. It's not like it's either on or off. You can have all of those things you described, like at different levels of intensity?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And this is why people have, for example, you know, stroke or other acute medical kind of complication under conditional, really intense stress. But they don't have it luckily, you know, if they're later for a meeting. Because the level of activation, for example, of the sympathetic nervous system, which is the system that increases your heart beat so they get faster, but also increases your blood pressure so you can get more blood to the brain. Because that's where you need the blood, because you're, again, you have to decide what to do in front of the lion. While all of that may only increase a little if we are worried about being late

• 12:18Speaker 01

  and increase really exponentially a lot if we are facing a life-threatening situation.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  In a situation where I'm feeling a lot of stress, as all of these things have been switched on in my body. In fact, some of that is also to like my heart beats faster and more blood pressure. Is that related to this idea that you could have a heart attack if you're under too much stress?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. This is both in terms of chronic activation of the stress systems, which increase your risk of cardiovascular problem really across a variety of mechanisms. Because unfortunately, having a chronic activation of your stress system is not the same as having the acute activation that, you know, we're having in the jungle. Because in the jungle, our ancestor would face a predator for a few minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, maybe not even every day. But for us, it's different, right? So it's the stresses of the daily life, the pressure of work, the social isolation, the difficulty we have with the relationship that stays with us every day. So it's continuous.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  So I think you're saying that there's a big difference between probably what our ancestors experienced, which is very high level of stress, but for the short period of time. And I think you've mentioned, apparently, this idea of like chronic stress. Could you help us to understand what that means?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  A lot of the condition that we are now facing today and we are perceiving as stressful are of situation that stays with us for weeks or months or years. And it could be a work pressure. It could be relationship difficulties. It could be, you know, feeling lonely. A lot of the problems that we're facing as a society, they tend to be there for a long time. And so at that point, it's very difficult to switch the biological stress response off because the challenge is always there. While with the lion, once the lion is gone, or if you're dead, we don't need the stress system anymore.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  And so, Carmina, what's happening in those sort of long-term situations? So like, I've got a horrible boss and my relationship is difficult and I'm worried if the company is going to go bankrupt, et cetera, et cetera. Is that a completely different set of reactions that's going on in my body from the one you described with the lion?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  It's the same, but it stays on longer. So your sympathetic nervous system that is supposed to kind of make your heart beating faster and your blood pressure go up for 20 minutes or half an hour until you deal with the problem, actually increases your blood pressure for days or weeks and months in a row. And, you know, the baseline stays on. Because the baseline stays on, then when there is an acute things happening on top of it, you know, you're starting already from an activated baseline. So it goes up faster and higher. And it's the same with cortisol. So your cortisol gets constantly activated. And so the system is just more responsive.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And so when you're facing a small stress in the context of ongoing stress, then your cortisol goes up more and goes up higher. And cortisol, you know, in the short term helps because you want to have more sugar in your blood so that you can, again, have the energy to run. But in the long term, that means your risk of diabetes or metabolic disorders, your risk of weight gain, your cardiovascular problem, all of that goes up. Because it's something that your body is doing not for half an hour, but it's doing it for weeks and months in a row.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  So this raised level of cortisol, it's not just that it makes me feel maybe more focused and feel stressed, but actually it's going to increase my risk of serious disease like diabetes, but also a risk of weight gain?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yes, weight gain, together especially with inflammatory component. Because inflammation does the same. So inflammation also increased our risk of metabolic dysfunction. It can potentiate the negative effect of cortisol. One other thing that cortisol does is it activates mechanisms of reward so that increased eating as a way of coping with stress. So some of the negative consequences of the stress are the unhelpful way that we cope with them.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. So you're saying that our modern environment is having the same reaction to me as I'm designed to have against like this scary lion. It's not quite as high, but it's just on for months. And part of that system is like increasing my inflammation, it's increasing this cortisol. And you're saying that that actually is likely to lead me to put on weight, it's likely to make me eat more. That's slightly crazy.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  It is, but it's, you know, and the environment, of course, facilitated that. High-fat food and high-sugar food, they have a kind of a rapid anti-stress effect. They can, you know, they can reduce cortisol because they kind of give you a feeling of reward. Food, obviously, is available to everybody. I guess alcohol, smoking, you know, comes immediately after in terms of availability. And then, of course, when people use drug of addiction. I mean, these are the negative one. And you can add, I guess, social media, scrolling, and everything that takes the pressure away from you, even if for like a minute or an hour. It will be, in a highly stressful situation, will be a welcome relief.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  It's not like I know my cortisol is high, right? So you're saying that like in my biology, it's sort of saying, oh, if you get that, it's going to reduce, I'm going to feel better. So I'm sort of learning these behaviors. We now know in our modern world that eating lots of sugar is not going to be good for us. But similarly, alcohol, which I think for many of us, we do think like at the end of a really stressful day, I'd love to have a drink. I definitely can often feel like I would really like a glass of wine. There's a physical relationship to do with the level of pressure that I felt earlier and this raised stress and this raised cortisol?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yes, and there's also the mental aspect. I mean, of course, all these strategies we use to cope with stress.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  I'm really struck that you said that there's not a complete difference between sort of physical and sort of emotional or social threats. Is there really genuinely my body is going to respond in the same way to a really high-intensity, like emotional situation as it would to a really high-intensity situation with like physical threats?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  It does. It's only really a matter of quantity and for how long it stays on, all of these mechanisms. We have one way of coping with stressful situations, which is usually a way that allows us to, as I said, either run away or kill. And unfortunately, modern society, we can, often we cannot run away from the stressors and most of the time we cannot, you know, kill the stressor metaphorically or physically.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Why is it that you're saying it's today that we live with this chronic long-term stress? Why wouldn't our ancestors have just been chronically stressed all the time?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  There's really a lot to unpack here. So first of all, our ancestor had different expectation on their life, on what is their well-being, if you like, to use a term that probably they would not have used.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Probably not a lot of wellness influencers back in the savanna.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So they would have had different expectation. They would know exactly how often they would have been able to eat. And they would know that a lion was always behind the corner. They would have developed strategy to deal with it. Also, they would have developed, I guess, acceptance of what the world around there was. And, you know, this is not dissimilar to a lot of things that have changed over the last 100 years. There've been plenty of discussion how our attitude toward death, for example, has changed in society. How, you know, 100 years ago, for example, you know, with infant mortality being much higher

• 20:21Speaker 01

  and of course, illness and kind of medical care being much less developed than today, it was unfortunately a common experience to lose someone in your family, to lose maybe a child. And there was a different relationship with bereavement and the loss of someone. I'm just giving you one of, I guess, hundreds of examples of how society has changed even recently. So we are in a situation now that, if you like, is the worst of possible combination, where we have high expectation that life should be perfect and everything should go well. But we have less, if you like, spiritual or kind of philosophical frames

• 21:06Speaker 01

  to make sense of what's happening to us. And we are a society that is more difficult to live with in terms of, you know, more fragmented. We don't have a village where we trust, you know, people who have been living with for all our life. So I think it's, you know, it's a weird combination of a much better quality of life and a much worse kind of way of dealing with the difficulties that are still here.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  I'd love to talk about what happens to us today now that we are living in this long-term stress and particularly how it affects our health. So imagine someone is experiencing this like low-level, long-term stress. You know, what symptoms might they notice? And what might be going on inside them perhaps that they're not even going to be aware of?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  We're all different in terms of some people tend to express stress in more in a physical way and some people tend to be more mindful of their emotional well-being and reaction. I think at the minimum, yeah, I would imagine someone who's going through a really difficult time, the immediate thing would be disrupted sleep, so inability to fall asleep, maybe ruminating before going to bed about what's happening, or waking up earlier in the morning, again with the kind of waking up with these concerns. Appetite change, a lot of people when they're under stress, they stop eating or they eat less, they lose weight, other people eat more. And sometimes it's like a curve, the shift.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  So, I know it, not as a scientist, but as a stressed person, that if I'm a little bit stressed, I eat more, but if I'm really stressed, then I stop eating. So each of us will have this kind of a curve, amazing, some people only have one style or the other.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  So those are both potentially responses to the same underlying stress?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely, you know, whatever in a way, whatever works for you or for me at that particular time.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  But this is a real physical reaction, this isn't just all in my mind, a bit the way I was brought up, like there's some real physical things that are happening inside me as a result of the stress responses that you were talking about.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yes, because there's no mind and body and brain separation, you know, it's all one single entity, if you like, communicating. And so, the high level of cortisol stimulates the brain and may, for example, increase hunger as a way of coping with stress. The food will have a reward effect, so the pleasant experience of the sugary or fat will give our brain a feeling of kind of pleasure, which will then relax us and therefore, you know, the body relaxes after that. So it's a continuous communication between mind, body and brain.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  And so, you were saying that if I start living with this long-term stress, like I start to get these physical effects and that might be disrupted sleep, appetite change, is there anything else?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, high blood pressure and stomach pain, you know, the famous stress gastritis, probably the indigestion or reflux or gastric acidity and that's again is driven, is largely driven by actually cortisol effect on the internal layers of the stomach that the cortisol increased the kind of acidity. And that's why in very acute situations, people may have, you know, when they're going to severe stress, they may have an acute gastritis, they may need to kind of go and see a doctor just for that. So these are all kind of consequences of stress. The inflammation goes up, although we don't feel it as much, however, we do feel it a

• 24:48Speaker 01

  little bit because probably the high level of inflammation during stress is what drives the feeling of fatigue and lack of energy.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I can't feel my inflammation directly, but I might feel like this fatigue, this tiredness, this lack of energy, and that is actually sort of how my brain is aware that my inflammation is high.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yes, because you need to remember, talking about ancestors again, so when we have an infection, any type of infection, one of the responses of our body to the high level of inflammation is to shut down, so to kind of reduce our physical activity. Think about how you felt last time you had flu, you know, you know, those unlucky, you had COVID, how bad it was physically, how tired we felt. And this is because the brain is programmed to respond to the high level of inflammation by shutting down kind of what we call the reward system, so the activity that make you sick, things that you like, because really you need to kind of sit down and wait and so that your body keeps all the energy to fight the infection.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  And possibly from an evolutionary point of view, there's also a principle of kind of social isolation, a natural social isolation, so we stop moving, we just want to kind of be in bed, we don't want to socially interact as a way of protecting our peers from the infection. So that's another issue, like ancestral mechanism, similar to the stress, that it works also in daily life. And so when we are stressed, the inflammation goes up and the brain perceives that almost like if there is an infection going on, and so it signaled the body to feeling really tired and stop doing stress.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Really interesting, so my stress can trigger inflammation that is the same as if I actually had got, you know, a cold or flu or something like this?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely, I mean, if you measure it, you'll see the same levels, not as high as having, you know, COVID or sepsis or like a real severe infection, but definitely as high as having a cold.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  So I could measure that, what would you measure in someone's blood?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  We do that every day, we take the blood, you can measure what we call cytokines, so these are chemicals produced by the immune cells, the white cells that are circulating in our blood, they kind of send it in the blood to communicate with other immune cells that are in our lymph nodes, in our spleen, and they go up. There's one that we study a lot, it's called interleukin-6, and you know, it goes up with depression, it goes up with stress, it goes up acutely, you know, with an exam, but it goes up chronically in people who are, you know, for example, as I said, have major depression.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I think that's amazing, as I said, I was like, I was definitely brought up in this idea that, you know, your brain and your body are separate, keep calm, carry on, and so the idea that you could feel stress and there would actually be a chemical you could measure in your blood that's changed, that is physically affecting you, you know, is a pretty big hole in this idea that these are completely separate.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes, in fact, I would argue that if you completely dissociate from the emotional content, if you like, of your life, the risk is that your body keeps feeling stressed and feel the effect of stress, however, you're not even aware of it because you're kind of dissociated from the emotional component. So it's like, okay, I'm not gonna be feeling sad, I'm not gonna be feeling worried about it because it's all in my brain, but your body will continue to feel sad.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  So these are sort of like the short-term impacts, how serious can this be for our long-term health?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Very serious, I mean, chronic stress that is so embedded in the life that eventually brings clinical anxiety, clinical depression, so, you know, with mental illnesses, for example, to die younger because of the ongoing physical effect of, you know, the biological changes that happens to body and in the brain with high level of stress. As I said, sometimes it's also some of the mechanisms that we use for stress, so, you know, the change in our eating behavior, the use or abuse of alcohol or smoking or substances.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  So it's really true, like if I'm highly stressed over long-term, I'm just gonna die earlier?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  You're gonna die early, you're gonna have a miserable life, and probably the people living with you will have a miserable life too.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Well, lots of people living with me might say they're having a miserable life, so that might be true.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  You know, stress is an emotional cost, stress is a, it's a physical cost in the body, but it's an emotional cost as well, in the way we behave and the way we communicate with other people around us, including the people that are closer to us.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And so you've mentioned already the fact that if I'm under this stress for a long time, like that will lead likely to weight gain, we know that obviously that's really bad for your health, you talked about high blood pressure, what about other diseases? And I definitely think that sort of heart attacks are the thing that I have, you know, I think all the way back to before I was born, right, somehow, the like 1960s sort of madmen, everyone was like, you're gonna drop dead of a heart attack because of your stress, like is that not true?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  No, no, it's true, because, and again, all these are all the same mechanism, kind of focusing on one single, you know, potential kind of negative episode, because the increase, you know, in food intake or the high level of cortisol, the stimulation of more glucose will also increase your lipid in the blood, that will increase accumulation of cholesterol. And so, your blood vessels start to kind of becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, especially the one in the heart, the inflammation activate the response of cells that are circulating in the blood, they make it stickier, so they stick to the blood walls and accumulation

• 30:37Speaker 01

  happens, basically like an accumulation of cells that block the flow of blood in the heart and you have a heart attack. So all of these mechanisms operate in giving all of these different, if you like, negative effects. Of course, we all come with different predisposition, maybe genetically or, you know, based on how we, the kind of life we had as a child, or, you know, the type of nutrition or physical activity or other lifestyle that we have. So some people may suffer more in the stomach, some people may have a heart attack, some people may, you know, develop diabetes, but they're all downstream negative effect of stress.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  And I know that you conduct a lot of research into inflammation and sort of mental health conditions, and you've already touched on sort of fatigue and lack of energy, but what is happening in the brain, if anything, as a result, and does that affect like my mood or anything like that?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we now kind of know that the high level of inflammation is present during depression, it's also present during anxiety and other mental disorders, but it's certainly important in the kind of the creation of at least some of the symptoms of depression. The inflammation typically affect the reward system, I keep going back to the, to the reward system, because there are kind of this area of the brain that allow us to feel pleasure.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  And if you, if we don't feel pleasure anymore, because this part of the brain gets shut down, and it got shut down by a high level of inflammation, then of course, we'll, you know, our life will become dull and we'll feel sad and unable to ever feel kind of normal again.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  I think one of the things I often personally struggle with is being able to experience a lot of happiness. And I definitely have quite a lot of pressure in my life, but I never thought about it being related to that. It sounds like you're saying that stress might lead to impact on my brain that affects my ability to be happy and experience joy? Because that's not so obvious. I think we understand, I can understand the anxiety, but I'm surprised to hear that it would also affect maybe then being able to even feel these positive emotions.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  These are all kind of downstream, if you like, negative effect of something that in the short term is helpful. So again, if we're going back to the idea that you have an infection, you really want your brain to concentrate on fighting the infection. So you just don't want, you don't want to be seeking pleasure or pleasurable activities. You don't want to go out. This again lasts hours, days, or you know, you die because of the infection, as a lot of our ancestors would have done, um, you know, maybe even until a hundred years ago, when the antibiotics were discovered. Now we have this mechanism that operating weeks, months, because they're chronic. And one of the downstream effect

• 33:39Speaker 01

  of this is certainly the fact that inflammation reduced the ability of our brain to respond to reward, so to respond to pleasure. And we know it because if we give the studies that we and others have been conducting in using anti-inflammatory strategies, so literally medication that have been developed for inflammation, so for pain or for autoimmune disorders or inflammatory disorder like arthritis, use this medication in people with depression. And we can see that one of the things that lift is this ability to experience pleasure and the, you know, the brain areas that respond to pleasure get to work again, if you like.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  You can actually sort of scan someone's brain, and if you reduce the inflammation that comes from the stress, like parts of their brain are suddenly sort of switching on that before were sort of dark and switched off?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, it's kind of trying to understand how we can help people with depression.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I think it's incredibly interesting, this link between stress and inflammation, and then inflammation and mood, and this idea that there's a continuum. So it's not like you're either clinically depressed or not, you could have some of that. I'm also partly think I'm struck because we meet so many other scientists talking about other things in our modern life that contribute to inflammation. You know, on this show, we talk a lot about food, for example. And so presumably, if I'm eating a modern Western diet and I have some level of inflammation, if I'm then stressed on top, does that mean my inflammation is therefore even gonna go even higher?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Well, we know that, for example, part of the inflammation in people with major depression or other mental disorder is driven by an increase in weight, because the fat tissue is actively producing inflammation and putting in the blood. Your inflammation makes the body more metabolically responsive. The, the stress maybe increase your food intake, which then in the context of increased inflammation will kind of create more problems from a metabolic point of view, you know, but it'll be, your body will be more sensitive to developing a high level of cholesterol, a high level of fats in the blood, a high level of sugar. And at the same time, the deposition of fat increases inflammation.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So it's all, unfortunately, they're all kind of negative cycles kind of potentiating each other.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Think of a friend or colleague who powers through deadlines and life challenges on coffee, adrenaline, and too little sleep. Perhaps they feel awful once the pressure lifts. Why not send them this episode? It can help explain when a useful survival response starts becoming a threat to health, and actionable advice to help balance what to do. I'm sure they'll thank you.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Just talk about cortisol a little bit longer, because you've mentioned it a lot through um this discussion. And I've been struck by that because cortisol has become a bit of an online buzzword recently. But I've now got one of the world experts I'd like to ask you. So there's a lot of people talking about cortisol face and cortisol belly. Like, is there any truth to that? Can cortisol be causing you to lay down fat in these places?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  As you were saying, cortisol does increase food intake as a, as a way of coping mechanism with stress. People that have very high level of cortisol, but not because of stress, because of endocrine dysfunction, also tend to put on weight. And unfortunately, we see, for example, who people who take steroids, which is really, they're just kind of cortisol, exogenous cortisol, they're kind of medications that mimic cortisol. However, instead of all of that, I think what I don't like, if you like, of the, of the buzz about cortisol is that somehow it's something that we can measure or interpret or modify

• 37:36Speaker 01

  or, I mean, yes, cortisol is important in a stress response. However, you know, is that something that we can manipulate beyond just kind of try to have a kind of less stressful life? And certainly it doesn't help to measure it. And there's nothing, you know, pharmacologically you can do to reduce it unless you take, you know, medications that are quite toxic. So I, I just think stress is not about measuring your cortisol. Coping with stress is not about measuring your cortisol. Coping with stress is about improving the aspect of your life that you can control to make you more able to deal with stress.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  I would love to go to that, but first, I have a specific question that um the research team said I have to ask. So apparently, also online, there's a lot of noise about a cortisol cocktail that can allegedly reduce your cortisol levels. So they've told you you're gonna get cortisol face and cortisol belly. And I'd just love to tell you what's in it, so you can tell us all whether it's gonna work. Apparently, it's orange juice, coconut water, salt, and potassium or magnesium powders. Is this going to fix my cortisol?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  To me, it does ring a bell, because I cannot link any of this compound or things in the cocktail to anything that particularly would affect cortisol level.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  So for those of you who've been taking your cortisol cocktail, we recommend you, you stop. I'd love to talk about, you know, what we can do, but can I even start maybe with like my aim? Should I be aiming to have no stress in my life?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  It's impossible. It may be actually that that's the reason why we feel so stressed. It's because our expectation is that we should have a stress-free life. And, and so it's a continuous disappointment when we are stressed or when we feel stressed. Hence the guilt, you know, because maybe we're doing something wrong, because we should not be feeling stressed. So this is completely the wrong way around, looking at it. The correct way is like, life is difficult, stress will be behind the corner every moment, and I need to learn how to cope with it. Avoiding it will only make it worse.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  So don't try and avoid it. Life is difficult. Let's learn how to cope with it. So could you talk to us now about whether there are any evidence-based things we can do to like handle this stress that inevitably comes our way?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Plenty of strategies. The first things to remember is that stress is particularly bad, was perceived as particularly bad when is what we call uncontrollable stress, or something on which we feel we don't have any control. If I come to this podcast because I want to do it and I really enjoyed the idea, this would be a rewarding experience for me. If someone obliged me to come to a podcast that I hate, uh, because I hate to be talking in front of a microphone, this would be highly stressful. And if I cannot say no to their request, it would feel even more stressful. So the first question we

• 40:52Speaker 01

  need to ask to ourselves is how much control do I have on the situation that makes me feel really stressed? And sometimes control is about choices. That's the most important strategy of having control on what you feel stressed, and what you feel stressful. But you need to start by doing an analysis of the situation. What can you control? And maybe you, you cannot change your job, or you can maybe work less, or, or you can use better the hours that you're not working, so that you're kind of compensating your quality of life. It's a balance. So if you cannot reduce, objectively reduce stress level, maybe you can increase the, the, the positive aspect in your life. And so focus more on

• 41:36Speaker 01

  the positive aspect, gives more, more time and more attention to the positive things in your life. Things like spending quality time with family, friends, your hobbies, your passion. We tend to think of the pleasurable side of life as the weak one, as in, I don't need that. You know, I, I want to become a very famous professor. I don't need to spend time reading books or, you know, or, or walking in the woods. But these are essential activity for our well-being. Whatever it is that is important for you, traveling, you know, walking,

• 42:16Speaker 01

  they generally do reduce level of stress. I mean, we recently did some work using um singing groups from others that were suffering from postnatal depression. And we measured literally from before the singing session, one hour singing session, to the end of the singing session, a reduction in cortisol and inflammation. And that, you know, this is just one thing that we have been doing. There are hundreds of other studies like this. The same is for walking in the green areas, dedicate time to culture, art, creativity, but also, you know, spending time with friends, you know, having a social network, social support. And, and, you know, just next to it is the spiritual element, which again,

• 43:00Speaker 01

  it doesn't mean that you have to have a religion or have to have a religious group or spiritual, uh, official spiritual, if you like, attitude. However, things that will feed your soul, if you like, or feed your mind, will really help you with the stress.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  I'm really interested that the first thing that you've gone to is not

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Some sort of meditation, but you've gone straight to both having some control over work and some time with friends and and family. That's because you feel these are the biggest things you can do to really.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, the kind of the more personal lifestyle choices that will help you, I mean, you know, physical exercise, whatever helps you maintain a kind of physical activity and a healthy, you know, your your body will benefit from movement, from physical fatigue.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Could you tell us a bit more about that? Because thinking from my own experience, I started doing the gym about a decade ago, and it was it was driven by like a physical issue, I was having some pain, and then I think supported by the things I was learning sort of through Zoe about how good it was for my long term health to be doing exercise and resistance training, things like that. But interestingly, I now think about it as being an essential part of sort of managing my mental health. And, you know, my job is quite stressful, like I think lots of people listening to this, and I've started to think about like doing that exercise regularly through the

• 44:32Speaker 00

  week as something that helps me cope mentally, but I have no idea if that's there's anything real in that, or it's just sort of.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  There is, there is, and you know, again, there's so this in this complex mind, body, brain, exercise does so many things because you can measure inflammation in the blood, and actually, we know that physical exercise is anti-inflammatory, recent research showing that the muscles actually during exercise produce chemicals that are against inflammation. And but also, exercise gives a feeling of reward and satisfaction with yourself, because of course, if there is one thing that you can you can get better at is exercise, whatever it's gonna be, because you learn you learn the skills, the technique, you your body gets more used to it, whatever it is.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  There are so many elements that are positive about having like a regular rewarding physical activity, both from a body point of view and from a mental point of view, and I'm, you know, I'm, I do a lot of physical exercise and certainly helped me with coping with stress a lot.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  So the exercise really does have an effect on stress?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  It does. You need to enjoy it, or at the beginning where you don't enjoy it, push it until you start enjoying it. It doesn't come with the first the first time you go to the gym, I'm sure you had the same, exactly the same.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  Honestly, it took me years to start to enjoy it, and as I said for years, oh, I don't get any pleasure out of it. It's actually not true anymore, like I do actually get pleasure from it now. I did not grow up doing lots of exercise at all, so it's normal that it might take quite a while.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yes, it's different, you were, you know, in in in some kind of team playing something when we were kids, so we're always used to it. I think for people like, I guess, you as and me as well, that we're not very sporty children, it does time, it does require time, but I'm I'm now at my fittest level, I've never been as fit as now, and I'm, you know, I'm sixty, so.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Well, you don't look sixty, so it's definitely working well. When we talk about exercise, what do you need to do? Like, do you need to be like lifting weights or going for a run to be doing like this exercise is gonna help with your stress?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing is to doing something that you really like, that increases your heart rate a little bit, so that you feel you need to feel tired after it, you need to feel fatigued while you're doing it, you know, you need to push it yourself a little bit.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Could a long walk, for example?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yes, long walk also works, it's always beneficial, because you tend to focus on the repetitiveness of the stepping, and there's a little bit of kind of creates a little bit of meditation, even if you don't want to do it, basically.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  What about diet and how it can affect stress? And if I'd said that to you ten years ago, I'd be like, that's mad to think that diet could have any impact on on stress, but I've definitely been reassessing that myself. What does the science say? When I hit forty, I started feeling tired and sluggish. I remember thinking, great, this is it, it's all downhill from here, but I was completely wrong. It wasn't my age, it was my diet, it was literally sapping my energy. I was trying to juggle kids, work and exercise, and back then I'd just grab whatever food was nearby. I still have that crazy schedule, but what's changed is what I put in my body. Our own researcher Zoe has shown that if your digestion feels off, or you're regularly

• 48:00Speaker 00

  feeling exhausted, it's often because your gut bugs are starving. They thrive on a huge variety of plants, at least thirty different plants a week, and the more, the better. But if you're as stretched as me, it's not always easy to achieve this, and that's exactly why our scientists developed Daily Thirty. It's a great tasting gut health supplement with over thirty plants in every single scoop. I take it every day without fail, and because we're Zoe, we don't just guess, we test. We put Daily Thirty through a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard of testing. The results absolutely blew us away, proving it's good for energy, digestion and gut health. That trial helped us develop the formula that we have today. So if you're not feeling like yourself, don't settle for feeling sluggish.

• 48:45Speaker 00

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• 48:48Speaker 01

  The best evidence is on things like fish, you know, fish rich diets, and after that, we'll a little bit less evidence, but promising, if you like, evidence, fruit and vegetables. And these are coming from largely studies at a population level, or cultural group that have a diet that is particularly rich in fish, or vegetable, or fruit, or both, or kind of combination, they tend to have overall, as a population, lower level of depression, or lower level of mental disorders. It is possible that you need a lot, if you like, to actually have a therapeutic effect or preventative effect, so we're talking about kind of, you know, eating fish twice

• 49:31Speaker 01

  a week, or having lots of fruit and vegetable every day. I think, again, even just having some kind of control in avoiding the bad food, not in a way that kind of deprives us of, you know, of the pleasure of chocolate, but at least having a feeling of control, that we can actually, we can decrease the the sugar intake, we can decrease the fat intake, you know, feeling of control is always good for our mental health, partly because it has a really positive effect.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  One thing you haven't really mentioned that I would definitely like to ask about is alcohol, because I am sure there are a lot of people listening to this podcast who say, you know, I know what I do, I've had a really tough day, I get home, maybe I've finally got the kids to bed, and I have that wonderful noise when you take the cork out of a bottle of wine, and you're gonna pour a glass of wine, and you're gonna drink it, and I feel like my stress just falls straight off this alcoholic drink. Does alcohol reduce my stress, I guess is the first question, in the short term?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it reduces literally for like the ten minutes, half an hour that you're drinking, and you're under the effect. I would argue that actually, if you feel that it's actually reducing your stress a lot while you're drinking, you're probably drinking too much. It's numbing it, and then usually gets worse after, I mean, partly alcohol increased cortisol. People with alcohol problems, they have sky high level cortisol, they increase inflammation terribly, so people with alcohol dependence and alcohol abuse have high level cortisol, high level of inflammation. So physiologically, it does everything that you don't want to do, because it activates stress response. I still think it's nice to have a glass of wine, or I'll share a bottle of wine, you

• 51:16Speaker 01

  know, with friends at the end of a difficult day, but I think that if you start, if you're using it to numb yourself, then A is only gonna be very temporarily, and B is gonna get worse the day after. These are all dysfunctional coping mechanisms, they all they become dysfunctional at some point. We all enjoy, you know, social media, or spending time, you know, scrolling or spending time on the internet, it could be pleasurable, interesting, and then it become numbing, because we are so entrenched into, you know, the moment or.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Well, I love that you've talked about phones, because I did want to ask, because it feels like there's this growing evidence that they might actually be harmful for us. A lot of people take out the phone almost as a sort of way to de-stress, but is it in fact making us more stressed?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  It depends what we're doing it. I suspect most of us, that includes me, we're doing it because at the moment we don't want to think of what is worrying us, or we don't want to feel the emotion that we are feeling. Am I saying that people should not have ten minutes of kind of relief by looking at a mobile phone? Of course not, the same way that people could have, you know, the glass of wine. If you're becoming, you know, being drunk every night, or not interacting with your family or with your friends because you're constantly on your phone, that you need to ask yourself, what am I, what am I avoiding in my mind by putting all my attention, you know, on the glass or on the phone or whatever it is?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  The principle of wanting to use all of these strategies, whatever works for us, to numb our emotions are the same across all of this. So we need to try to understand how we're using it and we're using it in a healthy way that is acceptable, are we using it in an unhealthy way, whatever it is that we're using.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  So these aren't fundamentally going to help with my stress, whereas then you're talking about these other things, like time with my friends and family, actually trying to understand my stress and see if I can have more control over it, you know, exercise, these things can actually reduce my stress genuinely and therefore lead to a sort of long-term improvement in how I feel and my health.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Exactly, because these things are doing it without numbing us. So they, they are strategies that help us to cope with stress while being present to our stress, while, you know, the negative coping strategies, if you like, are the ones that are numbing the stress, but they're not helping us finding a solution or finding, finding a way of dealing with it.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  When I'm stressed, I find it really hard to sleep, but then being tired, I think, makes me feel more stressed and it's a sort of vicious cycle. How much should I worry about this and is there anything I can do?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  So I think most of the time, a kind of a compassionate waiting, accepting this is a difficult time, accepting that there will be some difficult nights of sleeping and try to minimize things that are disrupting us, you know, against screen time, try to go to bed always at the same time, not too late, reading maybe, or whatever is we feel that is distracting, reading a book or, you know, whatever helps us to kind of relaxing. That's probably the best strategy. Once it becomes a problem that you cannot work or, you know, you cannot, it goes beyond just the discomfort of not sleeping, then that's when you need to ask kind of professional advice or help.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  And of course, there are most kind of more specific psychological interventions, you can do it, I'm not saying that people should take medication for sleeping problem and certainly when they do, they usually recommend it only for like a, you know, a week or so, just to go through the acute phase.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Final question. If someone listening to this podcast right now is feeling really stressed, what's the first thing that you would recommend that they do?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Talk about it to a close person, a friend, a relative, partner, don't keep it inside, talk about it, start with that.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I really enjoyed that. I would like to do a little summary. I mean, the first thing that springs my mind actually is this thing about alcohol, that it actually increases my cortisol and so it doesn't actually reduce my stress, it's just sort of numbs me to it.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  I think the big thing I took away though is, you know, stress is natural, don't feel guilty about it, life is difficult, so you're going to have stress in, in your life and therefore you're going to cope better with it just by knowing that. But we also have to recognize that having long-term stress is bad for us because it increases this cortisol, encourages us to eat high fat and high sugar food, more than we need, it encourages us to drink alcohol and smoke and all these sorts of things. It is this very deep system within us and so you described brilliantly like what happens if like I saw a tiger in the distance, but it's the same thing maybe if I'm running late for my meeting, this sympathetic nervous system is being turned on, my heart beats fast and my blood pressure goes up, you know, my blood goes to muscles, all of this stuff about

• 56:23Speaker 00

  like being ready to fight or flee, which obviously makes no sense for a meeting, but it's all been switched on, my immune system is being turned on and this is turning on my inflammation to get ready because it thinks I'm going to get injured and it kicks in this cortisol, which you described as being like this really key drug that's having a big impact on me and also does some funny things like, you know, switches off the blood flow to my stomach, which helps explain also why, you know, so many people feel like these gut problems related to their, to their anxiety. This is all completely natural and we shouldn't feel worried that we get this like short, sharp stress from time to time. The problem is that in our modern life, we tend to live with chronic stress, it doesn't

• 57:04Speaker 00

  get switched off properly and it just sort of stays turned on, that is a problem over months and years. And what you describe is it disrupts our sleep, you know, it causes appetite changes and stomach pains, it increases our inflammation, which is a really big problem, that leads to fatigue and low energy, it increases our cortisol as that increases how much we eat so we put on weight, leads to a risk of diabetes, heart disease, but you know, ultimately all of this together means we're going to die younger, so that's a pretty serious physical risk. But interestingly, there's a real mental side to this as well, not just the fatigue, but you said you can end up feeling more sadness and an inability to feel pleasure.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  So like, it's not just a long-term thing, it's like really going to affect how we, we feel. But the good news is it's not like there's nothing we can do about stress. You said, spend time with your friends and family, understand what the stress is that's causing this deep ongoing thing and even just thinking about it, you may feel like I have more control, maybe not to remove all of that stress, but to think about what else you're doing in your life, you know, maybe you've got to keep the job, but you can just change a bit the rest of what you're doing to feel like you have more control over it. Exercise is genuinely anti-inflammatory, so try and add exercise into, into your life.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be like lifting weights or running, actually if you can do like a long walk that you feel tired about afterwards, that could really be reducing your cortisol and reducing this, this stress even better, like it's getting you out into nature, which you were describing as really beneficial for this. Be aware of dysfunctional behaviors that are numbing this. And so you talked quite a bit about the phone, for example, it's not really reducing your stress, it's sort of numbing you from the underlying issue, so it's not triggering these positive sort of biological systems that are sort of reducing the cortisol, you know, like the alcohol. And then maybe the final thing that I took away is try to accept that life can be difficult.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  You know, that maybe the biggest difference between us living in 2026 and our ancestors is our ancestors just assumed that life would be difficult and therefore actually they didn't have chronic stress because they're just like, well, this is normal, whereas we feel everything should be easy and perfect and therefore constantly stressed because life isn't matching that. But this isn't real and if we can come to terms with the fact that life can be difficult, weirdly, we might feel more relaxed.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it's the principle of acceptance, you know, accepting the difficulties that we will encounter, you know, it's just part of life.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and sharp well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over thirty high-quality hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi and different types of fibre. Better yet, it contains ingredients to support gut health, digestion and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

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