10% Happier with Dan Harris 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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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.
Five Minutes A Day Helps
- Meditate daily, even five minutes, to reduce stress, depression, and burnout and increase purpose and reward at work.
- Short digital programs for eight weeks produced benefits that lasted months in UCSF studies.
Retreat Gains Can Be Undermined By Reentry
- Dan describes regularly doing 10-day retreats and sometimes checking his phone on the last night, which disrupts re-entry sleep.
- He notes retreats recalibrate him but re-entry and immediate exposure to emails can spike anxiety and insomnia.
