The science of managing workplace stress - an interview with Elissa Epel
Elissa Epel, Ph.D. is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal ageing, 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 behavioural factors, such as meditation and positive stress, can slow ageing, and focuses on climate wellness.
In our whitepaper, 'Managing Stress: Your Hidden Advantage', we highlight perspectives from three prominent experts in the field of workplace stress, including Elissa. In our interview, Elissa shared her years of scientific research on the impact of stress on our bodies. Dive into the complete interview with Elissa below, and download the whitepaper at: https://resources.walkingonearth.com/stress-whitepaper
Let’s start with understanding why people respond differently, when faced with the same stressors?
My journey into stress research has been a profound exploration of how stress affects our lives, both mentally and physically.
As a society, the levels of perceived stress and threat are so out of control - it’s at epidemic levels. Almost half the population are feeling overwhelmed by stress on a daily basis. Work is such a strong influencer on our emotional wellbeing that it certainly contributes to stress naturally, but that doesn’t mean it has to impair our health and wellbeing. So we need to think about how we can shape our daily environment to make the stressors manageable.
Some of us are very high reactors, which has been evolutionarily adaptive. It often means that in our lived experience, or possibly our ancestors, we have had a lot of stress and what we call intergenerational trauma - trauma that shapes how our genes are turned on and off, and how our brain is wired. We often arrive on Day 1 of life with those. So part of our challenge is to recognise our triggers and learn how we can best manage our environment.
Most of us have an immediate response to stress that is built into our wiring and our nature. Often we can't control this initial response, but we can control everything after that. The skill lies in being able to evaluate what is happening in the moment - are we having an overreaction or dealing with it appropriately?
One of the factors that determines this is how we tolerate uncertainty. Inability to tolerate it is a big contributor to chronic stress. As there will always be stressful events, and there is really no control that we can have over the future, on a large scale anyway, it’s important to intentionally build a tolerance to uncertainty, as if it were a muscle that we can exercise.
Can we use mindset to control our response to stress?
You need to discern in each stressful situation if you need a positive ‘challenge’ response, or simply need to let go, release control, surf the waves, and know that it will pass.
I use this analogy in my book, The Stress Prescription, of the lion chasing the gazelle. It shows that both animals are under maximal stress responses. Their heart rate and their blood pressure are sky high. But when you look more specifically, they’re having a very different experience.
The lion is having what we call a challenge response and positive thoughts of gain, such as ‘if this goes well I could have dinner for a week’. Whereas the gazelle is having a ‘threat’ reaction with a need for survival. So while their blood pressures are both high, the lion’s is high because the heart is pumping a tremendous amount of blood and oxygen. For the gazelle the cardiovascular is constricting to what we call total peripheral resistance response, that can lead to hypertension or high blood pressure.
When we’re experiencing a threat response, we can’t think clearly and creatively or feel positive emotions. Often we’re going to feel like a threatened gazelle. It’s possible and important to take a step back and say, is this a situation where I can actually be the lion, adopt some positive thoughts that empower me to have a positive physiological response. This is a key component of a peak performance response, which is crucial for workplaces.
How do you navigate workplace stress that is out of your control, such as a poor manager or job insecurity?
In the workplace we have a certain role and we’re at a certain level in the hierarchy. Unless we’re at the top, we have a limited range of control. It comes down to this balance of how much control we have over our resources - such as if we have enough people to help, the level of decision making power we have, and whether the demands and deadlines asked of us are realistic. When we have very little job control, this is a predictor of long term poor mental health, and even physical health, such as the early onset of cardiovascular disease.
To manage this, we really do need to maximise the positive rewards of work.
I do love what our US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, talks about in terms of workplace health. He talks about keeping our workers safe, and this includes psychological safety. This involves moving from a workplace of competition and stress, to one of compassion and trust. I know that the WONE platform is big on helping people feel safe physically and emotionally at work.
Another major factor that protects us from stress at work is social support - connection, community and belonging. That’s partly why work has felt so different when we’ve not been seeing people over the last few years.
Do you think it’s possible to build a high performance culture with wellbeing at its core?
There’s an inherent tension between wellbeing and high performance. If we have a high performance workplace, we’re going to have a lot of demand. Too much demand pushes us to rush, and rushing doesn’t allow for growth, creativity or peak performance.
I do think that we can create these high performance workplaces, central to this is putting a high value on emotional and social wellbeing. How is the group functioning? How can we create group interactions and meetings that are actually promoting creativity, positivity and support instead of a stress mindset where we’re just rushing?
What people don’t realise is that even if they have a stressful day ahead, those practices in the moment, especially if done with a group, really do reduce stress within minutes. You can see some metrics like heart rate going down rapidly. If you give yourself 5 or 10 minutes, you can change your physiology and your subjective experience. They’re so immediate.
What effect does toxic stress have on you and can it be reversed?
We do know the effects of toxic stress. When we have unrelenting demands, feelings of anxiety, fear and overwhelm for days or even years, we call that toxic or overwhelming stress because it wears out our regulatory systems. We’re so good at coping with daily stress, mounting a stress response and recovering, but when we get into situations where we’re not actively managing our stress response, we’re not getting respite and it continues on for too long, then we see the effects on our ageing biology.
There’s all sorts of ways we can look into the cell and see toxic stress - for example telomeres are indices of how long our cells can go on dividing. Greater stress results in shorter telomeres. We’re now discovering that our mitochondria are also stress responsive, and mood responsive.
What’s more important and interesting is understanding how we can reverse stress-related damage. We can shift our nervous system from a predominantly sympathetic state where we’re actively having an arousal response, to a predominantly parasympathetic state, where we’re increasing our heart rate variability, and putting our body into a more restorative state. Practices like meditation, breathing and nature immersion help us to do this.
In the workplace, these short breaks are critical and you can do this by building them in as a lifestyle - like starting the day or a meeting with a practice.
