Elissa Epel, PhD (#03)

The Shannon Harvey Podcast

Today’s podcast interview is a little different from the first two. Although, like the others, this interview was done for my last documentary project, My Year of Living Mindfully, it isn’t with someone who’s specifically a mindfulness researcher. It’s with a scientist at the forefront of understanding the connection between our mind, body and health. If you’ve seen my first documentary, The Connection, you’ll know that is a topic I’m really committed to understanding more. I did this interview while I was still setting-up my ridiculously elaborate, hare brained experiment to see what would happen to my health and wellbeing if I meditated every day for a year. It meant having to take a plane from my home in Sydney, Australia to the other side of the world, then taking another plane and yet another plane. Eventually I arrived at the Global Wellness Summit in Palm Beach, Florida, where Professor Elissa Epel, the Director of the Aging, Metabolism and Emotion Center at University of California San Francisco Medical School, was giving a key note speech about her research investigating how chronic stress can impact our health and biological ageing, and how activities like mindfulness may slow or even reverse those effects. I knew the journey would be worth it because although Elissa and I hadn’t met before, she had already made a big impression on how my own lifestyle was influencing my health. Among many other things, she co-authored a best-selling book called The Telomere Effect, with the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist, Elizabeth Blackburn. Elissa’s influential research demonstrating that mind-body activities like mindfulness training can slow down the rate at which our cells age, was the reason I’d enlisted the help of Associate Professor, Hilda Picket, from Sydney University’s Children’s Medical Research Institute. Hilda had already measured my telomeres from two control blood samples taken before I began meditating daily. I really wanted to know whether doing something with my mind could have downstream effects throughout my body, and impact my physical health.