Specialists › Sleep, stress & connection › Elissa Epel

SpecialistStress

Elissa Epel

PhD · Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, UC San Francisco · director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center · co-author of The Telomere Effect and author of The Stress Prescription

Go-to expert for: how chronic stress ages the body

Who and why

Elissa Epel is a health psychologist and professor at UC San Francisco who studies how chronic stress gets under the skin and speeds up biological ageing. With Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn she showed that long-term stress is linked to shorter telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes, and she now tests ways to build stress resilience. She is a member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Why it matters after 50: Many people in their 50s and beyond carry long-term stress from caregiving, work or health worries. Her work suggests that how you respond to stress, not just how much you face, may affect how fast your cells age.

What Epel recommends

  • Separate what you can control from what you cannot. Act on the first and practise letting go of the second.Some evidence
  • Use short, tolerable doses of physical stress to train resilience, such as high-intensity interval training. Cold showers or sauna are options, but check with your doctor first.Some evidence
  • Reframe a stressful moment as energising (for example, telling yourself this is exciting) rather than only as a threat.Some evidence
  • Build in deep rest: protected, screen-free downtime each day, using slow breathing to switch into a calmer state.Personal habit
  • Spend time in nature or green space to let your attention recover; if that is hard, even looking at the sky or nature scenes can help.Personal habit
  • Telomere length is a research marker, not a personal health score. At-home telomere tests are unreliable and not worth relying on.Note

Signature: Stress and telomeres (the caregiver study)

Her 2004 study of mothers caring for a chronically ill child linked higher perceived stress and longer caregiving to shorter telomeres. She turned this line of work into The Telomere Effect (2017, with Elizabeth Blackburn) and a practical seven-part programme, The Stress Prescription (2022).

In your plan

Choose her for stress: short daily stress practices that fit around your training.

Build my mix

Research and honest caveats

Life stress and telomere shortening

Among 58 healthy mothers (39 of them caring for a chronically ill child), the most stressed had telomeres shorter than the least stressed by the equivalent of at least a decade of extra cellular ageing.

Epel, Blackburn et al., PNAS, 2004

  • The telomere findings come largely from small, observational studies, so they show links rather than proof that stress causes faster ageing or that stress-reduction reverses it. Telomere length varies widely between healthy people and is a noisy measure for any one person.

Career highlights

  1. 2004Published the landmark PNAS study linking chronic stress to shorter telomeres
  2. 2016Elected to the National Academy of Medicine
  3. 2017Published The Telomere Effect with Elizabeth Blackburn
  4. 2022Published The Stress Prescription: 7 Days to More Joy and Ease

Sources