The secret to coping with stress - how to protect your brain and feel calmer now

Episode Overview

• Professor Carmine Pariante, Professor of Biological Psychiatry at King's College London, joins host Jonathan Wolf (co-founder of ZOE) to explore the biological mechanisms of stress, how chronic stress damages physical and mental health, and evidence-based ways to cope.
• The conversation traces how an evolutionary survival system designed for 15-to-30-minute physical threats becomes toxic when activated for days, weeks, months, or years by modern psychosocial pressures.
• Listeners learn how chronic stress drives systemic inflammation and elevated cortisol, increasing the risk of metabolic disorders, heart attacks, clinical depression, and early mortality.
• The episode debunks popular wellness myths—such as the viral "cortisol cocktail"—and provides actionable, scientifically grounded strategies to shift from numbing avoidance habits to restorative, anti-inflammatory behaviors.

Key Concepts

• Stress as a Perceived Mismatch: Stress is not inherently bad, nor is it identical to anxiety. It is defined as a personalized, moment-by-moment mismatch where a challenge is—or is perceived to be—greater than our ability to cope with it. Most people mistakenly feel internal guilt about being stressed rather than recognizing that stressors originate from the outside.
• The Acute vs. Chronic Biological Timeline: When facing an immediate threat, the sympathetic nervous system instantly raises heart rate and blood pressure to pump blood to the brain and muscles, while priming the immune system for potential injury. A few minutes later, the adrenal glands (sitting atop the kidneys) release cortisol to generate glucose for energy, narrow mental attention, and shut down non-essential functions like digestion. While this system was built for 15-to-20-minute or half-hour physical encounters, modern psychosocial stressors (such as work pressure, exams, or loneliness) trigger the exact same biological cascade continuously for days, weeks, months, or years.
• Physical Damage, Heart Attacks, and Stomach Pain: Cortisol is not something we should always try to lower, as it is necessary for acute survival, and trying to pharmacologically manipulate or measure it without toxic medications is unhelpful. However, chronically elevated cortisol and inflammation raise blood pressure, blood lipids, cholesterol, and the risk of diabetes and weight gain. Specifically, inflammation makes circulating blood cells stickier; when combined with cholesterol-narrowed vessels, this causes coagulation that blocks blood flow in the heart, triggering a heart attack. In the stomach, cortisol increases gastric acidity in the internal layers, causing reflux, indigestion, and acute "stress gastritis."
• Sickness Behavior and Measurable Inflammation: Psychosocial stress raises blood inflammation—measured via white blood cell chemicals called cytokines, specifically interleukin-6 (IL-6)—to the same magnitude as having a common cold (though lower than severe COVID or sepsis). Because the brain perceives this stress-induced inflammation as an infection, it triggers "sickness behavior," shutting down physical activity and social interaction to conserve energy (which Pariante notes possibly evolved to protect peers from infection), explaining why stress causes profound physical fatigue.
• Anhedonia and the Brain's Reward System: Chronic stress and inflammation alter the brain's reward circuitry in two ways. First, cortisol activates reward mechanisms that drive cravings for high-fat and high-sugar comfort foods (which temporarily reduce cortisol via pleasure), as well as alcohol, smoking, drugs, and social media scrolling. Second, high inflammation eventually shuts down the reward system entirely, causing anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) and depression. In clinical trials by Pariante and others, giving depressed patients anti-inflammatory medications (originally developed for arthritis, pain, or autoimmune disorders) switched their brain reward areas back on and restored their ability to feel pleasure. Additionally, weight gain in depressed patients creates a vicious cycle because fat tissue actively produces inflammation and releases it into the bloodstream.
• Emotional Dissociation: Attempting to suppress emotions or dissociate from sadness and worry does not stop the physiological stress response. Even if you convince yourself mentally that you are not worried, your body continues to experience the full physical damage of stress without your conscious awareness.
• The Expectation Paradox and Control: Despite enjoying far greater safety and quality of life than hunter-gatherers, modern humans suffer heavily from chronic stress because we expect a perfect, stress-free life, whereas our ancestors accepted hardship and mortality as normal. Furthermore, uncontrollable stress is the most damaging form of stress, making the identification of what you can control a central pillar of mental health.
• The Myth of the "Cortisol Cocktail" and Alcohol's Rebound Effect: Viral trends like "cortisol face," "cortisol belly" (outside of endocrine dysfunction, exogenous steroid medications, or cortisol-driven overeating), and the "cortisol cocktail" (orange juice, coconut water, salt, and potassium or magnesium powders) lack scientific validity; none of the cocktail's ingredients link to affecting cortisol levels. Similarly, while alcohol numbs stress for 10 to 30 minutes while drinking, it physiologically activates the stress response afterward, causing sky-high cortisol and severe inflammation in people who abuse it.
• Sponsor Disclosure: Host Jonathan Wolf discloses that he is the co-founder of ZOE and promotes ZOE's Daily 30+ gut supplement (containing over 30 plants, 4g of fiber per scoop, omega-3s, plant protein, calcium, and copper), noting that ZOE ran a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the product during its development.

Quotes

• At 0:00 - "People with chronic stress, they die younger, because with high level of stress, your inflammation in the blood goes up, and your cortisol goes up, which actually increase your blood pressure for days and weeks and months in a row." - Explaining the severe, life-shortening cardiovascular and inflammatory toll of long-term stress.
• At 4:03 - "Stress is every situation where the challenge that we're facing is bigger, or at least is perceived as bigger, than our ability to cope with it, to deal with it." - Defining the core psychological and biological trigger of the stress response.
• At 8:35 - "The problem with today's society is much more about chronic stress. So the question is how a body that was really created for stressors that 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 stressors are mostly psychosocial and continuous, rather than acute and disappearing after 20 minutes." - Framing the evolutionary mismatch between human physiology and modern daily life.
• At 14:57 - "One of the things that cortisol does is that it activates mechanisms of reward so that increase 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." - Clarifying why stress biologically drives comfort eating and secondary metabolic health issues.
• At 26:35 - "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 going to be feeling sad, I'm not going to be feeling worried about it because it's all in my brain, but your body will continue to feel sad." - Warning against emotional suppression as a coping mechanism.
• At 39:43 - "It may be, actually, that that's the reason why we feel so stressed, is because of our expectation that we should have a stress-free life." - Highlighting how unrealistic modern expectations amplify our perception of stress and guilt.
• At 42:48 - "We recently did some work using singing groups for mothers 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 in inflammation." - Providing concrete clinical evidence that engaging in pleasurable, communal activities rapidly alters stress biomarkers.
• At 49:55 - "It's numbing it, and then usually it gets worse after. I mean, partly alcohol increase cortisol. People with alcohol problem, they have sky-high level of cortisol, they increase inflammation terribly. So people with alcohol dependence and alcohol abuse, they have high level of cortisol and high level of inflammation. So physiologically, it does everything that you don't want to do, because it activate the stress response." - Debunking the idea that alcohol helps unwind, showing it actively worsens stress physiology.
• At 52:33 - "These things are doing it without numbing us. So 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 one that numbing the stress, but they're not helping us finding a solution or finding a way of dealing with it." - Distinguishing between restorative coping mechanisms and dysfunctional avoidance habits.

Takeaways

• Audit your control and adjust your expectations: Stop feeling guilty about experiencing stress and drop the expectation of a stress-free life. Analyze your stressors to separate what you cannot control from what you can—such as reducing working hours or strictly protecting your non-working hours—and talk to a close friend, partner, or relative as your first step during acute stress rather than keeping it inside.
• Replace "numbing" habits with "present" pleasurable activities: Avoid using alcohol, high-sugar/high-fat comfort foods, or endless phone scrolling to numb out (limit phone relief to 10 minutes so it doesn't replace human connection). Instead, schedule activities that keep you present and actively lower cortisol and inflammation, such as a 1-hour group singing session, walking in green areas or woods, reading, engaging in art and creativity, or spending quality time with friends and family.
• Engage in enjoyable physical exercise: Use physical movement to trigger your muscles to produce anti-inflammatory chemicals and generate a sense of reward. You do not need to lift weights or run; choose any enjoyable activity that raises your heart rate slightly and causes physical fatigue, such as a long walk, which also induces a meditative focus on repetitive stepping.
• Adopt an anti-inflammatory mental health diet: Support your brain and buffer against depression by eating a fish-rich diet (such as eating fish twice a week, which has the strongest population-level evidence) and consuming plenty of fruits and vegetables every day (which has promising evidence), while exercising control over high-fat and high-sugar intake.
• Practice "compassionate waiting" for sleep: When stress disrupts your sleep, avoid panicking; practice acceptance of difficult nights, maintain a consistent bedtime, minimize screen time, and read a book. If sleep issues prevent you from functioning at work, seek professional psychological intervention, keeping in mind that sleep medications are generally only recommended for an acute phase of a week or so.