PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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Learn why uncertainty fuels anxiety and how noticing our body’s stress signals can help us find calm.

Summary: One in five adults in the U.S. report living with anxiety, and many of us struggle to control or avoid the feelings that come with it. Science shows that tuning into the body, rather than resisting discomfort, can actually reduce anxiety and strengthen resilience. Join us on The Science of Happiness as we explore what anxiety teaches us about control, uncertainty, and how to care for ourselves with more compassion.

How To Do This Practice:

1. Create a quiet moment for yourself: Find a space where you won’t be interrupted—even just for 30 seconds. Close the door, silence your phone, and step away from distractions.
2. Take a deep breath in: Begin with one slow, steady inhale. On the exhale, let your body soften. Keep your breathing gentle, not forced.
3. Do a quick scan: Where are you holding stress? Maybe in your chest, shoulders, or jaw. Simply notice the tightness or pressure without trying to change it.
4. Breathe into those sensations: With each inhale, imagine sending your breath to the place where stress lives in your body. With each exhale, release a little of that tension—like letting it flow out.
5. Name what’s on your mind: Ask yourself: What am I feeling? Am I anxious about the past, worried about the future, or caught up in uncertainty? You don’t need to solve or fix anything—just acknowledge it.
6. Let it go, even briefly: Tell yourself, I don’t have to fix this right now. Allow the stress to soften as you exhale. Even 20–30 seconds can bring a sense of calm and clarity.

Today’s Guests:

JENNY LITTLE is a Health and Fitness Director at the Albany YMCA.

DR. ELISSA EPEL is a psychologist and professor at UCSF. Her research shows how chronic stress and anxiety affect our bodies at the cellular level.

Learn more about Dr. Elissa Epel here: https://www.elissaepel.com/

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

How Holding Yourself Can Reduce Stress: https://tinyurl.com/2hvhkwe6

Hot to Tap Your Way to Calm and Clarity: https://tinyurl.com/psmskjyp

How To Tune Out The Noise: https://tinyurl.com/4hhekjuh

Related Happiness Breaks:

Make Uncertainty Part of the Process: https://tinyurl.com/234u5ds7

A Meditation for When You Feel Uneasy: https://tinyurl.com/4x27ut3p

A Meditation For When You Have Too Much To Do: https://tinyurl.com/5dvk3d7m

Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

SHUKA KALANTARI: If you walk into Jenny Little's workout class at the YMCA, you can't help but feel happy. 

JENNY LITTLE: Welcome to the Albany Y. My name is Jennie.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Jenny is full of joy and boundless energy. Her classes are always packed, a line of people waiting out the door to get in. She makes a fun playlist for each class, and she's always singing along.

JENNY LITTLE: [Singing] for class on Thursday morning.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Jenny encourages everyone to smile and do their best in class, she's the epitome of positivity, except Jenny is also stressed out, dealing with a lot of uncertainty, and sometimes she gets anxiety attacks. It all started a little over 20 years ago, when she was a young mom.

JENNY LITTLE: My children were small, maybe three and four. They're close in age, and we had just moved across the country. My husband was still in California, and I was in Florida with the boys, and one night I was sitting at home and the boys were asleep and I could not catch my breath, and I looked in the mirror, and my eyes were dilated, and I had this weird sort of plasticky metallic taste in my mouth, and I thought, I've been poisoned. I'm going to die. And my boys were here by themselves, so I called 9 [laughs] 911, and the paramedics came very quickly, and they could see the chaos in the house. And they took one look at me, and they said, might you be under a little bit of stress? And I said, Yes. Do you have any wine? I said, Yes. And they said, We're going to give you a Valium and you're going to take a glass of wine and you're going to be just fine. Mrs. Little and I thought that's an anxiety attack that I have never quite been able to shake ever since.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari, anxiety is something many of us face. The CDC reports that one in every five adults in the US experience it every week. And we know from research that chronic stress and anxiety is connected to things like premature cellular aging, poor cardiovascular health and inflammation, but research shows that by noticing and naming the stress and anxiety we feel in our bodies, instead of avoiding it, we can actually reduce its hold on us. That's what our guest, Jenny Little tried for our show. We'll hear from Jenny and also from Dr. Elissa Epel, an expert on stress well being and healthy aging

DR. ELISSA EPEL: By identifying the uncertainty that we are specifically living with, in this moment in this body, we can have more states of recovery and ease in our nervous system, in our mind, we are slowing biological processes of aging.

SHUKA KALANTARI: More after this message from our sponsors.

DACHER KELTNER: How much awe and wonder do you experience in your life? From The John Templeton Foundation, our sponsors at The Science of Happiness, The Templeton Ideas Podcast explores the most awe inspiring ideas in our world, with the people who investigate them. Host Tom Burnett sits down with inspiring thinkers like Alison Gopnik, David Brooks, Tyler Cowens, and Gretchen Rubin to discuss how their investigations have transformed their lives and how they may transform yours. Learn more at templeton.org/podcast.

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SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Joining us is Jenny Little, a long time instructor and director of the Bay Area YMCA that I happen to attend and love. Jenny is usually in constant motion leading fast paced classes and always helping everybody out. But for this episode, she tried something different, a practice in slowing down and tuning in to the subtle signs of stress and anxiety that we tend to hold in our bodies. She joins us to tell us how the practice went for her. Jenny, welcome to The Science of Happiness. 

JENNY LITTLE: Thank you so much for having me. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: I've been coming to your classes at the YMCA for probably over a year now, and it's shifted my whole state of being. And it's so much more than just physical movement, you play fun loud music constantly reminding us to smile into the mirror, and it creates this amazing energy and connection between everyone in the class. So I personally invited you to be a guest on the science of happiness after a barbell class one day, and with this idea in my head that you would want to talk about the power of music, or community, or movement, and you kind of leaned into your chair and you said, let's talk about anxiety. How has anxiety played out in your life these past years?

JENNY LITTLE: If I dive deep and be honest with it. I think a lot of it has to do with control and that I am a fixer. And so in my daily job, I can run in, I can fix it, oop that's broken, that's broken. You need that, quick to lend a hand and fix it. Personal level, maybe not so easy, to snap your fingers and fix someone that's not like fixing a treadmill. When your son is deep in a Covid, depression and no human connection, you take it on. Take it on, and it may not even be my stress. I took on his. My son, Ben, didn't have a group of people, didn't have a connection at all. So he spiraled into a pretty deep depression, which he still struggles with. I mean, we're still, we're not out of the woods. He's after that self love and happiness, and I can't fix it. So that causes me a lot of anxiety.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Speaking of self love and happiness, we shared with you some steps for this embodying anxiety practice. Can you walk us through the step by step of actually, how to do this practice? 

JENNY LITTLE: Sure. Well, for me, it was creating a space just to have that moment. So to understand what it took to do that, I am all day long, visual and auditorial, just on all the time, [music plays] and there's a computer going and there's music going, and there's front desk staff, and there's members and all the things. So I closed the door, [door clicks shut] and I would sit at my desk, no phone, no computer, and it was that that deep inhale that I have come to use when I'm stressed, but it was more than that deep breath in, and then I would start to focus on what my body was feeling on the exhale. I would sort of do a mental checklist. Am I holding stress somewhere? Normally for me, it's neck and shoulders or tightness in my chest, hence the deep breath and the exhale. And as I would do that, I would start to release the tension, and it would start to feel better, I'm telling you, 20 to 30 seconds, and I would start to feel better. The room would just lighten.

SHUKA KALANTARI: The next step in the practice is to name what you're feeling. So you ask yourself, what's on my mind right now? Am I thinking about the past? The future? Am I in the present? What was that step like for you?

JENNY LITTLE: Putting a name to it or actually figuring out what it was, was challenging at first, because it is that for me, that feeling of, if I avoid it, it's going to go away for now, and I'll deal with it later. So this was head on. [music plays] Sometimes it would come to me quickly, what I was feeling or why, and other times I just had to go with, I'm releasing it, and maybe the “why” would come later, so I wouldn't spend too much time thinking about, “what was I stressed about.” It was a moment to think, what's happening right now, not what happened 20 minutes ago, or what's going to happen four hours from now, right now, and is there anything else that I need to be doing? And really, what it taught me was you might not be able to fix it, and avoiding it isn't gonna make it any better. When I first started the practice, I was like, wait, you want me to focus on this stress and where I feel it? Really? I don't want to, you know, I'm gonna push it away. And then it became more clear. If you address it and you breathe into it, it starts to relax, and you start, actually, start to relieve some of those bodily feelings, and maybe clears the way so you can emotionally and maybe cognitively understand why you were feeling that it was just acknowledge it, breathe into it, and by doing that, it let it go.

SHUKA KALANTARI: You know, in psychology, they often talk about the body as a barometer for our emotions, and you know, when I've spoken to you in the past, you said you're very good at recognizing your signs of anxiety. You recognize the tight chest. You recognize the beating of the heart. What did this practice of embodiment add to that awareness,

JENNY LITTLE: The feeling of a more steady state of calm, you know, instead of getting these big highs and these big lows or this, oh, I'm in this thing and I'm stressing it out and I'm powering through it. I think the with the practice, it helped me shift to feeling like, well, this calm thing might be a better place for me, you know, I might be able to get more done over here, instead of it being this, you know, high level, I'm up way up at the top, and my head might explode, and then I get all this stuff done, and then I crash. If I can find a happy place in the middle, I think, you know, longevity wise, it's going to be much better for me. Slowing down is challenging for me, giving myself permission to close the door and have that time for myself has been liberating. I have to say, I never closed that door. And those of you maybe that are listening from the Y, know this, you can enter my office anytime to have time just for yourself and not feel like you're being unproductive. And that was huge for me.

SHUKA KALANTARI: People who are highly anxious tend to want to be very detached from their bodies, but healing often asks us to return to that very place. And so you're kind of diving right in with a practice like this as a high anxiety person, and I'm curious. It was challenging getting into it. It was frightening. What helped you stay with it?

JENNY LITTLE: I think because it was short, I didn't have to stay there long. I tried longer practices, meditation, and I found that very challenging. Some of those were five to seven minutes. I wasn't happening. For me, this is doable, and it actually felt good. So why not? I think at first I was uncomfortable, and then the more I did it, and then I actually felt more calm and present. Even after, I have to say, I probably never did it for longer than 30 to 40 seconds, there started to be a shift, and that it was a welcoming time. It was like, oh, I'm gonna [breathes in] just now if the phone rings or I get a text that might trigger some anxiety response in me, I can take that 30 seconds, I can breathe, and then I'm in such a better spot to offer support to someone, you know, it's like the airline put the mask on first before you help the guy next to you. And I mean, what a great analogy is that is exactly what it is. Take time for yourself. Maybe your stress is adding to the stress of the person you're trying to help.

SHUKA KALANTARI: What words of encouragement would you give to people who want to try this out?

JENNY LITTLE: [Music palys] Don't hesitate. Just do it. It's not a big commitment, but you might find that it actually will help. And you catch yourself doing it without the timer. You know, you catch yourself during the day, having a quiet moment and, gonna check in with myself and checking in with yourself is the best gift you can give yourself. Just acknowledge that your happiness and your calmness might help somebody else. If you're a fixer like me, if you're a doer like me.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Jenny Little, thank you so much for being a guest on The Science of Happiness, and thank you for being my awesome YMCA teacher. 

JENNY LITTLE: Thank you so much for having me

SHUKA KALANTARI: Up next, Dr. Elissa Epel joins us to talk about how stress and anxiety show up in the body.

DR. ELISSA EPEL:  We are so used to holding on to uncertainty that we don't actually recognize the experience. Holding vigilance, tension pressure in our body when nothing is happening.

SHUKA KALANTARI:  

Dr. Epel shares how to gently tune in and notice the stress we hold in our bodies and what happens when we do. Stay tuned.

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SHUKA KALANTARI: I'm Shuka Kalantari. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. We're joined by Dr. Elissa Epel, a psychologist and professor at UCSF. She shares how bringing mindful awareness to things like our breath and physical sensations can help calm the nervous system and ease the toll of uncertainty. Dr. Epel, thank you for joining us today.

DR. ELISSA EPEL: Shuka, so happy to be here, and I'm delighted you want to talk about uncertainty, stress, our uncertain future. It's the big elephant in the room.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Can you describe what is holding onto uncertainty look like in the body, and how does that contribute to chronic stress?

DR. ELISSA EPEL: So uncertainty, stress tends to live in the body, and it makes our nervous system hyper vigilant, so we have higher levels of sympathetic activity and lower levels of parasympathetic activity, and that important vagus nerve that runs from our brain all the way down our body that is very sensitive to levels of stress and subtle stress, like uncertainty stress, and when we are under chronic stress, we get hyper metabolism in our cells. Now my favorite study, Shuka, to demonstrate the effect of uncertainty stress on a cell's aging is actually a study of cells that have been taken out of the body. So they're fibroblasts, and in this study, which was conducted in the lab of Martin Picard from Columbia, he and his team exposed cells to chronic low levels of the stress hormone cortisol. What they found in the study is that the cells that were exposed to chronic low levels of glucocorticoids, cortisol, the actual aging machinery was accelerated, so the telomeres shortened more quickly. The epigenetic age was accelerated, so it was burning up energy and reducing its lifespan. The cells died early.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Well, that's disheartening [laughs].

DR. ELISSA EPEL: Now the good news for us, we have such amazing ability to repair every mechanism that I just mentioned is reversible. So with daily care, with self care practices, like a lifestyle that has some stress reduction, we can turn all of that around we can stabilize our telomeres, reduce oxidative stress, reduce epigenetic age in some studies, and improve our mitochondrial health so that we feel more energy. So the story is actually beautiful, which is that stress is related to aging, and we can reverse stress related damage in any part of our lives, even when we're older, and by identifying the uncertainty that we're specifically living with in this moment, in this body, in this particular period of our life, that's really step one to this discovery process of awareness of our emotions, of what is stressing us out, we can have more states of recovery and ease in our nervous system, in our mind. We are slowing biological processes of aging. We may also be improving our vagal tone and reducing our overall level of bodily stress.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Being embodied is being fully present in the moment in your body, and when we're present, there's less room to get caught up in the past or worry about the future. Is there a link between how well we tolerate uncertainty and our ability to stay present in our bodies, especially when anxiety is high?

DR. ELISSA EPEL: When we feel intolerance of uncertainty, it's a very uncomfortable feeling, because uncertainty of the future is a given, and we have different levels of comfort with that uncertainty. So part of the solution is to allow ourselves to be present now and to be in the body. The body doesn't live in the past or the future like our mind. So when we can shift our attention to body sensations, to relaxing the body. This is such a beautiful way of coming back home, of grounding us in the present, if we don't get really discombobulated by what we find there, the muscle tension, feeling our heart rate, feeling our breathing, the calmness of being in our body now is an option. It's an invitation, shifting our focus to our senses, to our body, is actually pretty powerful in that it takes us out of the worrying mind and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, where we tend to ruminate about things, focus on ourself and focus on negative thoughts, such as, am I safe? We want to control things, and we want certain outcomes, so we can just simply ask ourselves, “What am I expecting to happen? What am I holding in my body?” What all of us can do for general anxiety and stress is to slow our breathing rate. Most of us tend to have subtle hyperventilation, and that means we breathe at a faster rate than we need to, and due to a lot of complex biochemistry, our breathing rate is intertwined with our anxiety level, and so some really promising treatments for anxiety are based on breathing biofeedback, changing the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our blood, and that can actually help with panic attacks. And when we can take deep rest breaks and slow our breathing, relax our nervous system, we are promoting restorative and reparative processes in the cell. So in a sense, that's anti aging and so worrying and trying to control and holding on to uncertainty doesn't help an iota. It only exhausts us. So that's kind of a reason to smile at it and just say, you know okay, I can actually be present right now with ease. At this moment, I'm not controlling things. When we go through our day in a rush, we are choosing to stay in what I call yellow mind, which is a pervasive threat state of stress. We're missing beautiful flowers. We're missing deeper social connections, and that is really the sweetness or the juice of life. The shift out of threat mind states opens up our mind for more expansive emotions, wonder, love, but also just a larger worldview. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: We've been talking today about how anxiety can arise from uncertainty, but uncertainty can also be a pathway to hope.

REBECCA SOLNIT: We are not in paradise. We have not achieved the world of perfect equality and Safety and Justice, but we are in a radically different world, if you take the long view. So all those things were feeding my sense of hope.

SHUKA KALANTARI: We hear from author and climate activist Rebecca Solnit about how the uncertainty of climate change can be used as a source of hope, and how that hope can lead to action. That's next time on The Science of Happiness.

Our research assistants are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our host is usually Dacher Keltner. I'm Shuka Kalantari, executive producer of audio. Have a great day.