The secret to coping with stress - how to protect your brain and body, and feel calmer now | Prof Carmine Pariante

Growing up, many of us were taught to just stay calm and carry on - as if stress was all in the mind, with no real effect on the body. But chronic stress can change your brain, raise your risk of heart disease, and even shorten your life.

In this episode, we ask: what happens when a stress response built to last minutes never switches off?

Today, Professor Carmine Pariante, one of the world's leading researchers on stress, helps us understand what’s happening in your body during a stressful moment and why chronic stress disrupts sleep, appetite, and energy levels. Carmine also explains how worried you should be about cortisol, and whether "cortisol face" and "cortisol belly" are backed by evidence.

By the end, you’ll understand why stress can be so powerful, when it becomes harmful, and have some evidence-based ways to manage it.

Next time you reach for wine, your phone, or something sweet after a hard day, ask yourself: is this helping you cope, or helping you avoid how you feel?

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Timecodes

00:00 Intro

01:10 Should you be aiming for zero stress?

06:13 Inside your fight-or-flight response

11:19 Can stress actually cause a heart attack?

13:15 Why your stress response won't switch off

15:33 Why stress eating isn't a willpower problem

17:15 Why emotional stress feels physical

21:00 The earliest sign of chronic stress

22:05 There's no such thing as "it's all in your head"

25:15 Stress causes the same inflammation as a cold

29:54 The blunt truth about chronic stress

31:07 How stress clogs your arteries

32:55 Why chronic stress can steal your joy

35:10 What a brain scan reveals about chronic stress

37:07 Is "cortisol face" actually real?

38:49 Does the viral cortisol cocktail actually work?

41:20 Why control is the key to coping with stress

42:46 How singing for one hour lowered cortisol

45:15 Why exercise is such powerful stress relief

47:57 Foods with the strongest evidence against stress

49:45 Why alcohol doesn't actually relieve stress

50:58 Is your phone making your stress worse?

54:04 The first thing to do when stress overwhelms you

56:06 Why modern life never switches your stress off

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Free resources from ZOE

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Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint (zoe.com/brainhealth?utm_medium=zoe_podcast&…)

How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health (zoe.com/2026?utm_medium=zoe_podcast&utm_so…)

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Mentioned in today's episode

Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12910469), The American Journal of Psychiatry (2025)

Implementing a group singing intervention for depression (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39497844), Frontiers in Medicine (2024)

The Relationship between Diet and the Occurrence of Depressive Symptoms (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10489963), Nutrients (2023)

Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us knowhere (gf6hx47iu5g.typeform.com/topicsuggestion).

Episode transcripts are available here (zoe.com/learn/category/podcasts).