FLAME with Brad Hook
The Stress Response Was Built to Save Your Life, Not Your Future
Does your immune system have more say over your thoughts than you realise? Dr Aoife O'Donovan, Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF and director of the THRIVE Lab, has spent nearly two decades studying how psychological stress gets under the skin and into the brain — and why a system built for short-term survival so often mortgages long-term health.
The stress response evolved to save your life in the next sixty seconds, not to protect your next sixty years — and it can't tell the difference between a predator, a memory and a worry. Aoife explains why humans mount a full biological response to events long past or that may never happen, and how inflammation then rewires the loop: sharpening the amygdala's threat detector while loosening the prefrontal brakes that would normally talk it down. Trauma, in this picture, is a body left on alert for years.
The hopeful half of the conversation is just as rigorous. Pessimism and perceived threat predict shorter telomeres — yet Aoife's research shows biological aging in immune cells can move in reverse. She also shares early findings from UCSF's Translational Psychedelic Research Program, where psilocybin therapy in Parkinson's patients was linked to lower inflammation and reduced mitochondrial stress.
The practical close lands squarely on FLAME ground: stop fighting the nervous system you have and design around it. Aoife's counsel — figure out what kind of nervous system you've got, build your environment to suit it, and start absurdly small — is a working manual for anyone whose threat detector runs hot.
In this episode
- The stress response protects you today at the expense of your future — and that isn't your fault
- Inflammation and threat sensitivity feed each other, between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex
- Pessimism and perceived threat predict shorter telomeres — yet immune-cell aging is reversible
- Early UCSF findings: psilocybin therapy linked to lower inflammation in Parkinson's patients
- Figure out what kind of nervous system you have, then build your environment around it
- Why starting absurdly small works
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