Elissa: Now, there are biohacks and lifestyle hacks and that is a super exciting interesting area that hasn't been studied. Again, there's going to be some risks but some probably better benefits than some of the drugs we've been talking about. So by that, I mean, the intermittent fasting, extreme breathing, some of, you know, the things that you feature on your podcast that are more...

Rhonda: Has intermittent fasting been shown to...?

Elissa: No one's looked at that yet.

Rhonda: I'm sure that's in progress, right?

Elissa: I don't know.

Rhonda: It's got to be. Wow. So yeah, not that you're aware of. So yeah, that would be...

Elissa: I mean, not with telomeres. I'm sure they've looked at it with other...

Rhonda: With telomeres. Yeah, other aging biomarkers for sure. And certainly like the mitochondrial health, like you mentioned earlier. Yeah. But cool, so...

Elissa: So the meditation I think that for some people, they cannot stand to sit, it's not going to be sitting meditation and that's okay. Yes, we studied it to death. Mindfulness is in the news every day. Go to your... we're in October. In your magazine stand when you check out is a special issue of "Time" on mindfulness. And it has one of our studies, this meditation retreat study where it looks like people...telomeres really benefited from a three-week residential retreat. That's exciting and especially benefited if they were people who are particularly neurotic. If they kind of have a lot of, you know, tendency for negative emotions.

Rhonda: So, people, they benefited from their baseline, you mean?

Elissa: We see lengthening, we don't want to be like, you can lengthen your telomeres. Because like how the hell do they lengthen in three weeks, we don't know. But it looks good. So that's for people who love meditation. Try it, you know, if you haven't tried it, try it because it can only benefit you if you like it, and it can become a habit. But there's other things. So like, for me, it's yoga, like it's got to have the movement in it. So people need to have...you have to have some vigorous activity, it can be walking, you should have some mind-body activity that changes things. It's restorative, it's not the same as an aerobic exercise. And that turns on, we think things like vagal tone and more restorative processes.

Rhonda: What's vagal tone? What do you mean?

Elissa: So heart rate variability. And then, you know, I think positive stress should be part of the menu. We don't really think about that much. But like we're doing this study now where we're, you know, comparing things like high-intensity interval training to extreme breathing and meditation. And it's like these are really different but we think they're going to benefit these aging processes in different ways. And we want to see what those ways are.

Rhonda: Excellent, you know, one of my meditation at least for a long time sort of my favorite thing to do for meditating would be a long run. Like I'm not one of those people... for sitting still and like just trying to do the breathing it's hard for me. But like going for a long run, my mind I go into the zone and it really is very refreshing for me. I recently after having my son, I got into this high-intensity interval training, these spin classes which were an hour long and amazing workout, certainly more low impact. But one difference I do notice between the two is that I don't have the mindfulness that I had with the run.

Elissa: After the run.

Rhonda: So yeah, because...

Elissa: Or during.

Rhonda: Well, you know, there is points where I do get in the zone but, you know, it's a little different than doing the high-intensity stuff. And it doesn't seem so... I'm not getting in that zone like I do on the long run. So it's kind of like...

Elissa: Really interesting.

Rhonda: Incorporate both.