Wisdom Works CEO Renee Moorefield interviews Rachel Gilgoff, Chief Medical Officer at the California Institute of Stress and Resilience, about a new framework for understanding the biology of stress that she and her colleagues are putting into practice.
In this insightful and vulnerable conversation, Rachel shares the new stress phenotyping framework, a mental model designed to help us understand how our experiences can affect our individual physiology. The framework outlines eight mechanistic pathways for chronic stress-sensory motor, arousal and energy, reward processing, autonomic nervous system, endocrine, cognitive processes, and attachment and relational-and evidence-based approaches for treating stress based on each pathway.
They also discuss how the evolutionary purpose of our stress response is to help us survive, how we may pass our traumas from generation to generation, and in today’s environment, how being bombarded with stressors (such as digital overload) may be training us to live and work from a reactive orientation.