Does your immune system have more say over your thoughts than you realize? Dr. Aoife O’Donovan, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 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. In this conversation, she explains why humans mount a full stress response to events that are long past or may never happen, how inflammation sharpens the brain’s threat detector while loosening its brakes, and why trauma can leave the body on alert for years. She also shares early findings from the UCSF Translational Psychedelic Research Program, where psilocybin therapy was linked to lower inflammation and mitochondrial stress in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and research showing that biological aging in immune cells can move in reverse. A candid, hopeful guide to working with a nervous system that evolved for short-term survival rather than long-term flourishing.

In this episode:

• Why the stress response protects you today at the expense of your long-term health, and why that isn’t your fault
• Inflammation and threat sensitivity feed each other: what happens between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex under stress
• Pessimism and perceived threat predict shorter telomeres, yet immune cell aging turns out to be reversible
• “Figure out what kind of nervous system you have, then build your environment around it,” plus why starting absurdly small works

Aoife’s lab (THRIVE Lab, UCSF): https://odonovanlab.ucsf.edu
Aoife’s UCSF profile: https://profiles.ucsf.edu/aoife.odonovan

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