Mastering Resilience: Dr. Eva Selhub Explains Stress, Burnout, and the Power of Adaptive Coping

**Episode Introduction – “Transforming Lives: Mastering Resilience & Burnout”**

Welcome to *Transforming Lives*, the podcast where we dive deep into the science of well‑being, the art of leadership, and the tools you need to thrive in today’s high‑stress world. In today’s episode, your hosts Sharmin Prince and Mitzy Dadoun guide you through a powerful, grounding breathing exercise before inviting a remarkable guest—Dr. Eva Selhub, an internationally recognized resilience expert, physician, former Harvard Medical School instructor, and author of six bestselling books, including *Resilience for Dummies* and *Your Health Destiny*.

Dr. Selhub unpacks the fundamental difference between **stress** and **burnout**, explaining how our bodies’ natural homeostatic balance (homeostasis) is constantly challenged by everyday imbalances—what she calls “entropy” and “neg‑entropy.” She shows how the brain’s built‑in alarm system (the stress response) can be either **manageable**—triggering adaptive coping like eating when hungry—or **unmanageable**, leading to chronic activation, allostatic load, and ultimately burnout.

Listeners will learn:

* Why our modern coping mechanisms—screen time, comfort food, and instant dopamine hits—are largely maladaptive, while nature, connection, and purposeful activity remain the true resilience boosters.  
* A **five‑minute “Shield” meditation** (Slow‑down, Honor, Inhale, Explore, Listen, Decision) that instantly resets the nervous system and shifts you from a victim mindset to a co‑creator mindset.  
* The **six pillars of resilience**—Physical vitality, Emotional intelligence, Mindset, Relationships, Spiritual connection, and Leadership responsibility—each with practical questions to assess and strengthen your foundation.  
* How Dr. Selhub’s expertise translates into executive leadership, helping leaders cultivate self‑awareness, self‑compassion, and organizational coherence.  
* A sneak peek at her new online program, *Foundations of Mastering Resilience*, which delivers lifelong access to videos, workbooks, and guided meditations.

We’ll also hear rapid‑fire answers that reveal Dr. Selhub’s favorite mood‑boosting song, the most overrated wellness advice, the biggest myth about burnout, and her go‑to recommendation—*The Power of Now*.

Whether you’re a busy professional, a budding leader, or anyone yearning for a healthier, more purposeful life, this episode equips you with science‑backed insights and actionable tools to transform stress into sustained resilience. Tune in, breathe deeply, and get ready to reclaim your vitality.

Sharmin Prince
Welcome to the Transforming Lives panel podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Sharmin Prince.

Mitzy Dadoun
And I am your other host, Mitzy Dadoun. And we have a guest with us today, Dr. Eva Selhub. We will introduce her further after we do our breathing exercises.

Sharmin Prince
Join us for a brief breathing exercise by taking a deep inhale through your nose and out through your mouth. Again, deep inhale and exhale. In and out. Again, in and as you exhale, just let go of everything that didn't serve you today.

Again in, and on this exhale, let go of the to-do list that you have. Just let it go so that you can be present and grounded with us for the next 30 minutes. Again in, and breathe normally. Thank you for joining us for that brief breathing exercise.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Eva Selhub, an internationally recognized resiliency expert, physician, and former Harvard Medical School instructor. She is the author of six books, including Resilience for Dummies and Your Health Destiny. Dr. Selhub brings a unique integration of medical science and neuroscience to help us understand how to master resilience in our own lives. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. This was my first question. You mentioned the stress response, self-regulation, but oftentimes we hear the word stress and we hear the word burnout. And from your unique vantage point, of being a physician and even a neuroscientist.

What are you seeing? Or can I say, you may know it's the root cause of this collective exhaustion that we're experiencing today and feeling burnout or stress or sometime a combination of both?

Speaker 2
Yeah. I think it's important to delineate what stress is. Not all stress is bad. I think it's important to understand that stress is a term of physics.

okay going back to this idea of coherence and entropy so every living organism eventually is going to die period that's sort of entropy that means that you're in a stable system that's eventually going to disperse into dust imagine that in our psyche every cell of our body knows that so it spends the entire life avoiding that or trying to what we call neg entropy you know negation of entropy what allows us to stay whole or to believe that we're whole. So and how do we know that we're okay? It's a term called homeostasis, which is that state of stability.

I'm okay. So that's how the mind-body-spirit connection says, I'm okay. It's when we get into homeostasis, which is that place of balance or harmony. Now, because everything is living, breathing, and moving, It's impossible to stay in homeostasis.

There's no such thing. You're not going to sit here for the next 20 minutes without having to shift positions. At some point, you're going to get uncomfortable. That's stress.

So every time the system has an imbalance to its state of balance, I'm hungry, that's a stress. So the stress is what then alerts the brain to do something to get back into homeostasis. It's a term called allostasis. The ability to get back into stability by making a change.

Okay, so my energy chain is shifting, my balance is off because my blood sugar's dropped. So then my brilliant body's going to pick up that imbalance, send signals to my brain, And my brain has a database of information of what to do in such cases. And then it motivates or initiates the action to do so. So your database has somewhat formed coming in.

There's a manual in there from your ancestors. But then the rest is built from the day you're born. The day, the minute the sperm eats the egg and the neurons are forming all over your body, that information is coming in. How do I deal with different scenarios?

So let's say, as you're growing up, 10 out of 10 times you were hungry, and 10 out of 10 times you got fed, or you learned how to get food, or you were given money to get food. And you realize you have all these different ways of satisfying that stress, which is hunger. So now we're going to anticipate the future, that should I be hungry, I'll be OK. But what if you grew up, as your brain is developing, and only three of those times you had food?

The rest of the time you went

Sharmin Prince
hungry.

Speaker 2
So now you're developing the notion that I'm not safe, that I could die at any moment, and that you never know. So my anticipation of my future is now fear. I didn't come in with fear around it. I didn't even know that it was an issue.

But now I do. Because without food, I can't maintain my coherence. Again, this is not something you're thinking about. It's happening on a cellular level, on the neurological level, on the psychic level.

So that now is creating the template from which everything else is based. You could be a wealthy multi-millionaire with a refrigerator that's totally full and have access to your own restaurants. But in your brain, it's never enough. because that's how you're wired.

We all have something. Nobody had a perfect upbringing. Nobody had perfect ancestors, you know, ancestral history that led to where we are today. But there is an internal wiring that anticipates trauma, that anticipates something going wrong.

That's sort of how we then perceive ourselves within the larger context of the world. Am I enough? Do I have enough? That's what stress is.

Stress is the perception of not having or being enough, but there is a difference. Again, with those two scenarios, I don't have food right now, that's true, but I also believe that I can get food. So that's going to affect the stress response very differently because there's no fear there. It's just a manageable stress.

My system will get activated to then initiate an action, but then the stress system will be extinguished because the action has been taken care of. But if there's fear there, the system is activated and doesn't get put out. Why is that important? A manageable stress versus an unmanageable stress or the perception of an unmanageable, because that fight or flight response involves increased heart rate, blood pressure, inflammation, muscle tension, a breaking down of the digestive system and the hormonal system.

And it's essentially the reason why we get sick. And then the sickness itself is a stress that isn't being managed. So our beliefs, the food that we put in our body, whether or not we're moving our bodies and exercising, whether or not we're sleeping, our relationships, our thoughts, all these things can either be stresses that are manageable or stresses that are unmanageable, which all affect the stress response. And so if a stress is not being managed, remember I said allostatic, then we start getting an allostatic load.

And that load is what causes the system to break down. And that's when we get burnout. Why is that more common now? Because the things that we normally would use to help us cope, that we call adaptive coping versus maladaptive coping.

Adaptive coping is I'm hungry and I eat. So I'm taking care of the stress. Maladaptive coping is I'm anxious and I eat. So the eating is making me feel better.

It's calming that stress response temporarily, but it's not solving the problem. Okay, so we've developed a lot of maladaptive coping techniques like screen time. because it stimulates dopamine and is distracting and helps us not have to deal with our issues. Or comfort food, which is loaded in fats and sugars and trans fats and chemicals, but it feels good in the moment and calms our anxiety or medications or drugs or whatever it may be.

And we've lost other things that normally helped humans cope, like spending time out in nature. and spending time with one another, the love and connection that we connect with one another, and ultimately the trust, which is the same molecule, the same hormone is love, and trust in others and that our needs are going to be met by the larger world within which we exist. And that's fallen apart.

And we're looking out into the future and that knowing that we're somehow going to disperse is becoming more prominent, which means the unmanageable stress perception is becoming more prominent, which means the allostatic load is becoming more prominent, which means burnout is more likely. Does that make sense?

Sharmin Prince
Yes. Thank you for providing a definition for both and giving us examples and providing such a deep explanation of both. And while you were talking about, yeah, it's entropy. I thought of the caterpillar in the chrysalis when it dissolves in order to become a butterfly.

So I'll always remember that term. Um, this is rich. Thank you so much, Dr. Cell Hub. If someone listening right now is feeling completely overwhelmed.

What is one five minute resilience reset that you can offer them?

Speaker 2
I would say there's a kind of a four step process. Like I said, first of all, just honor the way you feel. I have a technique called the shield, which I can give you. It's on YouTube.

It's a meditation. It's a mnemonic, but also a visualization meditation that can guide you in how to go about doing that. The first thing is slow down. That's the S.

Slow down. H, honor the way you feel. What's really going on here? Inhale, and don't forget to exhale.

So we're honoring, meeting myself with compassion, and inhaling and exhaling, starting to slow down that stress response. Listen, what's really going on here? What do I really need? What I right now is what I really need is to feel loved.

I need to feel safe. I need to feel OK. Right? And what is my decision?

So that's S-H-I-E-L-D. My decision is, do I want to be a victim of my circumstances? Do I want to be a co-creator? And I know that it's difficult for me not to feel victimized right now.

I get that. I'm meeting it with self-compassion. But I would like to choose to be a co-creator. And that's when I give people a affirmation, or I call them positive verbal commands, which is I am enough, I have enough, I have all that I need.

Come what may, I have all that I need. So we're rewiring that narrative of I'm not enough. And then it comes along with the visualization of light that's shining down and moving into the body and surrounding you with love and healing and wisdom in the body, out the body, allowing our hearts to open. and connect to all there is.

A really wonderful visualization that will help regulate that nervous system, but also bring you into a state of love and quiet, so that then you can sit down and look at your pillars. So there's the first pillar, which is my physical vitality. Am I getting enough sleep? What kind of food am I putting into my body?

Am I moving my body enough? Am I spending time in nature? So it's doing sort of an assessment of what are the things I can do to myself to fuel myself. We look at our emotion, my emotions, what are the things I can do to improve my emotional intelligence to regulate my emotions so that I can control them, they don't control me.

Let me look at my mindset. Am I in my limited victim mindset or can I do the exercises that help me shift into opportunity mindset? And who can support me to do that? Let me look at my relationships.

Are there relationships that are draining me or relationships that are supporting me and how do I assess that and start developing relationships support systems? Or is there a support group, a therapist, a coach? a friend, somebody that I can go and get the support that I need because there's no one that doesn't who's resilient without that with a good support system. The fifth is one of my favorite, which is my spiritual connection, because ultimately that's going to allow us to transcend all things and to believe in possibilities of where that's nature or your religion or a spiritual practice or, you know, anything else that allows you to feel a

sense of purpose and passion that doesn't have to be religious. Spiritual connection, like I said, can be about a passion or a purpose. It's something that'll support you to have meaning. And it's not a setting of like, what's the meaning of life?

But how can I bring meaning into my life? How can I bring meaning into this? Which can then be uplifting and enlivening. And the last pillar, which is the sixth pillar, is the notion that I'm going to take responsibility as a leader.

You know, some of us are boulders, some of us are pebbles, but either way, everybody makes ripples in the water. And I know when I'm in coherence, I create coherence outside of me. I'm going to take accountability and responsibility for that as best I can. So these are all part of the six pillars, which are in the Resilience for Dummies.

It's also part of a new program I just created a couple months ago. It's an online program. It's available on learnworlds.com, and it's the Foundations of Mastering Resilience. So all that stuff's in there.

But in that quick five minutes, like I said, you can do this quick meditation to get yourself in a place of calm so that then you can really look more clearly in what's in front of you and what you can do.

Sharmin Prince
How does your work as a physician, a neuroscientist, the mind-body connection, how does that fit into executive leadership?

Speaker 2
well, you know, they're humans. But ultimately, you know, people who are boulders influence a lot of other people. So when I work with leaders, we work both on the internal and the external. We work on their self-awareness, self-compassion, self-regulation, work on their health and getting them into a place of coherence.

And then we also look at the practical on the external of how they're communicating, how they're leading, how they're setting their vision, what they want, and how to support their employees to be the best possible employees, how to make sure you have the right people in the right roles, how to ensure that you have an organization that's like an organism that's moving in coherence.

Sharmin Prince
If I joined the online course, The Foundation of Mastering Resilience, what's one benefit for me? Oh, just one? Or more?

Speaker 2
Well, look, it's really all of this information in one place and you have it for life. Not like, you know, you do it once and it's over, it's yours for life. And so there are videos and audio and workbooks and questionnaires and all sorts of resources that, that I will be continuously updating also, um, that you have for life. So everything I'm talking about right now will be there with examples and exercises and, and things like that.

And you just have it forever.

Sharmin Prince
My final question of hope, after all your years of research and working with, I'm assuming thousands of patients, what is the most hopeful or even surprising discovery you've made about the human capacity to heal and thrive.

Speaker 2
Well, that's the most beautiful thing that, and this is where it gets into a bigger conversation about consciousness, is that, you know, we think we're, in a certain extent, we are finite. You know, it's sort of, you think like vapor, like H2O is vapor and liquid and ice, depending on the environment it's in. We're not different. we're energy, we're matter.

So we are, you know, we are ether, we're vapor, we're liquid, and we're solid. And the solid part seems really finite. But the beauty that I've seen is the power of shifting energy, which is the vapor ether part that when we can see ourselves as whole, as vapor ether part, it can influence the solid.

Sharmin Prince
Does

Speaker 2
that make sense? And that's where I see it's just beautiful. It's miraculous. We call them miracles.

But the question is, if we're looking from a different vantage point, maybe we just realize that that's how it works. And that what's keeping it from working is our belief system that it can't work. That's why I think that's why the question is the wrong question. Not why should I believe this, but why

Sharmin Prince
not?

Mitzy Dadoun
This has been really, really interesting. And I know that people are going to want to delve into this quite a bit more. Dr. Iba Salab, could you please tell everybody how they can get in touch with you and where they can get your books?

Speaker 2
Sure. My website is drsalab.com, D-R-S-E-L-A-B.com. And so everything's available there. And I'm all over the social media channels.

I post regularly if not daily and I have a lot of things on YouTube which are free lots of meditations go ahead and go to that channel there's a lots of good yummy information there and I have my website has also lots of blogs and information there and my books all six of them are available on Amazon or any online store so but you can link my website will link you to them as well. And of course, like I said, the program is on learnworlds.com. But my, my website will guide you to all of

Mitzy Dadoun
that. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Selhub. And everybody who's listening, remember to like and share and go check out these valuable resources so that you can also be in control and feel transformed and Embrace your life.

Sharmin Prince
We're cheating Dr. Selhub. Rapid fire. Oh,

Mitzy Dadoun
rapid fire.

Sharmin Prince
Okay.

Mitzy Dadoun
You said my last question. So I thought you were holding off on your rapid fire. So give us the rapid fire. Oh

Speaker 2
my

Mitzy Dadoun
goodness. Oh

Sharmin Prince
boy. The most overrated piece of wellness advice Oh,

Speaker 2
gosh. The most overrated piece of wellness advice? I don't know. Overrated.

I mean, there's so many things that are probably overrated. I don't know. I can't think of that one. Because I don't really look at all of that stuff.

Sharmin Prince
OK. A song that never fails to boost your mood. Oh, because I'm happy.

Speaker 2
You can't listen to that song and not bounce around. Complete

Sharmin Prince
the sentence. Resilience is a muscle you build by? Practice. Practice.

Most important nutrient for the brain? Fat.

Speaker 2
Yeah, the 60, 70% of your brain is made up of fat.

Sharmin Prince
The book that you most often recommend? The Power of Now. The biggest myth about burnout?

Speaker 2
The biggest myth is that people think they know what burnout is. A lot of people say, I'm burnt out, but they're technically, clinically not actually burnt out. They don't

Sharmin Prince
meet all the criteria. Sunrise or sunset for mindfulness? Oh, both.

Speaker 2
Both. Mindfulness is really about being in the present moment with non-judgmentally. And I like to add it with awe. So whichever one ignites that state of awe, I think they're both or even without even just looking at the night sky and the stars.

Sharmin Prince
I am going to give you a word and you give me your immediate gut reaction. Gratitude. Joy. Social media.

Mind control. Breathing. Life. Cold plunge.

I just get hypothermia. Sleep.

Speaker 2
Necessary. Nature. Morphine. It's like a drop of morphine in the brain.

Joy. Happiness.

Sharmin Prince
Thank you so much, Dr. Sellhoff. Well, that was fun.

Mitzy Dadoun
Thank you so much for joining us and remember to like and share and to go to Dr. Selhub's website and check out her books on Amazon. Thank you so much for joining us today.