#114: Mindfulness, Medicine, & the Biology of Stress - Dr. Craig Hassed#114: Mindfulness, Medicine, & the Biology of Stress - Dr. Craig Hassed
The FitMind Podcast: Mental Fitness, Neuroscience & Psychology
Dr Craig Hassed talks with host Josh about how mindfulness affects stress biology, gene expression, and ageing, and how these practices are being built into medical education. The conversation also contrasts empathy with compassion and touches on bigger questions about consciousness and true wellbeing.
1:03:02•17 Jun 2026
Mindfulness, Stress Biology, and Compassion with Dr Craig Hassed
Episode Overview
- Chronic stress keeps the body in unnecessary fight-or-flight, driving allostatic load, inflammation, and faster biological ageing.
- Meditation can influence gene expression, reduce inflammation, and slow telomere shortening, acting as a kind of anti-ageing support at the cellular level.
- Mindfulness training for medical students improves focus, exam coping, and resilience, with many using short, practical exercises in daily life.
- Compassion is neurologically distinct from empathy; moving from empathic distress to compassion reduces burnout by keeping stress circuits quiet while maintaining care.
- Informal mindfulness throughout the day can be as important as formal sitting practice, especially for people who struggle with long meditations or past trauma.
“"We now know that meditation... actually has an effect of switching on the repair enzymes and slowing down the rate of ageing at the level of the DNA of the cells."”
In this eye-opening conversation, you'll learn about stress, ageing, and mindfulness from someone who's spent decades testing these ideas in real clinics and lecture halls. Physician and educator Dr Craig Hassed sits down with host Josh to talk about how chronic stress leaves "physiological wear and tear" on the body, something he explains using the concept of allostatic load.
He compares it to driving a car with your foot constantly on the accelerator and brake – eventually, the parts wear out. That same overdrive in the body affects cardiovascular health, immunity, and even gene expression. Hassed breaks down epigenetics in plain language, showing how lifestyle and mental habits influence which genes switch on or off. His favourite example is telomeres, "a marker of our biological ageing". As he puts it, "We now know that meditation...
actually has an effect of switching on the repair enzymes and slowing down the rate of ageing at the level of the DNA of the cells." You’ll also hear how he went from a disillusioned 19-year-old medical student to pioneering mindfulness in medical education at Monash University, where first-year students complete a six-week mindfulness programme and many go on to use it daily to manage study pressure and exams. A big highlight is the discussion of compassion versus empathy.
Hassed explains that empathy often tips into "empathic distress", fuelling burnout, whereas "with compassion, the stress circuits of the brain don't light up" and areas linked to positive emotion do. That shift, he suggests, can protect carers, clinicians and anyone who regularly supports others. The episode rounds out with Hassed’s ESSENCE model of health, brief practical advice on starting meditation (including very short practices), and his larger fascination with consciousness itself.
If stress, burnout or emotional overload feel all too familiar, this conversation might get you asking: what could change if you related to your own mind differently?
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