In this week's music interview podcast, I wanted to focus on a very relevant topic for these times - living with prolonged stress!  

To learn more about prolonged stress and tips to cope, I talked with psychotherapist Dr. Caroline Adelman.

Here's Dr. Adleman's bio:

Dr. Adelman completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships at the Child Study Center at Yale University.

Prior to establishing Chicago Psychotherapy, Dr. Adelman worked as a staff therapist and Co-Director of the Child and Adolescent Anxiety Clinic at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. Dr. Adelman served on the clinical teaching faculty at Northwestern University from 2013-2021. She was previously an Assistant Clinical Professor within The Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies at Northwestern, and most recently served as adjunct teaching faculty within the Counseling Program at The Family Institute. In addition, Dr. Adelman served until August 2019 as the Director of Student Wellness and Support Services at Near North Montessori School (NNMS) in Chicago. She continues to consult regularly with NNMS and a number of other local schools on topics related to student wellness.

You can find a more comprehensive bio for Dr. Adelman at her clinic's website.

I had this conversation scheduled for several weeks, and we released it as quickly as we could.  It feels so necessary right now.    The pandemic and physical threat of Covid has been hanging over all of us for almost two years and we don't have an end point yet.  It's constantly front of mind, top of the news, impacting our day to day, and incredibly stressful.  No matter what your situation has been during the pandemic, no matter what level of loss you have experienced, we have all experienced prolonged stress the past two years.

It was genuinely just a relief to talk about it.  Hearing how prolonged stress impacts our bodies and mental health, how it alters our creativity, and even how we treat one another gave light to so much.  Our emotional and political climate, with our seemingly irreconcilable differences, are all understood a little differently, a little more compassionately, under this lens.  How we are moving about our day to day, interacting with social media, and finding life just generally harder make so much sense when you understand how stress affects us.

And as a therapist, I know this stuff!  But I still found it so helpful to talk about and acknowledge it.

Best of all, Dr. Adelman offers some easy, totally do-able suggestions for ways we can cope with prolonged stress, depending on how intensely you are feeling.  In this episode, you'll find lots of tips - actual steps you can take -- to help you deal with the stress, get through your day, and kickstart your creativity.

For anyone who's needing a little boost and mental health pick-me-up right now, I highly recommend this episode of Music Therapy.

Learn more about Dr. Caroline Adelman here!