You're listening to Ted Health. I'm Elise Hugh. We have lost so much in so many different

ways during this pandemic. What it leaves is an extreme feeling of exhaustion and stress

and uncertainty. But today we have thoughtful antidotes, relationship therapist and podcast

host. A stare perl sits down with Ted's head of curation, Helen Walters, at a Ted salon

to help us make sense of our profound stress and some ways to get through it. I especially

love the part about anti-small talk. She'll explain.

Today that's survey.prx.org slash health. Thanks.

Hi, Esther Farrell. Thank you so much for joining us and I want to get right to it. So we're

more than a year into this pandemic now and I think one constant whether we're really

acknowledging it or not has been heightened stress levels, shall we say. So I'm sure you've

seen this in your practice and in your work and I'm curious. What are you recommending

to people who are coming to you? They're wanting to know how to regulate stress effectively.

So hello, Helen. Here it is. We're living in a time of existential

anguish, of isolation, of universal grief, economic insecurity, prolonged uncertainty and

we have a tendency to call all these feelings stress. But stress is multidimensional. Researchers

Susan David and Elissa Apple emphasized the importance of having to break it down into parts

so that they become manageable. We have despair, we have anxiety, exhaustion, sadness, anger,

irritability, all these feelings are part of stress and when they are named and framed we can

regulate them and deal with them. prolonged uncertainty at this moment is that notion that

we are uncertain but we also don't know how long this will last. This is not your typical disaster

where you have a warning and a planning and an onslaught and a post. We are in it and we don't

know for how long. We experience a sense of ambiguous loss where things are gone but still there

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