Strides To Solutions

Esther Adams
  • 4.0 (1)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Weekly

Strides To Solutions uncovers how animal-assisted psychotherapy—from equine sessions to canine companionship—rewires the brain for lasting cognitive and emotional gains. Join host Esther Adams, a trauma-informed psychotherapist with a doctorate in psychology, as she shares powerful client stories, expert interviews, and hands-on exercises designed to strengthen attention, memory, executive function, and resilience. Tune in for actionable strategies that transform barnyard breakthroughs into real-world success. esthernava.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    The Neuroscience of Social Rejection

    You can probably still retrieve a social wound from years ago with more feeling than you can retrieve a sprained ankle from the same year. That asymmetry is the puzzle this episode is built around. For about two decades, the popular explanation has been that rejection recruits the same circuitry as physical pain. It came from real research, and it turned out to be, at best, partially right. When those studies were pooled together, the finding everything was built on did not reliably reappear. Newer analysis methods showed that rejection and physical pain have separable signatures in the brain even when they light up the same regions. What replaced it is more interesting. Rejection appears to be less a wound than a computation, one that asks how much that person valued you, how surprised you should have been, and what you should now expect from people going forward. That reframing changes what the aftermath is for, and it explains why the strongest predictors of lasting distress turn out to be self-blame, brooding, and disrupted recovery rather than the severity of the rejection itself. We also get into why some people are far more affected than others, what actually happens in the hours and the night after a rejection, and which approaches to building resilience have evidence behind them. The one most people reach for first, deliberately exposing yourself to more rejection, has the weakest support of the lot. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    The Neuroscience of Social Rejection

  2. 4d ago

    The Psychological Cost of Perfectionism and How to Reclaim Your Creative Courage

    If a small mistake can end your creative day, the usual explanation is that your amygdala mistook a missed brushstroke for a predator. The direct research points somewhere else. In this episode of Strides To Solutions, Esther Adams walks through what brain imaging and electrophysiology actually show about perfectionism: that the strongest evidence sits in the anterior cingulate and middle frontal performance-monitoring systems, not the classic fear circuit, and that people with genuinely high personal standards show deeper error processing and better recovery, not worse. The episode covers why criticism lands and praise does not, why avoidance feels like relief and strengthens the fear that made it necessary, and why a randomized trial of deliberate mistake-making performed worse than its comparison condition, with participants growing more distressed across sessions rather than less. Esther makes the case that the target is not your standards but what your mind does with the gap between the standard and the performance. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    The Psychological Cost of Perfectionism and How to Reclaim Your Creative Courage

  3. 4d ago

    The Voice in Your Head

    Almost everyone carries a running inner commentary, the voice that judges the email you just sent, replays the conversation you wish had gone differently, and quietly decides whether you are doing well enough. We tend to treat it as a fixed part of who we are. The research suggests something more interesting, and more hopeful. In this episode I trace the inner critic from the ground up. We start with a genuine puzzle from neuroscience: the brain regions that let you reflect wisely on your life are, to a striking degree, the same ones that produce harsh, looping self-criticism. What separates the two is not location but flexibility, whether that self-focused network stays connected to the systems that let you shift your attention and eventually look up. From there we follow the voice through the forces that shape it. How your earliest relationships taught you what to expect when you needed care, and what that seemed to say about your worth. How culture assigns very different meanings to focusing on your own flaws, so that self-criticism can feel corrosive in one setting and constructive in another. What chronic self-attack does to the body over time, through the stress hormone system, heart rate variability, and inflammation. And finally, what the evidence actually supports about changing the voice, including reappraisal, distanced self-talk, self-compassion, and the slow re-authoring of your own story. I have tried to keep this honest rather than tidy. Reframing helps only when it stays realistic. Learning to observe your thoughts hasn’t clearly beaten challenging their content. Brief self-kindness exercises can even misfire. The goal is not a mind without an inner voice, but a mind that can reflect without getting trapped, and that speaks to itself, in the hard moments, a little more like someone on your side. What this episode answers * Why self-reflection and self-criticism share the same brain machinery * Where the tone of your inner voice originally comes from * Why the same self-criticism can help in one culture and harm in another * How looping negative thought reaches the body and leaves a physical mark * Which approaches actually shift the voice, and where the science is still uncertain This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    The Voice in Your Head

  4. 6d ago

    Hope When You Have No Control

    Most advice about hope assumes you have leverage. Set a goal, make a plan, take one small step. That works until the step does not exist. This episode is about the other situation. The diagnosis with limited options. The court date. The marriage ending that you did not decide. The waiting on a decision made entirely by other people. There is a real body of research on this, spanning psychology, palliative medicine, philosophy, sociology, and nursing, and it says something different from the self-help version. Hope does not require control. It changes when control disappears, but it does not necessarily die. In this episode I cover why hope is not optimism, and why that distinction matters more than almost anything else in the literature. Why honesty does not destroy hope, according to some of the most consistent findings in palliative care. What hope shifts toward when agency goes: meaning, smaller and more available objects, and other people carrying it for a while. Where the evidence is genuinely strong, and where it is thin enough that I would not build anything on it, including the neuroscience. I also spend time on two things the research avoids. Nobody has good guidance on when hope should end and grief should begin. And the dominant model of hope was built largely from the experience of people who had control, then handed to everyone else as the standard they failed to meet. If you have felt that the usual advice about hope was written for someone whose life cooperated more than yours does, this one is for you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    Hope When You Have No Control

  5. Jul 13

    The Mechanisms of Emotional Healing — What Horses Actually Do

    This show is called Strides to Solutions, and there’s a horse standing quietly inside that name. A stride is what a horse does, and it’s forward motion, but it’s rhythmic and honest and it happens one measured step at a time. So this episode goes straight at the thing that has been sitting behind the title all along. Equine therapy has become popular enough by now to attract both true believers and eye-rollers, and I don’t think either camp is being careful enough with the evidence. The believers say the horse feels your soul. The skeptics say it’s an expensive pony ride with a therapist attached. The research says something more interesting than either of them. Horses appear to genuinely help, and we can see it in the outcomes, and almost everything we assume about why is either unproven or, in a couple of striking cases, actively contradicted. That gap, between it works and we know why it works, is where this whole episode lives. The outcome evidence is real. Randomized and open trials show PTSD symptoms falling in veterans, and equine-assisted therapy improved emotion regulation and self-esteem in people being treated for substance use disorders. Israeli military and police veterans described three things coming out of the work with horses: self-regulation, bonding, and hope. But then the mechanism starts to come apart in the hands, and I give those findings to you straight rather than tuck them into a footnote. In the randomized riding trial where PTSD symptoms genuinely dropped, the emotion regulation measure did not reach significance. Researchers deliberately manipulated the horse’s stress level and measured the humans, and found no meaningful difference in client stress, mood, or anxiety, which means this is not simple emotional contagion and you are not a sponge absorbing the horse’s serenity. And one study found that therapy horses respond more to human physical cues than to human emotional states. The horse may not be sensing your soul. It may simply be reading your shoulders. So what is actually doing the work? The thread running through the strongest findings is not mystical connection. It’s felt safety, and it’s quieter and more precise than the mythology. Heart rate correlation showed up only with a familiar, preferred horse. Gentle grooming on the areas the horse actually likes helped, while routine grooming, done our way for our convenience, often produced more negative emotion in the animal. Safety is not automatic, and it has to be built. Which reframes the entire thing. The horse is not a healing device you point at a wounded person. The horse is a condition, a large, warm, non-verbal, entirely non-judging animal that keeps failing to hurt you, over and over, while your body stands right there paying close attention. That is not mysticism, and it doesn’t need to be, because it’s exactly the kind of repeated, embodied, prediction-violating evidence this whole series has been about. There’s also a piece the romantic version leaves out, along with my favorite honest detail in the literature. Patients in one study spoke powerfully about their relationship with the horse, but they did not say it improved their rapport with their therapist, even though the therapists believed it did. That is the sound of a field catching itself in a flattering assumption, and it takes integrity to publish something like that. In the end this isn’t really about horses at all. Whatever your version of the horse turns out to be, a dog, a garden, a workshop, cold water, one friend who has never once flinched at you, the mechanism is probably the same. It isn’t the thing that heals you. It’s that the thing creates a reliable, repeatable situation in which your nervous system finally gets to gather evidence that it is safe, and capable, and not alone. You don’t need the mysticism. The ordinary version is remarkable enough, and it has the considerable advantage of being true. Listen in, and let’s take the stride. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    The Mechanisms of Emotional Healing — What Horses Actually Do

  6. Jul 11

    Can Your Nervous System Lose Hope?

    A note before you read. This episode discusses serious illness, hopelessness, and suicide risk. If you're in a fragile place today, it's completely fine to skip it or come back another time. And if you're having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out for support. In the US you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans is at 116 123. In Israel, ERAN is at 1201. Elsewhere, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory of crisis centres at iasp.info/crisis-centres. You can also go to your nearest emergency department, or reach out to a doctor, a therapist, or someone you trust. This state is treatable, and help is real. Last time we established that hope isn’t a soft feeling. It’s closer to a calculation, your nervous system’s running estimate of whether action is still worth taking. Which raises an obvious next question, and researchers have genuinely chased it. If hope is that real, where is it? Is there a place in the brain where hope lives? A circuit that could be found, protected, maybe someday repaired? Can a nervous system, as a physical object, actually lose hope? In this episode of Strides to Solutions, I take you along on that search. Hope leaves signatures. In people who have recently been through a suicidal crisis, hopelessness has been linked to reduced activity in the brain’s salience network. In depression, it tracks with the state of the reward machinery. And in studies of suicide risk, there’s a finding I can’t shake: people struggle to generate positive future experiences at all. Not that the future looks dark. That it has gone blank. The imaginative machinery that would populate it with anything worth walking toward has quieted down. I think that’s a far truer picture of despair than the one we usually carry. Then the search turns, and science does the thing I most admire about it. Someone actually tested the hope-center hypothesis. Patients with brain metastases receiving radiation can have their hippocampus deliberately spared, and the hippocampus was a plausible seat for hope, since you can’t hope for a future you can’t imagine. So researchers asked whether protecting it would protect their hope. It didn’t. The hope center wasn’t there. And I want to argue that this negative result is the most valuable finding in the whole body of research, because it means hope is not a room in the house. It isn’t a lamp a surgeon could shield. We also go where this stops being abstract. Roughly two thirds of people with early-stage multiple sclerosis report moderate to severe hopelessness, often with little physical disability, because a relapsing disease is almost a machine for destroying the sense that your actions control anything. In people with brain tumors, hope and distress turned out not to track the stage of the tumor. And in one study of people with central nervous system cancers, needing a language interpreter was associated with lower hope. Not the tumor. The interpreter. Which tells you hope in a hospital is being built or dismantled partly in the conversation. And then the finding that reorganized my thinking, and which I’d hand to every clinician I know. We assume hope and hopelessness are one dial: turn one down, the other comes up. The research says no. They appear to be distinct, and hope has been found to buffer the effect of hopelessness on suicidal ideation. Two dials, not one. Which means a person can be genuinely hopeless and still carry hope, and the hope is still doing work. You don’t have to talk someone out of the dark to hand them something in it. So can your nervous system lose hope? It participates in hope, deeply and measurably, but it doesn’t hold hope as one thing that can be switched off. What the research finds is distributed vulnerability. Hope doesn’t get deleted. It gets starved, from several directions at once. And that’s why the failed experiment is the most hopeful thing here. A distributed thing has no single point of failure, and therefore no single point of no return. It can be undermined from many directions. It can also be fed from any of them. You don’t have to find the room where your hope is kept, because there isn’t one. You only have to start putting evidence back into the system. Listen in, and let’s take the stride. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    Can Your Nervous System Lose Hope?

  7. Jul 11

    The Biology of Hope

    Hope is a word I’ve circled warily for years. It’s been worn so thin by greeting cards and graduation speeches that it can feel like the soft thing you say to someone when there’s nothing useful left to offer. But there’s a body of research on hope that is nothing like the greeting card. It’s precise, it has a structure, and one of its findings reversed something I had believed for twenty years. The core reframe is this. Hope is not a feeling, or not only one. In the research, hope is closer to a calculation: your nervous system’s running estimate of whether action is still worth taking. And a calculation, unlike a mood, is something you can work on. In this episode of Strides to Solutions, I take that apart. We start with a distinction that sounds academic and turns out to matter enormously. Hope is not optimism. Optimism says it will work out. Hope has two parts, agency, the belief you can act, and pathways, the belief that routes exist. And they behave differently under pressure. Hope predicts outcomes specifically when a situation is controllable. Optimism takes over when control is gone. So hope isn’t cheerfulness about the world. It’s a belief about your relationship to it. Then comes the reversal. Most of us know the story of learned helplessness. An animal that can’t escape something painful learns it is helpless, and stops trying even when escape becomes possible. I taught myself that story. I believed it for years. And in 2016 the original researchers went back, looked at what fifty years of neuroscience had turned up, and said, essentially, that they had it backwards. Passivity is not learned. Passivity is the default. Shutting down is what a nervous system does automatically under prolonged aversive experience. What gets learned, when it’s learned, is control. Which means hope is not the natural state that despair corrupts. Hope is the achievement. Nobody has to teach you to sink. Somebody has to teach you to swim. We look at what happens in the body when that estimate falls: dopamine weakening, an anti-reward signal growing louder, inflammation lowering the willingness to spend effort. And the striking possibility that helplessness, low motivation, anhedonia, and withdrawal all fall out of a single computation. Is action worth it? Not a mood. A policy of conservation. Then the finding I keep turning over. In therapy for anxiety, hope rises early, and that rise appears to be part of why the anxiety later falls. The hope came first. Which suggests hope may not be the reward you get for recovering. It may be part of how recovering works. I also spend real time on the limits, because hope is a word people weaponize. During the early pandemic, when people were locked down and genuinely could not act, optimism predicted lower distress better than hope did. That’s a warning. When someone truly cannot act, demanding hope of them isn’t kindness. It’s asking them to run a calculation whose inputs are missing, and then treating the result as a moral failing. Sometimes what a person needs is company in the dark, not a light. And here’s what the structure gives us, which is more useful than any pep talk. Hope has two handles. Pathways is a skill, so when you’re stuck, the move isn’t to feel better, it’s to generate one more route. And agency is built from evidence, from small completed acts that visibly worked, which is why you don’t talk yourself into agency. You accumulate it. If your hope is low right now, that isn’t proof you’re broken. It’s a reading. It’s the output of a calculation run on the evidence you were handed, and if that evidence has been poor for long enough, a low reading is exactly what a healthy system would produce. Which means the work isn’t to feel differently. It’s to change the evidence. Listen in, and let’s take the stride. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    The Biology of Hope

  8. Jul 11

    When Meaning Becomes Biology

    Your interpretation of a phone call from your mother has no mass. It weighs nothing. And yet it can raise your cortisol, tighten your gut, and shift how your immune cells behave within the hour. That’s the puzzle at the heart of this episode. By what route does something as abstract as a meaning reach something as concrete as a hormone? There’s a careful body of research that answers it, and I want to be precise about what it does and doesn’t say. It doesn’t claim that meaning overrides biology. It claims something more modest and, I think, more remarkable: that meaning gets implemented in biology, through pathways we can now trace. Your brain is constantly building a working picture of what’s happening and what it means for you. Not simply “a phone is ringing,” but something closer to “my mother is calling, and the last three times it was bad news, and I don’t have the capacity for this today.” That picture is the meaning. And the circuitry that builds it has direct wiring down into the systems that govern your stress hormones, your heart rate, and your immune response. So the appraisal isn’t only registered. It’s transmitted. Which leads to the line I’d underline in this whole episode. The brain doesn’t turn meaning into a single molecule. It turns meaning into a coordinated policy across the entire body. Your interpretation becomes an instruction set, and the body carries it out. We look at the placebo, which is the cleanest evidence we have, because a placebo has no active ingredient at all. What’s doing the work is the meaning of the pill. We look at its counterpart, the nocebo, where an expectation of harm produces real harm, which tells us this channel runs in both directions. We look at the research on stress mindsets, where two people meeting the same difficulty diverge based on what they believe the difficulty is doing to them. And then we look at the shadow, because a meaning repeated for years stops being an event and becomes a structure. Researchers have linked adversity-shaped self-perception to changes in the gene expression of white blood cells, apparently traveling down the nerves to get there. A story, reaching all the way into a cell. That’s also where the hope lives, and one finding stopped me. In a study of people in psychotherapy, increases in a sense of agency within their own life story preceded the improvement in their mental health. The story changed first. Which suggests the narrative may not be a report on the healing. It may be part of how the healing happens. I spend real time on the limits, because they matter. Meaning does not override biology, the effects are modest rather than miraculous, and which meanings are even available to a person depends enormously on their circumstances. If you are unwell, nothing here is an accusation. Illness is not a verdict on the quality of anyone’s inner life. But somewhere in you right now, cells are responding to a conclusion you reached about what your life means. Possibly long ago. Possibly before you were old enough to notice you were reaching it. And unlike your genes, and unlike your childhood, that conclusion is one of the few places where your hand is on the pen. Listen in, and let’s take the stride. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit esthernava.substack.com

    When Meaning Becomes Biology
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About

Strides To Solutions uncovers how animal-assisted psychotherapy—from equine sessions to canine companionship—rewires the brain for lasting cognitive and emotional gains. Join host Esther Adams, a trauma-informed psychotherapist with a doctorate in psychology, as she shares powerful client stories, expert interviews, and hands-on exercises designed to strengthen attention, memory, executive function, and resilience. Tune in for actionable strategies that transform barnyard breakthroughs into real-world success. esthernava.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Esther Adams
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    146
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Esther Adams, Linsey Adams, Strides To Solutions
  • Show Website
    Strides To Solutions

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