Becoming Real with Dr. Lori

My husband Jay doesn’t open his MyChart unless we’re sitting together, holding hands. We made that agreement after the morning he found out, alone on the couch in the dark, that his prostate cancer had returned. In this episode, I look at what connection actually does in the brain and body when we’re afraid, including a hand-holding study that explains exactly what happens on our couch. We also ta...

“I have a voice in my head, and I want you to hear it.” The voice belongs to my Nana—a four-foot-eleven, blue-eyed, raspy-voiced Polish woman who was my soulmate. Her voice is why I wrote Greedy for Life , why I led a TEDWomen workshop on intergenerational relationships and why I started Nana’s Tribe Foundation. In this solo episode, I share Nana’s story, our family’s love of Cleveland Guardians b...

Self-Care for Women: Why Functioning Isn't the Same as Being Well I'm recording this one from a road trip, and if you know me at all, you know driving is not my idea of relaxing. I spend most of the ride working an imaginary brake from the passenger seat. But I chose to make this trip because there are people at the other end of it who matter to me, and somewhere along the highway I started wonder...

What happens when a physician knows what care a pregnant patient needs—but providing it could expose that physician to criminal charges? I sit down with maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. David Hackney, author of Impossible Choices , to examine what changed inside the exam room after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. We discuss how abortion bans affect far more than elective abortion....

What happens when your lab results are normal, but you know you do not feel like yourself? In this episode, I sit down with Ann Konkoly, DNP, MBA, WHNP-BC, MSCP , a board-certified women’s health nurse practitioner and Menopause Society Certified Practitioner, to talk about the hormonal changes that can begin during perimenopause and continue through menopause. We discuss why a single blood test m...

You walk into a room and forget why you're there. A word you've used a thousand times won't come. And somewhere underneath the frustration, a quieter fear starts to build — is this menopause, or is it something more serious? In this episode, Dr. Lori draws on decades of clinical work with dementia and midlife women to explain what brain fog during perimenopause and menopause actually is, what the...

Why does sex become painful for some women? Why can orgasms take longer—or feel different—during perimenopause and menopause? And why are women rarely asked about sexual health after cancer? Dr. Lori talks with Dr. Rachel Pope, a gynecologic surgeon and women’s sexual health specialist, about the physical and psychological changes women often struggle with privately. They discuss painful intercour...

Pregnancy and postpartum can change far more than a woman’s body. Hormonal shifts can also intersect with anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, OCD and, in rare cases, postpartum psychosis. But how do we know when what a woman is experiencing has moved beyond the expected exhaustion and adjustment of having a baby? In Part Two of our four-part Women’s Health Series, Dr. Lori talks with Dr. Lulu...

Alzheimer's may be diagnosed late in life, but brain health is built decades earlier. And nearly two-thirds of people living with it are women. In this solo episode kicking off a new women's health series, Dr. Lori breaks down why the line between mental and physical health has never made sense to her, what neuroscience reveals about the menopause transition, and why women have historically gotten...

When I released the first SAVE Act episode with attorney Pat Schraff, I thought it was a one and done. We talked about names — what women have historically had taken from them, and what happens when your birth certificate no longer matches the name you have carried for forty years. The response told me we were not finished. So this week I brought in Tera Coleman, counsel at Baker Hostetler, who pr...

It started with an offhand comment from my daughter: grown-ups need recess. We laughed — and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. Because somewhere between the playground and now, the bell just quietly stopped ringing, and nobody told us we'd had our last one. In this episode, I'm making the case that play, laughter, and curiosity are not the dessert of a well-run life — they're part of how hum...

What if the person who needs care is the parent who abused you, the mother you have not spoken to in years or the spouse you were preparing to leave before the diagnosis? We talk about caregiving as an act of love. But that leaves little room for the person who does not feel safe, the person who feels trapped or the devoted caregiver whose own health is beginning to fail. In this episode, I talk a...

Why do you say yes when part of you already knows you mean no? People pleasing can look like kindness, generosity, and being easy to get along with. But underneath it, there is often something else happening: the attempt to prevent disappointment, avoid tension, and keep the people around us comfortable. In this episode, Dr. Lori explores why people pleasing becomes so automatic, how it can begin...

Can we trust each other again? In this episode of Becoming Real, Dr. Lori talks with Dr. Debbie Plummer, national thought leader on social trust, DEI, and belonging. Together, they explore what it means to stay curious in a divided world, how we rebuild trust across our differences, and why belonging begins with the courage to listen differently. Show Notes: https://drloristevic.com/can-we-trust-e...

The SAVE Act is being framed as a bill about election integrity and proof of citizenship. But for many women, especially married, divorced, remarried, or older women, “just bring proof” is not always simple. In this episode, Dr. Lori talks with attorney Patricia J. Schraff about how women’s names, birth certificates, marriage records, and legal identity can collide with voting access. They discuss...

Most of us picked up whatever we know about money from watching our parents, winging it in our 20s, and hoping for the best. We were taught just enough to get by — but not nearly enough to get ahead. The real conversation — investing, building wealth, understanding what your money can actually do for you — that one largely got skipped. And for women especially, it got replaced with a story that mo...

Someone tells you that you look beautiful today. What do you do? If you're like most women, you immediately tell them about the sale rack, the dry shampoo, and the bad lighting. Studies show that only 22% of compliments between women are actually accepted — and women accept compliments from men nearly twice as often. And research finds that women who do accept compliments are actually rated more n...

The advice on prostate cancer screening has swung back and forth for years. Test, don't test, wait, ask your doctor. And all that contradiction leaves a lot of men doing the one thing they shouldn't. Nothing. Even former President Biden, with all the medical scrutiny in the world, was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, in part because the guidelines say men over 70 don't need routine screenin...

He had no symptoms. He was healthy, in good shape, and the only reason anyone tested him at all was a routine physical he needed to renew a racing license. This week my husband Jay sits down with me to talk about prostate cancer from the patient's side. Not the clinical version, not the tidy version, but what it actually felt like to hear the word cancer when nothing in his body had warned him it...

There is no small talk in a cancer waiting room. I learned that sitting in one for thirty-three days in a row, waiting through my husband's radiation treatments for prostate cancer. I went in thinking I knew something about fear. I came out understanding something else entirely, and it had almost nothing to do with cancer. It had to do with us. With what we are capable of with each other, and how...

You have voices in your head that talk to you all day long. But here's what most of us never stop to ask: whose voice is it, really? In this episode, Dr. Lori Stevic-Rust — clinical health psychologist with over 40 years of experience — unpacks the truth about the voices in our heads. They aren't one nagging "inner critic." They're a whole crowd: the cruel ones we inherited and never stopped payin...

In this episode of Becoming Real with Dr. Lori , Dr. Lori talks with Dr. Melodie Yates about the emotional reality of Alzheimer’s caregiving and the slow grief of dementia. After spending 16 years caring for her husband through Alzheimer’s disease, Melodie brings an honest, deeply human voice to a journey that is often loving, lonely, exhausting, and sacred all at once. Together, Dr. Lori and Melo...

What if the people holding your life together don't even know they're doing it? In this episode of Becoming Real with Dr. Lori , psychologist Dr. Lori Stevic-Rust explores the quiet, often invisible support system that carries us through our hardest moments — and why naming it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your own healing and growth. These aren't your official caregivers. They...

How can they possibly think like that? If you've asked that question lately — about a family member, a friend, someone you used to feel close to — this episode is for you. The truth is, we don't come to our beliefs the way we like to think we do. We don't gather the facts, weigh the evidence, and arrive at a thoughtful conclusion. Most of the time, we feel our way into a belief first, and then we...

I became real in August of 1988. On my first day as a clinical intern at Henry Ford Hospital, I walked into Room Three and met a young man named Nelson — and nothing I had been trained to do prepared me for what happened next. This episode is the story underneath this entire podcast. It's about imposter syndrome, yes. But more than that, it's about the moment we face a choice: put the mask back on...