Latest episodeAugust 12, 2026
why we self-diagnose, and why we do it to everyone else
i started going to therapy when i was eleven. i stopped in high school, which was probably exactly when i needed it most, and that's also when i got deep into psychology and got on social media for the first time. so instead of going back, i started typing my symptoms into a search bar. adhd, ocd, autism, bpd, ptsd. every time i came across a new one i was completely convinced that was the one that explained everything. this week is about what those labels were actually doing for me. they made existing a lot more comfortable, and they made growing optional. we get into the barnum effect, which is why a vague list of symptoms can feel like it was written personally about you, and why the exact same thing happens with astrology, psychic readings, and every personality test on the internet. medical student syndrome, which my abnormal psych professor warned us about on the first day of class and which i fell straight into anyway. what actually goes into diagnosing somebody, and how little of it looks like a search result. and then self handicapping, which is the part that got me. if i can blame it on the label, i never have to change. then the honest part, because i've done this. i made a whole episode called "he's not mysterious, he's avoidant," so i'm not standing outside of this one. what i've landed on is three levels. a hypothesis about yourself. a verdict about yourself. a verdict about somebody else. one of those is how people get diagnosed at all. one of them is what was happening in the threads i had to leave. then the tool. a boundary is a rule about what you will do. if your sentence is about what they have to do, it's a request, an ultimatum, or an exit. all three are allowed. you just can't call them a boundary. the word is not the end of the work. it's the beginning of it. then, like always, your care package. live with care 🤎 research credited in this episode: Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123. Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405–417. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M.,Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.).
EpisodeAugust 5, 2026
the art of doomscrolling
i paused an episode of dynasty to go get a glass of water, and forty five minutes later my boyfriend and i were sitting next to each other on our phones, having completely forgotten the show was even on. this week is not about how much time we spend on our phones. it's about what it feels like in the half second before we pick them up. we get into why this was never actually an attention span problem, why it's a tolerance problem instead, and what happens when the outside volume drops far enough that we can finally hear ourselves think. i talk about meditating badly for over a decade, the vape i quit that taught me what a trained motor pattern actually is, and the study where people chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone in a room with nothing but their own thoughts. then we get the tool, which is something i used every single day as a behavior therapist and somehow never once used on myself. abc data. antecedent, behavior, consequence. we only ever look at the b and the c. the whole answer has been sitting in the a this entire time. boredom is the comfortable antecedent. it means nothing is wrong, we're just under entertained. but if boredom were really it, the payoff would be entertainment. most of the time it isn't. nobody is coming to figure out your antecedent for you. then, like always, your care package. live with care 🤎 research credited in this episode: Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345 (6192), 75–77.
EpisodeJuly 29, 2026
you're not nice, you're afraid.
we've all been called a people pleaser, or called somebody else one. but most of us have never actually looked at what separates it from kindness, or from the thing underneath it. this week we're going three layers deep: kindness, people pleasing, and fawning, and how to tell which one you're actually doing. then we get into the why, and it's not always a bad childhood. it's school, work, culture, religion, one relationship that took two years to leave. and then we get into the mechanism, which is reinforcement and punishment, and the specific ways we got trained to be agreeable and trained out of being assertive at the same time. this one's for anybody who's ever been called the mom of the friend group. we finish where we always do, with your ego, and why "i'm just a kind person" is so much easier to say than "i was hurt and it changed how i act." your care package is three small things. nothing that'll blow up your life. live with care 🤎
EpisodeJuly 22, 2026
why you stay up late even when you know better
you're not tired. you're not done being a person yet. this week is about the thing you did last night and will probably do again tonight. staying up too late, scrolling, one more episode, stealing back an hour you swear you deserve. the internet calls it revenge bedtime procrastination. we get into the real version of it, why willpower at midnight was never the part that broke, and why the hour you lose at night actually got taken from you way earlier in the day. then, like always, your care package. one small piece of your day to take back before you're too tired to want it. live with care 🤎 research credited in this episode: Kroese, F. M., De Ridder, D. T. D., Evers, C., & Adriaanse, M. A. (2014). Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 5 , 611. Kamphorst, B. A., Nauts, S., De Ridder, D., & Anderson, J. H. (2018). Too Depleted to Turn In: The Relevance of End-of-the-Day Resource Depletion for Reducing Bedtime Procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 9 , 252.
EpisodeJuly 15, 2026
the real reason you stay in a relationship you don't want
"i just regret all the time that i lost." i said that sentence out loud, to my friends, to my family, like it was wisdom. it took an embarrassingly long time to notice it wasn't about him and it wasn't even about the past. it was a sentence about the future. this week we're on the sunk cost fallacy. why we stay, why it isn't hope and isn't love, and the reason this one is so hard to catch: it's one of the only ways we destroy ourselves that sounds like being responsible. we get into arkes and blumer's 1985 theater ticket study and the desire not to appear wasteful, and then into christopher olivola's 2018 research showing we honor other people's sunk costs too, even a stranger's. which changes the whole picture of what two people are doing when neither one will say it's over. the care package this week: name the sentence you use when someone asks why you're still in it. run it through the only question that works. then ask them. new episodes every wednesday. live with care 🤎
