You're more of the problem than you think.

And that's the best news you'll hear all year.

About me

Hi — I'm Kare. I'm in my twenties, same as you.

I almost became a therapist and didn't. I built an identity around lifting and lost it to a hip injury. I grew up in a house that didn't teach me how to live with care, and I've spent the last few years figuring out how to do it anyway.

This isn't therapy. It isn't another account telling you to think positive and wait for the universe. It's the friend who tells you the truth at 2 a.m. because she loves you enough not to lie.

Every episode I take one ordinary problem, trace it back to the ego underneath it, hand you the actual psychology term for what's going on, and give you one thing to do about it this week. You leave with a word and a step — not just a feeling.

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The Podcast

New episodes, every Wednesday.

Latest episodeSeptember 30, 2026

putting a word to a feeling: ambiguous loss

have you ever lost somebody who is still alive? a friend you could text right now and choose not to. a parent who's in the room and hasn't really been there in years. an ex you still watch post. the version of yourself from before something changed. there's a word for that, and i only found out about it a few weeks ago, watching pretty little liars of all things. this week we get into ambiguous loss. what it actually is, why it hurts differently than normal grief, and why nobody around you ever seems to treat it like something you lost. the woman who named it also says closure is a myth. not that it's hard to get. that it isn't real. and i think that one idea explains why some things stay heavy for years no matter what you do. this is the first of a new short series called putting a word to a feeling. one word per episode, about ten minutes, for the things you've been carrying around without a name for them.

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EpisodeSeptember 23, 2026

how to stop overthinking

i love rewatching shows. i love ordering the same meal at the same restaurant every single time. i like knowing how a series is going to end because i've already watched it five times before. and it took me a long time to notice that i do the exact same thing with my own life. there's a movie, and it's titled kare, and i have watched it more times than i've watched any show. every conflict, from every point of view, imagining what i would have done differently. i told myself that was reflecting. that i was learning. what i left out is that i wasn't sleeping. this week is about the difference between thinking about something and whatever it is i'm doing at two in the morning. researchers had two piles of studies that completely contradicted each other. one said people who think about themselves a lot are doing better. the other said those same people are more depressed. same behavior, opposite results, and nobody could explain it. in 1999 two researchers figured out why, and it turns out these are two different things that look identical from the outside. then somebody tested whether the thinking actually helps, and what they found is worse than you'd guess. i'm also not going to tell you to stop overthinking. you've heard that from a million people and it does nothing. care package at the end. three steps.

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EpisodeSeptember 16, 2026

you don't have to earn rest

i play the sims, and there's this little notebook next to your sim that tracks everything. how many times they felt happy. how many meals they ate. i've always wished i had one of those for my own life, and the number i'd actually want is how much rest i get compared to how much of that rest i spend stressing about not deserving it. then i got hurt, i couldn't work, and i was laying in bed with an ice pack most of the day. that's when it hit me that i don't know how to rest. and you don't need surgery to know the feeling i'm talking about. you've had a free saturday that got uncomfortable by two in the afternoon. this week is about why that happens, because somebody finally measured it. they gave 336 people an app that went off six times a day for a week and asked what they were doing and whether they felt guilty about it. over eleven thousand answers. and in a separate study, one in four people named the exact same activity as the thing that makes them happiest and the thing they feel guiltiest about. the guilt also gets worse when you're alone, which is backwards from what you'd expect, and the reason why is the part i couldn't stop thinking about. care package at the end, three steps. live with care!

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EpisodeSeptember 9, 2026

why you always think you're the reasonable one

i picked a fight with my boyfriend a few weeks ago over something so small i can't even really defend it. i was stressed about my surgery and i wanted him to agree with me more than i wanted to fix anything. and then about two minutes into explaining my side out loud, i stopped and started laughing, because what i remembered happening and what actually happened were not the same event. i almost ruined a really good night over a version of it that only existed in my head. this week is about naive realism, the everyday assumption that you're seeing reality directly instead of your brain's interpretation of it. i get into the three answers we cycle through when somebody won't agree with us, where each one is a worse thing to believe about them than the one before it. then the part i think matters most. why a bias never feels like a bias, why you grade yourself on context and grade everybody else on behavior, and why putting yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't work nearly as well as we all pretend it does. and as always a care package at the end, three steps. live with care!

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EpisodeSeptember 2, 2026

a quick update, i'm having surgery

not a real episode this week. i'm having hip surgery tomorrow, after almost a year of dealing with a hip injury, and i'm taking the week to actually recover instead of forcing something out that i'd be half present for. i talk a lot on this show about honesty and accountability, so this is me being honest about where i am right now. episode 16 is already recorded and it's coming next wednesday. it's about why you always think you're the reasonable one in an argument, and i got way too deep into the research on it while trying to distract myself from being nervous about all of this. you can find me on instagram at @livewithkare, or on tiktok @howtolivewithkare in the meantime. thank you guys so much for listening every week. genuinely.