Instagram once felt like a place to share glimpses of life. A meal, a walk, a moment in nature. Over time, it’s shifted into something else — a stage. Now, it’s not just about sharing. It’s about curating, performing, and playing the role of a self that others will recognize.

And now, the curtain never falls. The algorithms ask for constant output. The stage is our living room, our breakfast, our walk in the woods. What was once a persona reserved for a moment has seeped into the daily fabric of who we think we are.

Noticing. Observing. Remembering.

Every night, I clean the coffee pot. Every day, the laundry piles up. I finally get a load done, and within hours there’s another heap of wet, dirty clothes waiting in front of the machine, carrying the faint smell of damp cotton. I vacuum the house, and by the next day tumbleweeds of Labrador retriever fur are blowing in the fan’s wind, clinging to socks and skimming across the floor. I pay the bills, and new ones arrive with the slap of envelopes hitting the counter. The cycle never stops.

We think we’re moving toward “done,” but life always circles back to messy, dirty, empty, or due again. It’s not a flaw in the way we live — it’s the fabric of reality itself.

There are just some foods that are summer. Like, have you even had a summer if you haven’t had potato salad? Watermelon. Lemonade. A burger. Maybe a popsicle dripping down your hand on a porch somewhere. It’s not just food—it’s a feeling.

Potato salad has always been one of those for me. Growing up, my best friend Lauren’s mom made the best version I’ve had to this day—

Most people don’t realize they’ve built a life around survival cues. Urgency, pressure, overcommitment, hustle, people-pleasing—these stress signals often become the foundation of our routines, not because we chose them consciously, but because they’re normalized.

The result? Lives that look productive on the outside but feel chaotic, disconnected, and unsustainable on the inside.

But what if we stopped designing our lives around what keeps us stressed—and started designing around what helps us feel safe, steady, and well?

We’re told to push through.

Push through the tiredness.
The headache.
The short fuse.
The gut feeling that something’s off.

We reward it. Celebrate it. Build entire identities around being the one who never quits. And for a while, it works. You get things done. You check the boxes. You hold it all together.

But at what cost?

"My nervous system is fried." "I’m just so dysregulated." "My nerves are shot."

These phrases are everywhere right now—and while it’s good that nervous system language is becoming more mainstream, most people still don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Let’s clear it up.

I’ve come to believe that psychologists have a bit of an inferiority complex.

In the quest to be taken seriously—to prove that we’re “real doctors”—the field moved closer to medicine, and further away from its roots. We embraced diagnostics, lab coats, and the scientific method. We wanted to sit at the same table as MDs.

But in doing so, we distanced ourselves from something essential: the truth that psychology is, at its heart, a deeply holistic practice.