Season 2 is here, and I’m starting it by admitting I fell apart a little
This is for the 1am doomscrollers
For nearly a week, I was basically useless. Doomscrolling at midnight, doomscrolling in the morning, doomscrolling in the in-between hours when I was supposed to be working or resting or being a functioning human. The news (most about ICE, Epstein) felt relentless and unbearable and I could not stop consuming it even as it was making everything worse. The dishes piled up. The emails sat there. What do you do when an inanimate object (your to do list) is yelling at you, silently?
For someone who finds real meaning in showing up and creating and helping people, it’s the kind of paralysis that can make you question your whole existence and sense of worth.
Here’s the irony. I knew exactly what was happening. I could name it clinically: nervous system dysregulation, known as the dorsal vagal state in polyvagal theory, also known as the “freeze” state. I could have explained it to a client. I know what chronic stress does to the nervous system. I know what doomscrolling does to the brain. And none of it mattered. When your nervous system is flooded with unbearably bad news, your thinking brain doesn’t get a vote - survival mode takes over.
That’s what I want to talk about today — the gap between what we know and what our bodies do anyway, especially when the world feels like it’s on fire. Because I think a lot of you have been living in that gap too. And I have two episodes for you this week that I think are going to meet you right there.
Season 2 of Checking In is officially here.
The theme is “Unimaginable Joy”, and I’ll be honest — that title felt a little bold to me when I first landed on it, given everything happening in the world right now. But that’s exactly why I chose it. Because joy, I’m learning, isn’t something you find after the hard stuff is over. It’s something you have to build the conditions for, especially in the middle of hardship.
This season is about something I’ve come to understand slowly and a little reluctantly: there are parts of wellness you simply cannot think your way through. You can have all the knowledge, all the insight, all the self-awareness in the world — but healing requires more than simply thinking about it in our brain. Healing also includes how we move our bodies, how we nurture ourselves, how we rest, our friendships and greater community, and the societal structures that we are subject to.
So as we launch Season 2 I’ve got two episodes this week that speak right to the heart of things in two different ways. And I genuinely think they might explain some of what you’ve been feeling in ways you haven’t quite had words for yet.
Episode 1: Dr. Marie Fang on and joy as resistance and how to cope when the world is on fire
I called Marie because she’s one of the people I call when I genuinely don’t know what to do. She’s a licensed psychologist, the creator of Private Practice Skills, and the kind of friend who holds up a mirror to the best version of you without ever making you feel judged for where you actually are. We’ve known each other for years, and this conversation felt like the ones we have when things get real — not polished, not performative, just two therapists sitting with the honest truth of what feels like a monumentally challenging time in the world.
We talked about what happens in the nervous system when the news feels like too much. About why the shame spiral that follows shutdown is often more damaging than the shutdown itself — because now you’re not just overwhelmed, you’re overwhelmed and furious at yourself for being overwhelmed. We talked about what community actually does for us that has nothing to do with crisis support, and about something she said near the end of our conversation, about joy as a form of resistance, that I keep returning to and cannot wait for you to hear in her own words.
If you’ve been beating yourself up for not functioning the way you used to, this one is for you. Not because it wraps things up neatly — it doesn’t — but because something shifts when you hear two people who are supposed to have it together admit that they don’t, and then actually try to help each other figure out what to do next.
Episode 2: Dr. Alison Kole on why high achievers can’t sleep — and what actually helps
Dr. Alison Kole is triple board-certified in sleep medicine and a reformed chronic insomniac who didn’t sleep well for 25 years despite knowing everything about sleep science. She gets it from the inside out. And she said things in this conversation that I think are going to reframe some things you’ve been quietly carrying.
Like why high achievers stay up too late — and why it has nothing to do with laziness or bad habits. Or why the harder you try to force sleep, the more it escapes you, which is genuinely maddening news for people who are used to pushing through anything with enough willpower. Or what our parents inadvertently taught us about rest — and how that message is still running the show decades later in ways most of us haven’t connected yet.
She also gets into what the research actually says about sleep aids, melatonin, CBT for insomnia, and the warning signs that it’s time to stop pushing through and actually see someone. If you’ve been reaching for supplements or wondering whether any of it is actually working, she has answers that might surprise you.
This is the conversation that finally makes sense of why you — someone who is capable of almost anything — can’t seem to get this one thing right.
Here’s what I want to leave you with, sitting with both of these conversations together.
Near the end of my conversation with Alison, she said something that made me stop. “You can’t sleep better if your nervous system is dysregulated all day.” And I thought about Marie, and everything we’d talked about in episode 1 — the dysregulation, the shame spiral, the limits of intellect when the body has already made up its mind. These two conversations are about the same thing from two different angles. The body keeps its own schedule. It has its own requirements. And no amount of knowing better has ever been enough, for me or probably for you, to simply override them.
That’s the whole season, really. You cannot always think your way to wellness. Sometimes you have to tend to the conditions — the sleep, the nervous system, the body that’s been holding everything together while you were busy being capable — and trust that the rest follows.
A few questions I’d love for you to sit with: What does the end of your day actually feel like right now? Is there a moment in it that belongs only to you, or are you reclaiming it at midnight because it’s the only time available? And what would it feel like to give your body what it keeps asking for, without having to earn it first?
Leave a comment, or find me on Instagram at @exploring.therapy. I read everything, and I genuinely want to know how you’re doing.
With care,
Dr. Therese 💜