How to Live with Kare

I'm sick this week so there's no full episode. This is about a minute of me saying that out loud instead of just going quiet for seven days. if you haven't heard last week's episode yet, start there instead: "you're not actually being honest about how you feel." It's about the four things we do instead of saying the thing we actually want to say, plus the research on what happens to people who finally say it.

i'll be back next wednesday. come find me on Instagram in the meantime: @livewithkare

there's a conversation you're not having right now. you already know which one it is. and you've already decided exactly how it would go. this week we get into the four things we do instead of just saying the thing. telling four people and never the one person. saying a smaller version and then getting hurt when they don't do the math. apologizing for it before they've even heard it. holding it for three weeks until it comes out at eleven at night about something completely unrelated. none of those are honesty. but when they go badly, we file the results under honesty anyway, and then we stop trying. then there's a study from 2018 where researchers had people write down a criticism of somebody close to them, predict exactly how it would land, and then say it out loud to that person's face. same words, before and after. what people predicted and what actually happened were not close. i also get into emotional granularity, why bad is a useless word, and why handing somebody a vague feeling is so much safer than handing them an actual request. plus hip surgery has turned me into a person who genuinely cannot ask for help, so we get into that too. live with care!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

when i was twelve my great aunt gave me a mirror. double sided, one normal and one magnified, with a light you could set to cool or warm. i thought it was the best gift i had ever gotten. i still have it and it still works. this week is about what that mirror started, and how it moved from the mirror, to the front facing camera, to every photo i have ever taken of myself. we get into where mirrors actually came from and how recently they became normal, the selfie effect and what a lens does to your face from twelve inches away, and the frozen face effect, which is the study that finally explained why every still photo of me feels wrong. nobody who loves you has ever seen you as a still frame. then the part i could talk about for hours. cortisol face, hip dips, and the business of inventing something for you to hate so that somebody can sell you the fix. i am not going to tell you looks do not matter. i am going to tell you which part of this is actually ours.

then, like always, your care package. three options this time instead of three steps.
live with care 🤎

research credited in this episode:
Post, R. B., Haberman, J., Iwaki, L., & Whitney, D. (2012). The frozen face effect: why static photographs may not do you justice. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 22.
McDowell, M., Chi, Y., & Haberman, J. (2016). The Frozen Body Effect. Journal of Vision.
Ward, B., Ward, M., Fried, O., & Paskhover, B. (2018). Nasal Distortion in Short Distance Photographs: The Selfie Effect. JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.

i moved to florida at twenty one with no job, no friends, and no idea who i was anymore. an empty inner circle doesn't get filled by whoever fits. it gets filled by whoever shows up.

this week is about the person who showed up. what came after was the most destructive year of my life and also the most fun i have ever had. we were almost the exact same person, so she wasn't a bad influence on me. we were a bad influence on each other.

we get into robin dunbar's rings, why only about five people fit in your inner circle, and why you can find out who's actually in it by looking at your calendar instead of your feelings. that's the thing that finally explained it for me. she wasn't one of my five. she was all five.

then how i ended it, badly the first time, and the guilt that comes with leaving something. and a discussion on how we should view friendships.

then, like always, your care package.
live with care 🤎

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.).