How to Live with Kare

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.

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 🤎

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.

"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 🤎

you ever trip walking into a party, or send a text that doesn't get the response you wanted, and then replay that one tiny moment on a loop for the next four years? same. this week is about the audience you invented in your head, the one watching you way closer than any real person ever has. last week we talked about how fast we hand other people a verdict. this week we flip it: "i think everyone is reading me." it's the same ego, just pointed back at yourself. the name for it is the spotlight effect. we get into the actual study behind it (gilovich, medvec and savitsky, 2000, in the journal of personality and social psychology, aka the barry manilow t-shirt experiment), why you're about twice as noticed in your own head as you are in the real room, what social media does to a brain that already assumes there's a hidden camera on it, and the hangxiety spiral that makes all of it ten times worse. and the hard part: nobody is watching you that closely. but that's the part that sets you free, because if we built the spotlight, we get to take it back. homework's at the end, three steps, do it while nobody's watching.

the word this week is the spotlight effect.

new episodes every wednesday.

live with care 🤎

#spotlighteffect #socialanxiety #overthinking #psychology #livewithcare

You decided who she was before she finished handing you your coffee. One short reply, one bad text, one look, and you've got a stranger's whole character written. He's a jerk, she's fake, he's lazy, she's cold. Case closed. The problem is you were never actually reading people. You were casting them.

This week we get into the fundamental attribution error: the quiet, flattering habit of explaining other people by their character and yourself by your circumstances. We start on Love Island (light spoilers, you've been warned), where one guy gets branded "lustful" for doing the exact thing a girl three couples over calls "just figuring it out," and we work down to the version you're running on the group chat, the interstate, and your own mother. Fritz Heider laid the groundwork in 1958, Lee Ross named it in 1977, and Jones and Harris proved back in 1967 that we'll judge you for a position we know you were assigned. Then we turn it around, because the real gut-punch isn't how you judge them. It's how much grace you hand yourself for the same thing.

No shame, no "everyone's secretly an angel." Just one smaller, harder move: hold the scene open one beat longer before you issue the verdict. You leave with the word, a recast exercise, and one question to ask the next time someone does the annoying thing.

The deeper dive on the history and the mechanism is over on YouTube: How to Live with Kare.

New episodes every Wednesday. Available anywhere you stream.

live with care 🤎

It's 11pm and he still hasn't texted back. You've done the math. You know it hasn't actually been that long. And you're still holding your phone like it'll go off if you just believe hard enough. This week we get into the anxious-avoidant loop: the one who chases, the one who pulls away, why they keep finding each other, and why it never feels solvable from the inside. We trace where these patterns actually come from, and then we name the thing keeping you hooked. It's called intermittent reinforcement, the same variable reward schedule B.F. Skinner found inside a slot machine. The inconsistency was never a red flag you kept missing. It's the hook. And here's the part nobody tells you: the spark you've been reading as love might just be anxiety. The calm, consistent person doesn't feel boring because the love is missing. They feel boring because the alarm is. We close with your Care Package, three steps to trace your own chasing back to what you were really asking for, and whether you could give a little of that to yourself first. Want the psychology first? The whiteboard breakdown of all four attachment styles is up now on YouTube. Watch that, then come back here for the personal version. New episodes every Wednesday. Live with care 🤎

it's my birthday. which used to mean cake and now mostly means a performance review nobody scheduled. somewhere along the way birthdays stopped being a celebration and became a deadline, and i show up every year to audit myself against a list i don't even remember writing.

this week i get into the "by now i should have" list, why almost all of us keep one, and where the social clock actually comes from. i talk about pressing the pencil too hard, the woman you're losing to who got assembled out of the best parts of five different people and doesn't exist, and the courtroom in my head where i finally noticed there was never a judge. plus the realest stuff: leaving tampa, moving home at 22, walking away from the masters, and learning i'm not measured by what i can check off in a day. you're not behind. being behind would mean there's a front, and there isn't. you're on time because on time is whatever you decide it is. Live with care.

There's a voice in your head that gets loud the second you slow down, and she's brutal — but what if she's not actually wrong, just mean about it? This week I get into where your inner critic comes from, how to tell a coach worth listening to from a troll you need to block, and why the move was never to silence her but to translate her. Because "lazy" is usually just "scared" wearing a meaner face. Live with care.

When something goes wrong, who do you text first, and is it because they'll help you see it clearly, or because you already know they'll take your side? This episode I get into venting culture and why we go looking for agreement instead of perspective, usually to protect a story we've already decided is true. The friends who never push back might be the ones keeping you stuck.