How to Live with Kare

a quick update, i'm sick

Kare — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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

you’re not actually being honest about how you feel

Kare — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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!

putting a word to a feeling: ambiguous loss

Kare — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:01:00 -0700

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.

how to stop overthinking

Kare — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:26:20 -0700

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.

you don't have to earn rest

Kare — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:50:54 -0700

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!

why you always think you're the reasonable one

Kare — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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!

a quick update, i'm having surgery

Kare — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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.

your insecurities were sold to you

Kare — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:47:54 -0700

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 ended the most fun friendship I've ever had

Kare — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:29:09 -0700

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 🤎

why we self-diagnose, and why we do it to everyone else

Kare — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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.).

the art of doomscrolling

Kare — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:16:35 -0700

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.

you're not nice, you're afraid

Kare — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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 🤎

why you stay up late even when you know better

Kare — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:36:09 -0700

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.

the real reason you stay in a relationship you don't want

Kare — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:58:00 -0700

"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 🤎

that cringe moment from 4 years ago? nobody remembers it but you

Kare — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:26:43 -0700

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're not a good judge of character, you're just judging

Kare — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 23:59:00 -0700

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 🤎

he's not mysterious, he's avoidant

Kare — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:00:00 -0700

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 🤎

the birthday audit

Kare — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:40:08 -0700

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.

your inner critic isn't wrong, she's just mean

Kare — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:14:56 -0700

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.

why your groupchat is making you worse

Kare — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:38:23 -0700

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.

how to start something when you've already failed 12 times

Kare — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:36:55 -0700

You've started the same thing a dozen times and quit a dozen times, so by now you've decided the problem is you: you're lazy, you have no discipline. But what if it's not a discipline problem at all — it's a bar problem? This episode I get into why we set goals we have no real shot at keeping, how the ego is quietly running the whole thing, and what actually changes when you lower the bar instead of raising the stakes.

you're more of the problem than you think

Kare — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:34:47 -0700

We build the ego young, as armor against a world that didn't feel safe, and then we forget we're still wearing it into rooms that were never dangerous. In the first episode, I get into where that armor comes from, how it gets passed down through a family, and why the thing protecting you is so often the same thing hurting the people you love. This is the foundation for everything this show is about.

welcome to how to live with kare

Kare — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:54:51 -0700

Welcome to How to Live with Kare — a podcast about ego, self-awareness, and the slow, honest work of actually growing. Each week we dig into the stories we tell ourselves and why we tell them. First three episodes drop June 3rd.