You can read part 1 with a longer intro essay and the ways of simplifying to save money here.

Five Ways to Stop Attention Theft This Spring

1. Set a new routine around when you will NOT be looking at digital platforms that suck you in.

One way to try to cut back on attachment to screens is by picking a small amount of time each day that you can look at your phone and scroll. I’ve written about it, you’ve thought about it, it’s a great technique. BUT! Something that can be an easier on-ramp and require less willpower is to instead set a small time at the beginning of the day when you think it would be most powerful to not be tempted to get stuck in your screen. For me, this time is right when I wake up until I’m at work. This prevents me from running late, or scrolling and then realizing I don’t have time to workout or pack a lunch and am somehow already in a foul mood before the day has even gotten a chance to piss me off yet. Similar to what some notice about starting your day or having a specific routine right when you arrive home, reflect for a little bit about what time of day your attention most deleteriously gets stolen, and pick a 30 minute block just before then.

My Substack and writing across platforms is made possible by my paid subscribers, who get a weekly article, concrete ideas on applying the themes I’m writing about, journal prompts, and discount codes for all digital products in my Etsy. I appreciate all of your support, and the time and attention you lend my writing in an attention-sparse world.

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While I am currently in child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, I completed my adult psychiatry residency and licensing last year. I am learning so much about human development and care from working with kids, but I do miss seeing adult patients, especially the many women I worked with at transition points in life (into and out of college, career, relationships, and reproductive years). With this in mind, I’ve been working behind the scenes for the past few months on getting the pieces in place to open my own small, private practice for telehealth psychiatry for people who live in Massachusetts.

You can find more information on it at my clinical website, here.

I've spent the last 13 years of my life learning how to become a psychiatrist and psychotherapist that can help women slow down, thrive, and be supported. Combining specializations in reproductive psychiatry, chronic pain, and eating disorders, my background lets me offer you evidence-based care while being flexible enough to co-create your path.

Care is confusing for women, and my goal is to simplify it.

I believe mental health care is a journey we go on together, and much about the modern health system and world environment makes this path precarious. My job is to make sure you have all the tools you need, and to give guidance so you feel confident in your next steps. As a therapist, I have expertise and have been awarded based on my work and teaching modalities of therapy.

What A Private Practice Can Offer

For now, I will not be accepting insurance for a few reasons, but will be able to superbill for my patients to be able to submit to their insurance. This is a (even if temporary) decision I do not take lightly, and has been a part of my process of preparing for a private practice for the past year. Without the constraints of insurance, I can plan care for patients that has a level of creativity and consistency that insurance-based practice makes difficult. Additionally, this path allows me to practice what I find to be one of the most profound and holistic ways of mental health treatment: combined medication and psychotherapy treatment. Instead of seeing you only occasionally for medication in short, 20 minute visits, combined treatment helps me to understand what is happening in the broader expanse of your life and to respond with medication, lifestyle recommendations, or therapy approaches appropriately.

Thanks for considering, and I’ll see you soon in our next article on spring resets and saving out time, money, and attention!

Take care & take you time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

In 2026, this feeling arrives attenuated by the current political and cultural events of the world. It is not just about simplifying for aesthetic purposes but about taking power back by noticing where my resources have been flowing. Personally, as a healthcare worker with student loans, this means finances and time. With the rise over the last decade of the attention economy that only seems to escalate year after year, this is also about the mental resources of attention and cognitive load.

Like many, it has felt lately like so many areas of modern American life are an urgent siphoning of money and time wherever possible from us. While we mourn the physical third spaces already lost, we concurrently lose the digital third spaces as the wild frontier of the internet is bought, paywalled, and filled with ads. Apps like TikTok and YouTube now feel like 60% ad, 40% content, and little of the profit those ads generate actually go to the creatives making the work you’re there to enjoy. While the internet is made into rooms you need a subscription to access, subscriptions and monthly fees are being infused into everything from our rented apartment access key to our cars.

Any change in the economy is used as an opaque reason to increase prices, and promises are not given that those prices will come back down once that change is gone. AI is forced into companies, and then used as a reason for layoffs. People can barely afford life as it is, so they cling to jobs that treat them poorly and offer health insurance with huge monthly premiums. They work more hours and have less leisure time as they work more, and this leads to greater likelihood for impulse spending and needing shortcuts for daily life tasks because of the lack of time and cognitive bandwidth. A negative spiral is easy to be trapped into and the longer we are in it, the more profits those at the top get.

The heavier part of this article is over, I promise. If you’re reading this, I bet you’re already aware of it and living it. Let’s get onto the good stuff.

Below is part one for ideas for how to save money, time, or cognitive bandwidth this spring that I’ve been trying to apply. Not all of them are about spending no money or time, or never taking an easier path. They are about re-aligning how what we have is used more consciously and in a more values-based way. My hope is they offer you a small bit of freedom and something you can control in a world where everything feels very much out of our control. Each one includes the specific value or ideal it can help you live out, and later this week I will release parts two and three, ie for time and mental load. As outlined above, these three resources are very much linked, so hopefully each set of seven is helpful across categories.

This list is not about saving from a place of pure discipline. Individualism and frantic optimization is something that emerges from a culture and economy of isolation and understandable insecurity in position, and I think you all know by now I am a hater on the emergence over the years of discipline for discipline’s sake. These ideas are about doing something you might already want to that just so happens to help guard your precious resources more. Some that I suggest may feel right, on balance, for me but feel punitive for you—don’t take those ideas into your life! The point of these is to offer many things that you might try on for size and experiment with to see if they feel good for you. I want these to offer places to start from that, when applied creatively and kindly to your own life, improve the sense of power you feel in your daily routine.

Seven on Saving Money

1. Engage in an experiment for the last two weeks of April to utilize your local library instead of streaming/subscription services where possible. For me, this meant cancelling the Kindle Unlimited subscription I had (and that often didn’t even have the books I wanted but my in-person library did) and cancelling my streaming services that require individual subscriptions. Again, I am not an advocate for perfectionism with this stuff—I can still use HBO and Disney because I share them with my family and friend. Otherwise, I’ll be using Tubi (free with ads…but Netflix paid has ads now anyway!) and my DVD player for library DVDs, as well as Kanopy through my local library’s access.

   1. Value besides saving money: I’m noticing I’m consuming the same stuff as everyone else, and while I love the pop culture of that, I also would like to be more wide-reaching in my inspiration so that I run into more new ideas. Limiting my streaming services may have me either watch less and read more or watch different genres or periods of film/tv. Also: support my local library and be more involved with my local community.

2. There is SO MUCH we cannot control about prices and money right now, and I’m not Pollyanna about that at all. BUT!!! One thing I can control is knowing where my money is coming from and going to more closely. This month, I’m writing down what I spend and what I earn each day in my planner to make me more aware of daily finances. You can use an app for this, too, but I primarily use my usual bank app and credit card app to get these simply.

   1. Value besides saving money: It’s hard to feel secure if you’re uncertain. Often, this ignorance is because of either lack of being taught skills with finances or having had hard experiences with money. However, when we avoid these things, the sense of shame and the situation often worsens and traps us in a negative, escalating cycle. I’ve been there, and I think it’s something we always have to work on over our lives. Starting small with just knowing and bringing a kind curiosity to our daily finances can be a good step.

3. Help yourself reduce weekly spending by becoming more aware of what you physically have. What do you find you often are spending on in an in-the-moment way that you wish you would not? For me, this often happens in areas where I am less mindful about planning ahead or where I am more messy. Before buying a new workout set, I’m challenging myself to fold and reorganize my current workout clothes so I’m more aware of my needs or wants more clearly. For meal planning, having an organized kitchen cabinet and fridge lets me know what I have or need to restock on, and having recipes I like or pre-prepped frozen foods from Trader Joe’s helps me resist frequent fast food or Grubhub orders. Like finances above, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed and make quick-hit choices when we don’t actually know what we have.

   1. Value besides saving money: Understanding what we have can often make us better stewards of it. Whether it is being more able to be creative with personal style or feeling a sense of satisfaction and mastery in the kitchen, knowing what we have helps us use it more skillfully. It doesn’t mean never buying something new—it just means we don’t feel like we are surrounded by messy excess but still never have something to wear or eat that makes us feel good.

4. Set a creative frame that imposes limits on spending for a week at a time. This could be an experiment where you can only make meals from what you have in your cupboard or freezer. Depending on your stage and station in life, this could look like only being able to go to free events or where there is free food being offered this week as the way you can eat outside of what you have at home. This could look like doing a swap of some sort with friends or in your local community. Saving or reducing spending does not have to look boring and tedious—it is actually a victory of capitalism that we actually believe that (which I wrote about here).

   1. Value besides saving money: Creativity is not bought, it is lived. This is why I spam you all over and over again with The process is the point. But we have forgotten this, and we have been made to forget it for the sake of consumerist profit. Creativity has never primarily resided in human in history in the hands of genius. Creativity has lived in made-up lullabies for a child who won’t sleep at 2 am. It has lived in the blanket your grandmother once made for you that you still keep on your bed. It is in the lopsided birthday cakes and scribbled post-it note jokes and even the thorough Reddit comments on niche boards and hilariously specific comments on TikTok. Frames help us to look outside the button of buy and force us into make.

5. Make money in a way you find delightful. Walk with me, I want to do this point in a nuanced way. This is not a post about making all your hobbies into work and constantly therefore being a worker-bee instead of any leisure time. There are financial straits and times people need to do that or do part-time gigs because they’re on the financial brink. This point is not for that situation. This point is to say there may be things you love that you would still love while making money leading them, and that leading them might feel really good. For example, after going to medical school and now working in eating disorders and treating many female patients, I got certified to teach pilates, and now teach twice a week at a local yoga studio I love. I make maybe $100 a week from it, but the benefits it has given to me don’t feel like work. It has kept my workout routine regular, kept me engaged in creativity through planning classes and playlists, and given me a way to afford access to a lovely yoga and pilates community in Boston that I would struggle to afford monthly if I didn’t teach. I feel similarly most of the time about writing this Substack for you all, as it helps me deepen my writing practice, keeps me routine in it, and lets me be a part of the virtual community of creatives online, while also supplementing my fellowship income each month to afford to no longer live in a mice-infested apartment in Boston. These are just examples from my own life, but I think there are many ways of making a little extra money in a way that actually helps you feel more engaged in the world in ways you want to be engaged, and being open to these can be helpful for your bottom line and your sense of being in the world, especially if you miss a part of yourself you find not expressed in your day-to-day work.

   1. Value besides saving money: A sense of skill-building and mastery in an area important to you. A connection to different parts of your local or online communities. A practice and routine that has been hard for you to keep up without more structure/incentive.

6. Create a gentle accountability space. My friends recently decided to meet every month or two to have a place for each of us in our different careers and lives to talk about money and our goals. We are all in different fields, and none of us are experts, but having a space that is both a time for connecting to those you love and that you return to regularly can help with all of these ideas. So many of us have difficulty with money for both external and internal reasons. A regular check in not only strengthens your relationships, but it also gives you new ways of thinking about your situation. My group is friends who live all over the country, so it’s also something to do together when we don’t have regular shared routines anymore.

   1. Value besides saving money: Engaging with those you care about more frequently. Improving your financial literacy. Opening up your ways of thinking about money and making money so you’re not only being influenced by people talking about money online and stories you’ve inherited. Lastly, your friends believe in you and might help you dream a little bigger than you would alone, and can soften the anxiety or stress by sharing the load with money.

7. Reduce unpleasant situations that lead to impulse spending. Easier said than done? Yes. But concretely possible? Also yes. This is one where sometimes you need to spend a little upfront to reduce unpredictable spending along the way. For example, this year, I’ve decided to budget to get my apartment deep-cleaned by a professional. Beyond making my life easier and giving me a sense of delight quarterly, this also makes the amount of cleaning I need to do week to week feel more manageable. When this is more manageable, I actually do it, and so my apartment is tidy and calm more often because I’m not building up and putting off some massive, overwhelming clean by myself. When my apartment is calm, I look forward to coming home each day and my morning routine successfully happens more often. I don’t let things pile up, so I can cook more because there isn’t a reflection of that overwhelm as dishes in the sink, so I don’t impulse spend on take out as often. I know where my clean workout clothes are, and so I make it on time to my classes I teach and the ones I attend and feel better about all my workouts. One spending moment helps reduce many impulse moments of Ubers, takeout, or convenience but not delightful purchases in the weeks after.

   1. Value besides saving money: This one done well can help you feel more cared for in your daily life. Feeling less frazzled day-to-day is what helps me feel most creative and centered in my life. Additionally, feeling prepared helps us be able to take in the joy and meaning more in our work, our families, and our hobbies.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to stay tuned for part two which will be ways of protecting your time, followed by part three on protecting mental bandwidth.

As always, thank you for the time and attention you spend here, and for my paid subscribers for their financial support. I truly appreciate you being here, and I hope this community is a good use of what I know are scarce resources.

Take care & take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

P.S. I am currently in the process of opening my private practice as an adult psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Boston, Massachusetts. If you would like to get on my waitlist to formally work together in a clinical format and you live in the state of Massachusetts, you can find my clinical website here. If you are mental health care professional and wanting to work together in a mentorship/supervision capacity, inquiries come through the same clinical website.

When I started the draft for this newsletter, I found my excitement to write it drain as soon as the blinking cursor appeared. This was not the usual form of writer’s block that comes up whenever you are first starting a piece. The idea of writing this article had been funky and interesting but when I went to create it for Substack a script emerged about how to write popularly about spring for The Internet.

It needed to be calm. It needed to be about a reset (despite my open loathing for the concept of the self that requires constant attempts at improvement). It needed to be some sort of performance of a floating, ethereal, unflappable, almost unfeeling woman. A Pinterest board of green and white and beige seemed to threaten from the background. When I met the page, this story of how we celebrate spring, especially as women performing online, came to mind.

Social media forms us as much as any physical world experience or community does. I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with finding the inner-voyeur/inner-critic metabolized and living in my own mind. Even the recent trend of performing whimsy (which I, as a creator, am at times a part of) felt unalive.

The trend of whimsy online is still a performance, and what was once a wide-open word now looks a very certain way—small red glasses, thin women (often white), pops of design in the dressing and in the background, living in NYC or somewhere in California with an expensive apartment, with a listicle on being more whimsical with activities to do. In and of itself, this is not bad, and is actually a good thing compared to the constriction and pure performance of discipline that the “clean girl” aesthetic espoused.

As the trend has continued, I’ve found myself more ill at ease. Maybe it is because to me, whimsy has always been tied to presence and play. Whimsy was free, intrinsically, from self-consciousness. As with all internet aesthetics, it now is taught online to primarily women not as something that emerges joyfully from within but that is pressured down onto our life experience.

Do I think paper chains, colorful clothes, and crafts are a bad thing? Obviously not—I myself wrote about them at Christmastime. I think if the trend or ideas are taken up just as that and encourage people to live in a more playful way, it’s lovely. But as it continues to get likes, shares, and thus brand deals online, like trends before it, it becomes hollowed out. It is something you show instead of are.

I say all of this for a reason: This is not what I want to offer you for spring. I want to offer here places from which to jump off from, and maybe that’s what all the #whimsymaxxing girls want to do, too. I want to offer that continual image of Mary Oliver—which is to live from a sense of finding our “place in the family of things.” As I wrote about last year for Mary Oliver May, presence and being a creature can offer us a way of understanding ourselves as part of the beauty and awe that Nature evokes.

To be wild is the opposite of performance and an escape from self-objectification. You can put sprinkles in your coffee, and then show the dishes in the sink, the ugly lighting in your apartment that may be priced soon out of your price range. You can wear linen and have picnics and still be angry with bitten-down nails. You can find out what you like, what you don’t like, and stop looking at others. This is the wisdom of a creature.

The bud emerges from inside the bark. The caterpillar molts and emerges by cracking through the chrysalis. The sprout emerges from dirt. This spring, I want to emerge from within.

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Did I play sports as a tween and in high school? Yes—but definitely not well. I played volleyball by mostly residing on the bench and making jokes with my also-benched best friend. I ran cross country and was definitely not breaking any records (but still loved the aspect of being in nature). The most I could say about myself growing up was that I was willing to try hard at sports, and accept that athleticism was never going to be the place where my strengths (literally and metaphorically) lived.

I am not particularly unique in this experience of my body, exercise, and athleticism. In fact, after reading more into the history of feminism, fitness, and women’s bodies1, my felt sense of my ability is the socialization all women receive, albeit with my generation coming on the scene 35 years after Title IX and therefore receiving more encouragement that women in prior generations. We see this language still today that pulls women out of sports and considering themselves as athletes:

• “Don’t lift too much weight or you will get bulky (ie fear of living in even a somewhat larger body) or become intimidating. Men want cardio bunnies…”

• Almost all language around beauty standards and public presentation require a relationship with movement that would increase daily work for women. If you sweat, and therefore need to shower and redo your hair, makeup, and styling, fitness becomes more than just the hour in the gym. Because men have way less beauty labor to perform to be viewed as acceptable in public, valuing exertion costs more and requires more planning and calculations for women.

• Pay in women’s sports compared to men’s is abysmal. Women in sports from an early age all the way through professional leagues are seen as more masculine in a derogatory way while also being deemed as never being able to be skilled in a way that would matter as much as men in sport. This also comes out in sexualized harrassment, most often indicating that a woman interested in sports cannot also be interested in a romantic relationship with men.

It’s no wonder that it is therefore difficult for the modern woman to easily have a playful, joyful, and useful relationship with exercise, even as she pays hundreds of dollars a month to exercise daily. There are so, so many scripts we have inherited and left unquestioned that the casual daily exerciser is impacted by but may not have had the motivation that a professional athlete has to deconstruct.

In this piece about getting more fun in exercise again, my argument is that these scripts affect us “non-athletic” women, too. In understanding the sexist stories we receive about muscle, power, and movement, we move to not living by those stories any more. We find more freedom in our bodies (as pointed out by writers such as Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown)and that liberation allows us more access to joy, pleasure, and empowerment. Making exercise fun and believing in your ability to become or be athletic, no matter your age, can bring so much into the daily life of women.

“Our bodies are the physical bases from which we move out into the world…ignorance, uncertainty—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation from ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be. Picture a woman trying to do work and to enter into equal and satisfying relationships with other people . . . when she feels physically weak because she has never tried to be strong.”

Our Bodies, Ourselves, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 19702

Liberating Growth Mindset: Practice the ability to be something you thought you could never be.

I have a feeling that many of the writers and thought-daughters (aka reflective and creative women) who follow me here may have had similar strengths and weaknesses as girls. Some have had it all, but I suspect the creative and bookish areas of our schoolgirl lives were where we excelled, and P.E. class was something we either experienced shame or proclaimed disdain for (and honestly, often for good reason). This shame-disdain mix was certainly my experience of PE, and then sport became a place of effortful repentance in which I could try so hard (in the case of running, we were encouraged to push pace to the point of puking) to get to the point where I was not unathletic. The goals of mastery, expression, skill-building, connection, or fun were not ever a part of my movement practice until I got into my mid-twenties.

Exercise in your twenties, thirties, and beyond can be an entirely new world compared to how PE and childhood sports may have felt. For one thing, as you get older, less people exercise and, more importantly, as you get into your thirties and forties, exercise slowly becomes something of a daily medicine for many adults in more sedentary-style jobs. This change in the purpose of exercise and the culture around it (even compared to your early twenties, when solidcore and the gym feel like a way to prove your social and romantic worthiness to the dating pool) takes the pressure off. When the pressure is no longer there and you begin to practice a form of movement at a pace that feels good for you, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare becomes important once more.

When I was in my first year in residency in Boston, I began having low back pain. It was likely from increased stress, decreased sleep, decreased exercise, and standing in rounds for hours at a time in the hospital in varyingly odd formations. Because of this and my good health insurance, I went to PT and stuck with it for 6 months twice a week. Over time, the pain decreased and I learned about what contributed to my pain. More importantly, I also actually got stronger and for maybe the first time in my life finally understood how muscle grows and what that experience feels like. It is slow in terms of weeks but quick in terms of years. After this less, I then worked out 4 times a week with the strength training streaming program Evlo, which is run by three female physical therapists who also used to teach group fitness, and were tired of seeing injuries in themselves and their clients. (P.S. I was eventually on their podcast as to discuss body image and exercise as a psychiatrist who specializes in treating women). Through this, I learned that just because I had always been weak did not mean I always had to be weak. Cognitively from my lessons in medical school, I knew this. The actual embodied experience of being able to lift progressively heavier weights shifted something in how I thought of what movement could mean for me. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem also wrote about the radical change both she and other women experienced in pursuing strength:

Exercise can do this for you too, Reader, no matter where you start and what stories you carry. You may be thinking, “Wasn’t this article supposed to be a fun listicle? Why is my inner 13-year-old who dreaded kickball day because she would be picked last getting activated right now?”

Valid! We will get to the listicle, but for exercise to be fun, it has to be safe. For us to play, we need our imagination unlocked and liberated both mentally and kinesthetically. If we feel no safety or agency, our ability to try is severely limited. If we don’t explain some of the stories we have inherited, it’s really hard to have compassion as we try something new because we will simply end up back in a shame spiral and disoriented. You may have experienced this before when you yourself have tried to enact a change in your daily exercise, health behaviors, or lifestyle.

Any way, onto our first listicle of three for this guide.

Ways to make exercise a daily practice of empowering parts of yourself you thought didn’t exist.

• First, ask yourself what type of athlete (any gender, any sport, any time in history) most speaks to you. Let yourself roam with this or get very specific. For you, maybe it is Simone Biles, and the way she commands the floor and sets her limits to do her best. Maybe it is Tom Brady, and the way that he is so focused (sometimes too focused…) on his sport and becoming the greatest. Maybe, even, it is Zara Larsson who isn’t classically what comes to mind when you think of “athletics”…unless you count dance (which we should) and performance, and the ability to do concerts every night without missing a beat or losing her breath. If you could wave a magic wand and have the abilities of one of these athletes or one you choose, who would it be, and why?

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The following is what I would present to you in a print magazine in March 2026 if I had the title and no budget. Links to actual articles that do exist are placed wherever possible. Where not, well, if you work for a magazine feel free to steal my idea.

COVER STAR: ZARA LARSSON

Of course, she is the it pop girlie of the moment AND the most recent diva out on parole from the Khia Asylum. Her recent styling, the start of the US leg of her tour, outspoken politics, and maximalist makeup by Sophia Sinot (our pretend guest creative director for the beauty section) all speak to what young women want right now in the face of increasingly patriarchal and controlling political ethos: joyful, jubilant freedom.

While I don’t have the power to interview Zara Larsson, check out this fabulous one from Flaunt Magazine, by Annie Bush. You can read it in full here. If you didn’t catch it already, here is Zara using her pop girl power for good with the Portland Bike Bus. And because I love both the sentiment and beautiful prose, the following will get you to read the full article if Zara didn’t:

“Shouldn’t we all be so lucky to live in a world in which we’re told the truth, for once? Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard if we stuck around for a bit here, in this gentle universe where the night never comes, all of us adorned in glitter and keychains, orbiting faithfully around our radiant and undying star.”

- Annie Bush for Flaunt Magazine

Fashion + Taste Section: Examining the 2000s Tuscan Mom/ Yoga Mom

Dream articles that would be in this section:

• Actual reprint of an article from the magazine from 2006 (or earlier, maybe 2002).

  • By the way, if you want to reread MANY issues of Seventeen Magazine from our childhood, check out the Wayback Machine collection. Don’t worry—it’s free. God bless the archivists.

• Thrift the Look: Reader challenge/ Small Social Media Creator in which two people are given $100 and 1 day to recreate a look from a recent runway or celebrity red carpet look. Yes, this in itself is a throwback to both The Style Network and its show, The Look for Less. Throw back here on Vimeo (couldn’t find any episodes on Youtube, it’s that much of a deep reference at this point).

• Style feature with Alysa Liu showcasing both her own style as well as a few photos of her being dressed like the trending 2000’s yoga mom

  • For an actual feature on her, read her Teen Vogue feature here. I agree with Teen Vogue that she is worth a cover story, too.

Beauty Section

As above, I think an incredible way to elevate the names of those working around the industry would be having them be the creative director of the beauty section. For this one, Zara Larsson’s makeup artist Sophia Sinot would direct. One page would be her favorite products, and then a QR code to a tutorial for Zara’s look earlier in our pages.

You can check out one of her actual tutorials from her page on TikTok here.

I did not know this before writing, but Teen Vogue DID actually basically do my dream interview with her here, too, for you to check out.

Additionally, in the beauty section there would be an article related to skin and hygiene care, fact-checked by a dermatologist who is an academic and may even research in that field. If we are talking about hairloss, I want an interview with the person writing the papers that products then say they are citing. Like that level of experience would be who would be speaking to us as readers—to save us money and give good advice.

My Beauty Favorites Linked Here

Finally, we would be bringing back my favorite and very whimsical section from Seventeen: Seven Days of Beauty. I don’t think words suffice…so I’ll just let you zoom in on the screenshot of it below, from the one that most shaped my own beauty consciousness in 2008.

Politics + Purpose

Once again, Teen Vogue has been the shining beacon when it comes to taking the formation and opinions of teen girls seriously. Before them, it was not done, at least not in a big way.

One recurring series I would have loved would have been a feature on a non-famous career woman, and how she balances her life. This is a recreation of what Allure used to do with their Work It series, which is a day in the life of everyone from a sanitation worker to one of the Wiggles. Each one is fascinating for those curious, even if you enjoy your job already as a grown up.

Lastly, book recommendations would exist every month, and include a book recommendation from each of the interviewees for the magazine, as well as some of the editors’ and readers’ favorites. In terms of politics, this section would also include a book recommendation to help people go deeper on a story featured in this section around current events.

In the interim, here are some of my favorite nonfiction and fiction books: My Updated Favorite Reads For Summer 20% Off on Bookshop!

Fitness & Health

This is where my MD would work REALLY hard. We would have articles with tutorial images from physical therapists, mental health tools by therapists, and then one miscellany article related to what has been in the news recently that may have trickled down to TikTok and therefore to our readers. I think a recurring series on screen time and phone culture would also be a part of this.

• I think an intriguing article here would be a recurring series called “Two Weeks Noticed”, in which 3 people would try out a new habit or behavior for their health and report back how it went. I am biased towards my Brick and do have an affiliate code, but something like 3 people trying to reduce their screen time with different tools like apps vs. Brick vs. attempting to cold turkey via a “dumb phone.”

• For my biased but honest view on using the Brick, check out my longer article here. For the $10 off of Brick, you can use this link: Discount code here.

• I think bringing back what Popsugar used to do which was bringing in evidence-based celebrity trainers for a workout would still be fun. I would have them fact checked by the aforementioned physical therapist to make sure you’re getting correct, body-neutral wisdom. Sometimes, the fun part was just the variety.

  • For example, here’s that Men’s Health workout with Hudson Williams which I think would be fun to see for other big pop culture moments.

Okay, I think I have left y’all with enough links to explore for the weekend.

I had a ton of fun putting this together, and now I am going to re-watch The Devil Wears Prada.

I hope you have all have a lovely weekend and the spring arrives for all of us soon.

Take care & take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

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New Brick Use Unlocked: When I’m off the clock, I am OFF the clock.

As a fellow (aka I’ve been in training in psychiatry for ten years…1 more after this year to go), a common expectation of medicine that we have inherited is the idea of being on 24/7. There are times I am on call over night and on weekends, or when I am on service in the hospital, and those are not the times I’m talking about. Healthcare is predicated (as many jobs are) on an old system that presumed physicians were men with wives and a level of privilege. They had someone at home to do the work of “making” a home and life, and therefore their focus could be on career. Some of the burn out we struggle with now in healthcare is that there remains vestiges of the old version of medicine where there was not constant documentation, 24/7 ability for people to contact you multiple ways, and where your main focus was on the hospital.

When writing this out, it’s clear that this leads to burn out. Healthcare is not the only place where this is true (looking at you, too, teachers…), but it is the field I’m in. As I’ve transitioned from residency to fellowship, I brought habits that were sustainable in my prior clinics/hospital, but that are more burn-out inducing in my current phase of training. In prior years, when I was on vacation, I would have someone cover my inbox (email and the patient message box), but I would still check or be reachable. This past week, I actually signed out and trusted the other person to cover, and did not check my email. I let things wait, and nothing burned down in my planned absence.

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You can find this year’s journal + guide at my etsy shop, linked here!

Below the pay wall, I’m offering paid subscribers $8 off the journal as a note of thanks for their ongoing support. This month, I’ll be writing on themes related to digital discernment and having a healthier relationship with the internet vs the embodied world, as well as writing short form across socials for it. If you sign up to be a paid subscriber to this Substack now, you’ll have access to all upcoming paid pieces, all prior pieces, and be able to get the journal for $8. TLDR: 16$ is the same price for each, but you get more if you subscribe and then buy with the discount code. Sorry for the math.

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Since the beginning of medical school, the response I’ve gotten from people about wanting to this career path has been increasingly emphatic replies such as, “Oh, God bless you!”, “We need people like you,” and, coming in at number one, “I could never do that, that must be so hard!”.

Most of the time, I’m very grateful for my job, 15 years of intense work later. It is meaningful, and eventually I’ll be able to live comfortably (…and pay off my med school loans). As I’ve started the final part of my training this year in child fellowship, I still believe 16 year old me was right. I also have learned that it is important that I take what other people say—that this job is hard, in many ways—seriously. If I allow myself to internalize that this work is strenuous, complex, and at times downright hostile, then the way I treat my own sense of overwhelm or internal distress becomes a lot more generous and much more kind.

You, my dear reader, may not be a child psychiatrist, but you might be something else that entails the kind of labor that a patriarchical world has heavily invested in you not knowing and valuing as labor. Perhaps you are a school teacher with an underresourced class of 30 kids, all of whom have been impacted by the developmental repurcussions of the COVID19 pandemic. Perhaps you are a woman who is both a mother to young kids and the primary daughter of aging parents, caught between expanding care needs for everyone but yourself. Maybe you are a new mother, going back to work and yet still breast feeding, expected to be the primary parent and not let anyone at work know the toll this additional, round-the-clock work takes.

We fight for a better world. We protest against the injustice in our communities. We toil and we resist and we imagine a world better than the current direction we are going in. If we want to not let our bodies be the battlefield, we must also rest. To rest, many of us need to see the reasons we are so very tired.

This past year, I’ve found myself being drawn to the thought leaders online that can speak to experience—and thus wisdom—that I as a white woman do not have. Black women in particular have freed my thinking from restrictions I was not aware were there.

If I am to speak about the small changes I’ve been applying, I must first recognize the women I have been learning from over the past year, if not longer. Dr. Cecilia Regina has been the primary voice who has taught me to see and deconstruct much of the white supremacy and misogyny that exists in day to day life, and how to have a sense of humor and power when addressing it, both in the outside world and within myself. The Nap Ministry has been doing this work and writing about it for years, and has been one of the first invitations that made me reconsider my relationship with work and rest. BurbnBougie both on TikTok and Youtube has done the work of sharing stories from around the internet and Reddit of women waking up, and introducing with humor the term “Find Out Season” to my consciousness. There are many, many more I could list here. Finally, Adrienne Maree Brown’s book and this particular podcast episode have changed my understanding of pleasure and its part of a free woman and sustainable advocacy. Part of the failure of feminism has been the resistance to intersectionality, and therefore the failure to integrate wisdom from women who have been forced to question all systems we live under—not only patriarchy. Follow them, pay them—they are leaders and their work is life-changing.

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If you had told me intern year (2022) as I started writing about Taylor Swift’s Lover album on TikTok that eventually it would become a legitimate, integrated part of my career as a psychiatrist, I would have either not heard you because I was so sleep deprived OR I would have laughed. I’m very grateful to you all for following along here and across socials, and for the time and attention you afford to my work. It means a whole hell of a lot. Being able to worry a little less about loans and the deceased SAVE program has also been a gift.

My gift to you this holiday season is that all of my pieces are now out from behind the paywall from now until January 1st, 2026. I will not be spamming you in resending them, but highlighting a few of my favorites as reminders as we head into 2026. I hope you enjoy a little extra reading from me, and it gives you a sense of what you can expect in the New Year if you decide to become a paid subscriber ($8 a month, aka a hot cup of coffee, a pump of vanilla syrup, and a small pastry OR one ridiculously overpriced latte).

I hope your Avoidance Advent is going well and, when it is not, that you are getting creative and kind in your problem solving.

For my 201 paying subscribers: you are my patrons. Without you over the last year, I would have picked up more hospital shifts and written less. Thank you for support and engagement over the last year, and I hope you know that your support has meant the world to me.

Take care & Take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

Today’s post is sponsored by my favorite brand of light therapy lamps, Northern Lights Technologies. Beyond being a small family business that has been in the industry for years, Northern Lights Technologies make light therapy lamps functional and aesthetic, making it easier to leave them out in your home and use daily. More on that below. You can check out the lamp I have and get get $20 off with purchase with my affiliate code which is, as always, BADARTEVERYDAY at checkout.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a form of depressive disorder, and while it is thrown around online often each winter, I find most people (and in clinic, patients) often haven’t had the time with a clinician to discuss how and why winter might impact their mood, and what to do about it to help.

Seasonal Affective Disorder vs Winter Blues

In almost all of psychiatry, a disorder is when a normal emotion or human experience happens so frequently or so intensely that it disrupts day-to-day function for an ongoing period of time. For those with Seasonal Affective Disorder (or S.A.D.), what this can look like is a cluster of symptoms that usually occurs in the darkest months of the year, especially places that are far from the equator and much less sunlight per day.2 As with Major Depressive Disorder, the symptoms3 I’ll ask about for SAD are about whether for more than one winter in a row, the following have been notable:

• Emotionally: Increased and persistent feelings of low mood and sadness, feelings of worthlessness or guilt. Anhedonia, aka loss of pleasure or sense of enjoyment in activities that have usually brought fulfillment. Additionally, this is where I might ask about thoughts of self-harm or wanting to no longer be alive or of hopelessness.

• Cognitively, concentration can be more difficult.

• Physically, change in sleep with either sleeping more or sleeping less, and decrease in energy even when enough hours of sleep are occurring. Physical restlessness or feeling slowed down, almost like you’re moving as “heavy as lead”. Increased appetite or decreased appetite, sometimes an increased appetite for or craving for carbohydrate foods

These are the usual symptoms in depression. When it is only happening during a certain season and happens more than one year in a row, and is much less present or completely absent during the other months of the year, the diagnosis made is S.A.D.

Winter blues is more of a colloquial term, and while it can include SAD, it has more come to mean normative changes that might happen to mental wellbeing due to the change in daylight, temperature, and behaviors that occur during winter months. This could have something in common with the symptoms above, but it may not last the whole season, may not get in the way of day to day life, or may be related more to a change that occurs within winter itself (ie, you can’t go running anymore because of ice, and you used to love running daily with a friend) but aren’t necessarily part of the changes in light nor changes in your circadian rhythm.

The neurobiology of SAD is complex, and still under investigation as the science advances in understanding complex interactions between environment, sleep, and physiology of mood and cognition. One recognized mechanism in the literature is that lack of sunlight in the winter increases the presence of a transport protein. With decreased sunlight, there is increased transport of serotonin out of the space between neurons, which makes its cascade less available, and thus is correlated with lower mood. 4

Another mechanism thought to be related to increased fatigue in winter and SAD specifically is increased production of melatonin with increased darkness. The pineal gland is a component of the nervous system that assists in regulation of sleepiness, and when there is darkness, the pineal gland produces melatonin.

The downstream of effect from both of these mechanisms leads to disruption in sleep (which also happens in non-seasonally mediated depressive disorders) which further worsens mood and fatigue.

Vitamin D from decreased sun exposure is an additional discussed component, but I won’t belabor that here. If you are spending time outside still in winter, this may not be as much of an issue, but as always, speak to a clinician on any of this for clinical guidance. Vitamin D supplementation can be useful for some in winter, but it seems online many people are recommending starting it regardless of getting labs or symptoms, which may or may not be a useful recommendation (though I tend to think broad internet suggestions for interventions aren’t usually nuanced enough to help or be appropriate).

How We Treat Seasonal Affective Disorder

Like many diagnoses in psychiatry, we have a few different evidence-based routes to help treat seasonal depression, and what we end up choosing often has to do with the unique set of preferences, side effect profiles, and life style choices an individual has. The main options per the literature at present are light therapy, talk therapy, and medication. A work up by a clinician will also include asking about your whole body health, nutrition, and other symptoms to rule out other factors or underlying causes.

• Light Therapy: As you might guess from this post’s partnership, light therapy is one of the most accessible pillars of approaches to treatment for SAD, and is often one that can be used alongside other modalities if needed. Light therapy helps to increase exposure to rays of light similar to daylight, and can be especially helpful if done in the morning to mimic natural early in the day sun exposure that can help energize us.

  • Note: Similar to antidepressants, those with concern for depression that is a part of bipolar spectrum disorder (ie a psychiatric illness that includes hypomania or mania, sleep disruption, and changes in behavior in addition to depressive symptoms) should speak to a clinician before thinking about starting light therapy, as there is a risk light therapy may precipitate a manic episode.

• Medication is often the option we will use in cases where someone presents with moderate-to-severe symptoms from the list above, especially if safety concerns are present. Part of the reason this happens is that we know it can help pretty dependably in a timely fashion especially for severe depressive symptoms. Starting with medications does not mean precluding the other forms of treatment, and vice versa. Often, I try to help my patients not moralize which treatment is superior in trying—many people can have a stigma towards their own mental health that views medication as a sort of “shortcut” rather than a brilliant invention that can improve lives and get people back to who they are and the work they want to be doing in the world.

  • The common medication used for this are SSRI’s, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, aka the most common modern form of antidepressant used as they have much better side effect profiles compared to older antidepressants (aka TCAs, MAO-i’s) (though we do use those still at times in the right cases and can be hugely helpful!). We also at times may use Wellbutrin, which has a somewhat different mechanism, similar to how we use it in depression.

• Therapy, particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), can be hugely helpful for treatment of seasonal affective disorder. Common parts of CBT that may be used to help those who suffer yearly with change in mood are psychoeducation around how SAD works, increasing awareness of impact of SAD on one’s thoughts, behaviors, and mood states, and creating “behavioral activation” plans to approach the emotional, physical, and cognitive changes that SAD can bring in different, more effective ways.

  • Anecdotally, for those who may be more isolated during winter and that behavioral component is part of their SAD, I find therapy can be a good place to start if it can be started in a timely fashion.

• In terms of recommendations, as always, speak to your clinician. Transparently, most of the time the choice of how to best proceed depends so much on a person’s clinical history, co-occurring illness, preferences for treatment (effect onset, ability to maintain, cost, desire for medication vs not using medication etc, safety concerns).

• If you’d like an additional deep dive into this topic, you can check out the episode we did on winter mental health here.

How I Recommend Using A Light Therapy Lamp

• First up, I have loved my light therapy lamp from Northern Lights Technologies for a few reasons. One, it’s aesthetically pleasing. This may seem unimportant to some, but I think those who read this and follow me care quite a bit about the beauty of every day, routine life. In the case of this lamp, the form serves the function: it’s beautifully designed, and therefore I don’t mind it being on display, and therefore there is very little barrier to use. I’ve got mine on my nightstand for cozy coffee drinking and morning reading with the light nearby for 20 minutes, but you could put it by where you dry your hair or do your work in work from home.

• A few other things about optimizing this routine. Because the lamp is meant to help the body mimic the wake-sleep cycle from daylight during longer days of the year, it is best to use it in the first hour of the morning. One, this will help you wake up and it will be easier to be regular with if you tie it to your morning routine. Two, this helps start the internal clock that your body might otherwise not get until later in the day (or not at all, if it is frigid and you work mostly indoors). I would not recommend using this at night as it can be wakefulness promoting, which is usually not what you want at 10:30 pm. Am I intrigued by this and considering using it if I ever work night shift again? Maybe.

Ultimately, the causes of both mild winter blues to severe Seasonal Affective Disorder are multifactorial, and include lots of the lifestyle components we’ve been talking about in addition to the body-environment regulation mediated by weather and sunlight hours. Despite this, we have many options to help make winter much easier, and to support those who dread this season.

If you’re interested in your own aesthetic Light Therapy Lamp, you can check out Northern Lights Technologies and the one I own here, and get $20 off with my affiliate code BADARTEVERYDAY. Thanks again to Northern Lights Technology for making this post possible and bringing a little light into a dark New England winter.

Let me know what questions you have, and I hope you’re holding up so far this winter season.

Take care and take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

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For my own enjoyment, I knew I still needed to play and make good (or bad) art. I loved (and still love) Taylor Swift, am a romantic in all senses, and was on prom planning committee in high school. From all of this, you can get that I love a theme and love to love. I decided to start on TikTok by writing about living by the themes in the songs of Lover by Taylor Swift. Mostly, it was a challenge or devotion for me to keep thinking about things besides what I saw and learned in the hospital. It grew a few thousand followers in a month, which was huge traction for me at the time. TikTok has been mostly positive for me as a vehicle for creativity and expression, and I suspect it’s because my life has been busy and I love my clinical work. Since that time, I’ve grown my TikTok outside of the Taylor Swift niche mostly by continuing to post about lifestyle, habits, and pop culture themes I love.

When I began posting, I didn’t want my social media writing to be about medicine. I thought they needed to be separate anyway, and I was doing it to have access to the imaginative, VH1-loving, tumblr-having teen part of myself. At 26, I knew that I needed to hold that part of myself a little more tenderly and with a bit more celebration. I still thought it and medicine were separate.

Additionally, as stated, I WAS AN INTERN!

What did I know? Even at the time, I saw and knew of the misinformation around mental health online. I myself had fallen prey to some overpromising guides and coaches, and my early 20s library loan history was littered with self-help. As I still sometimes glibly say, it isn’t imposter syndrome if you truly are not yet skilled at something (which was developmentally normal for an intern!). I did not feel equipped to speak to a non-specific audience about psychiatry. Even as a board-certified adult psychiatrist now, I tend to lean away from generalizations or specific advice. Navigating mental health is like navigating giving someone directions to a place: the same advice that would get one person closer to where THEY want to be could bring another person in the totally wrong direction. If I send out information to a broad general public in the form of even longer social media posts, the algorithm doesn’t show it to people who it is the most accurate for. Algorithms direct what you see based on what is most salient—and salience can be an anxiety compulsion, a trigger of trauma, a video or idea coherent with the negative evaluation that depression causes in one’s cognitions. I felt MUCH more confident to talk about Taylor Swift albums, and eventually, confident in talking about small ways to try to be more creative, organized, and present like the good books and magazines I had once read as a teen (not the self-help book era though).

Quite a bit has changed in the last year, and overall that change has been quite positive.

I completed my fourth year of adult psychiatry residency and won a resident teaching award for creating a more robust curriculum for weekly psychotherapy lectures. I was recruited to start a podcast with my friend and fellow psychiatry trainee, Presro, and we’ve completed two seasons for a total of 40 episodes thus far, and even got asked to speak at the American Psychiatry Association for a panel on social media and psychiatry. This past month, I found out I passed my adult psychiatry boards, meaning I am now a board-certified psychiatrist (!!!) after 8 years of medical training. I also started child fellowship, which I’ve found challenging and enlivening. Finally (this is an annoying list now I’m sorry), I became dedicated to cultivating this space for longer writing here on Substack, and for finding a way to see if the time I put into this writing can be paid or sustainable, so that when I do finish training and continue on in life, I won’t need to be always behind on something or rushing.

With these milestones and with the years of training, last year I felt comfortable enough to say yes to the podcast opportunity when it was presented. Part of my hopes in healthcare and interest is in systems of care and education, and like anyone who cares about an ideal in a big, sometimes overly complex hierarchy, I like to complain about what should be different and how I would do it. When Preston was recruited by Dr. Glaucomflecken to do a podcast, I remember telling him how awesome that opportunity was, and how exciting both the education and conversations he would have would be. When he then surprised me by asking me (?!! was my internal reaction), it was a bit of a…well, excuse my language but a, “shit or get off the pot” situation. If you want a system to change, if you do feel prepared enough (I did at that point), and the opportunity presents, you need to take it or you need to chill a little on your complaining. So I said yes, and the first ten episodes functioned as a bit of exposure therapy for me (and Preston, for whom the podcast format was also new).

Over the year of creating longform, nuanced, and highly caveat-ed content around mental health on the podcast and women’s health information on here, the anxiety has lowered. Being a full on attending level, board-certified psychiatrist also helps. Finally, the amount of misinformation in the last year alone from the administration on everything from vaccines to SSRI’s to how mental health treatment works has been a propeller for me to research, write as well as possible, and get in the arena. I see the pregnant patients in my clinic who are struggling and then this misinformation makes them feel like getting care (which is shown to help them AND fetal development and longterm child outcomes) is a failing. I see the fear people have about what the world makes of their child with autism. I am prepared enough—we need voices out there with experience and without a supplement line.

This leads us to the question—why I am still not Bad Art MD on socials.

When I was younger, seeing that someone was a therapist or a doctor made me assume they were like my father, who is a retired primary care doctor from a small midwestern farm town. He does good things like he’d never thought to do anything else, and I strive to be like him. Growing up and being in the world, I learned that not every person is like him—whether that person is another doctor, a nurse, a businessman, a teacher, an influencer. I still want to be like him, but between self-help content online and realizing the amount of negative experiences people have in healthcare, I haven’t always wanted people to feel the information or things I write about are from a physician. I wanted them to see if they liked it on their own, without having too much influence on them. I believe that the public does need to seek better information, and re-orient to people who dedicate their lives to understanding something—teacher, caregivers, researchers, doctors. However, I know that when someone says, “I’m a doctor, trust me…” to a crowd of people, the immediate trust and belief is still a part of the privilege of being in the field, even online. When I speak to my patients, cite research, or on the podcast do an overview on standard of care, I want people to trust that over “trust me bro” influencers. When I talk about ideas to help you be a little more mindful, a little more present, and to address your anxiety differently, I want it to have the feeling of two friends over coffee. I want you, as my reader, to feel we are two peers sitting down and considering something, and that you are the expert of your experience and what suggestions might feel good. Ultimately, with my patients I want this collaborative, longitudinal clinical relationship, too. In public, collaboration and mutual influence cannot happen when speaking to a contextless, social media crowd, and especially not in 1 minute or a paragraph.

I believe many people out there who identify by their credentials are doing absolutely crucial work, work that is more needed than ever. I am glad that I’ve stepped a bit more into acknowledging on here and the podcast my daily life and expertise in psychiatry, especially in working in eating disorders, with chronic pain, and in pregnancy. As for my daily writing, I hope it comes to you like a comfort, a friend, or a good idea, and gives you 0% white coat anxiety. At present, this is the way that I do my part to impact the health information that we all swim in online every day.

Thank you for being a part of this, and supporting my writing over the years. This community and writing for you has made me understand that creativity and care for patients can go hand-in-hand.

Take care and take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

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It is officially my favorite and least favorite month of the year, and this year’s guide (renewed and invigorated compared to the one I made in 2023) is out now!

It includes tips and tricks, things to do to set up today, and a new daily task with explanation and reflection prompts for 25 days.

If you’re wanting an accountability buddy, you can join the chat here on Substack (linked here) where I will be posting our beloved Roll Call thread daily (and some reflection/advice sub-topics too). Link to chat directly is here.

And now for the link and discount of 50% off for the first 50 to use the code!

The listing for this year’s journal is here. (aka on my Etsy Shop for digital journals from over the years here).

Discount Code: Promo code: AVOIDANCEFEARSME for 50% off this journal (and actually all products in my shop)

Yes I do think making this the code is funny. You can also use the code by clicking through this link right here and it should auto-apply.

Thank you for your support (my student debt loans appreciate you) and SEE YOU IN THE CHAT TOMORROW!

Non-avoidantly yours,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

In our society, there is a lot of focus on the primary core of community being the nuclear family. You know this already, and so do I. Especially for women, the story of a meaningful life has been almost exclusively around marriage and having children. There are many parts of the internet and my own writings that get at questioning the overvaluation of this component of life that also devalues other forms of love, community, and meaning.

Paradoxically, within this world view comes a set of ideas that women will automatically know how to mother, how to care for a family, and that other women will know almost magically how to care for the mother. This is all care work, and it is a set of skills that can be learned. However, many people are stuck in the socialized story that if you don’t have these skills immediately, then something is wrong. The implication being the damning story that there is something not maternal, not caring, not feminine enough about you. This story keeps women separated from one another, especially when some women are having children and mothering, others are not, and all of them feel bad for the current status of their life and a sense that somehow, always, they are doing something wrong.

This article is for people who are in kind and caring friendships or communities where you think it would be a delight to be able to be with your friend during this period, but you don’t know where to start. This article is not an exploration of if your friend is there for you in your life as much as they want from you in their parenthood, if there is prior resentment in the friendship, or a sense that one woman’s stage of life is no longer as interesting or mature as the other’s. That article should be written, but it isn’t this one.

During Pregnancy

• When your friend tells you she is pregnant, there may be lots of emotions you feel around it. These are valid, and don’t need to be hid from the friend or within the relationship. However, we have the capacity in relationship to hold multiple things at once, and when you first learn, being able to celebrate them, and hold for another time if you have complex feelings about it may allow more space both for the celebration of her new phase of life AND the space for whatever feelings or fears it might bring you. The temptation is to err to extremes—ignore your own feelings and totally push them out of a close friendship, or demand they be the primary concern. In health relationships, there is time for prioritizing and journeying through both.

  • This includes if you don’t want kids or you’re surprised. Use curiosity and this change as a way to know your friend in a new way as they go through new life experiences.

• First 4-5 months for pregnant folks is nausea time. The last few months they feel like they have a medicine ball strapped to their spine, on top of their bladder. Consider how you would plan to spend time with a friend who had broken a leg or had another mobility limiting ailment. Pregnancy is not an ailment, but it is a huge body change, and your friend might not be able to do the same pace or type of things they could when not pregnant. However, they also aren’t frail, and many women feel great during most of their pregnancy. Attunement and curiosity are the first step, and recognizing how big of a change in their body is happening.

  • Ginger supplements, mint, etc if approved by their doctors as safe as well as some perfume scents can help with nausea. There are medications they can discuss with their doctor, too.

• Think about the things you both enjoy doing together, or think about the parts of them having a child you’re excited for. Offer one thing to do with them that they may be doing as part of baby prep that you could make an afternoon of, and then do your usual coffee or lunch spot with it. Your friend is still your friend, just with a new sort of existential job. It can be fun to live it with her.

Before Birth

• Ask your friend when family or friends are coming to support them post birth. Many people will have parents or family who help them in the first four weeks postpartum, and they may be both learning the skill of keeping a newborn well while keeping their sanity. These four weeks may also be the time when parents want to expose their baby to less new people, as they are anxious around virus or flu exposure. Consider talking to your friend about their plans both to learn how they are getting support, and to know when their support levels might change and a visit might be nice.

• Ask your friend what they are excited about for when they are not pregnant, and what foods or wine or experiences they most cannot wait for. Consider noting this and bringing whatever it is when you first visit.

• Let them know that you know this period will be different, and while you’ll reach out to them, you also understand that the first few weeks post-birth are a brand new world and you’ll assume benefit of the doubt with them that if they don’t text back, it’s because they’re sleeping for the first time in 4 days. Talk about when it might feel good for you to visit, and then check in once their settled at home after the first week.

The Fourth Trimester

• After birth, let your friend know you would love to meet their new baby, and that you’re happy to bring take out or a dessert or your nice vaccuum or anything they need from the store. You miss your friend, so getting to see them at all will be nice for you. They are trying to surf a brand new wave, and are probably tired: offering concrete things to bring that are reasonable for you to do helps them not have to try to come up with or ask things of you that might make them feel like they’re asking too much.

• When you visit, ask about the birth experience and how things have gone so far. Normalize that this period feels somewhat nuts to most people, and that it is like being thrown into the ocean and being expected to surf when you’ve never seen the ocean before. If you’re new with babies, don’t let your fear of them prevent you from holding the baby if offered. Part of what makes postpartum so hard is that assumption that mom knows all, knows best, and is the director of care. The more comfortable you get with your friend’s baby, the more that when you’re together you can be helpful and your friend can be more mentally present with you and have the luxury of peeing without holding the baby. You laugh, but this is groundbreaking for new mothers.

• The first few months postpartum strain a relationship. If both parents are involved (ideal), they’re tired, mother is bodily recovering, they have a little angry joyful being who they are just learning how to operate with. If this comes up, use your best judgment in normalizing this if your friend is anxious or taking too much on herself. Laughter and recognizing this is a phase is the best medicine.

• Babies love to walk. There are videos from nurses on youtube on how to swadle or efficiently change a baby’s diaper. You don’t need to overdo this if kids really are not your thing, but the more comfortable you feel with being with the baby with your friend, the more comfortable your friend will be, and the more connected you will both be (and have capacity for).

• If your friend has piles of laundry, help fold while you talk. If they have dishes, wash while you talk. Ask if they want to hold the baby or fold the laundry, ask if they want to ignore the chores and just talk while the baby sleeps because they never get to talk to other adults. Generally: offer concretely, but offer multiple choices so they can pick something that feels best for them. Do not offer things that you don’t have capacity or a little fun in yourself—we do not want resentment.

The First Year

• You don’t know how to talk to them about babies. They don’t know how to talk to you about babies. Let’s embrace being awkward. Additionally, you may feel like you have to talk about the baby with them, and they may feel like they just want to talk about anything but the baby. Things get quite weird after birth and women compare themselves online to other mothers and their friends and everyone else while they scroll instagram during breast feeding. This can lead to insecurities about postpartum everything—from their bodies, to having the right feelings about work, to how they miss the part of them that used to go out with you and was more free. This readjustment will take time for both of you in your friendship.

• Even if you don’t always love being around kids, especially in the first year, it’s really hard for parents to separate, especially breastfeeding moms. Get creative of what might be fun or easy to do together in this year. Once again: come up with something that you would actually like to do, because the more you keep some of your desire in there, the more you’ll feel like your old friendship.

• Familiarity is the mother of liking in most things. You may just not have been around young people before in a comfortable environment or at all. You may be surprised what it’s like when your friend has a kid.

• Something I’ve noticed that can be helpful for new parents but they feel guilty for needing: sensory adaptations. Below are some good ones to consider for your friend if you notice anything with them or from your knowledge of them before baby:

  • Babies scream. We need to know our baby is upset. We don’t have to feel on edge because the scream is so high pitched that our ear rings. Consider earbuds or adustable sound level earbuds like Loops (not sponsored).

  • Paper plates and bowls are allowed in the first year. Eating frozen food or the same thing more often than not is allowed in the first year. Running the dishwasher only half full because otherwise you forget and then the dishes are overwhelming is allowed. See where things can be made a bit easier while all energy is on figuring out how to have a kid.

  • Pelvic pain and difficulty with holding in pee is not normal as months and months go on. Pelvic PT and discussing with their doctor can help. Additionally, postpartum worsening mood, lack of enjoyment, irritability, insomnia, or other concerns can also be helped by mental health professionals and is more common than many think. Your job isn’t to be your friend’s therapist, but if you notice something even if you feel odd stating it, state it. There will be relief if it is there and someone wants to talk to her about it.

  • Babies need to eat, be changed, or be calmed to sleep. Sometimes they are a little too warm or cold, but mostly it is the first three. When you hold a baby and they’re older than like 8-10 weeks, hold them under a fan, a tree, or a mobile and they will fixate on those things for minutes sometimes. You’ve probably noticed people standing and swaying side to side when trying to calm a baby—this is the way. Additionally, containing them against your body, rubbing their head, and staying calm and gentle in hushing them or humming to them can help them regulate.

  • Night nurses exist. Lactation consultants exist. Not being too perfect about breast feeding exists as an attitude. Your friend will have 1000 voices telling her the ways she can fail as a mother. Be a voice where she can be open, explore, and come to her own sense of things with you.

As always, these are based in my understandings thus far as a perinatal and child psychiatry fellow, but this information is meant for general information and entertainment, not specific, targeted medical opinion or advice. This period can be such a special, beautiful, hard, and connective time, and seeking support should be more normalized than it is. We should take the idea that it requires a village more seriously, and some of the above are about how to sustainably be a member of that village.

Take care, and take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

I was influenced myself right here on Substack to consider the Brick device, and for a while I dismissed it. This dismissal had little to do with the device itself, so much as it had to do with my repeated failures with trying to change my tech environment voluntarily to reduce screen time. However, either due to virtual peer pressure or by the very physicality of the device, I succumbed in September and purchased. It is, for once, one that I have not failed immediately, and for the rest of this post, I’ll give you my thoughts on why that is, with integration in my hypothesis from different psychological/therapeutic behavioral change principles. After that, I’ll give a few tips on how it works for me and tips to prevent it from becoming another failed try of GTFOff our phones.

What I’ve Failed At And Why: Flashback to January 2025 AKA The TikTok Ban Was Awesome For Me

The TikTok ban. I deleted the app because I am a fool and really thought it was all over. I couldn’t redownload it until February even though it came back the next day. Surprisingly, given that my main platform is there, that time ruled for me. The time it gave back to me created the impetus to invest in Substack and start writing more regularly here. When the app became available for download again in February, there was a feeling of excitement swirled with dread. I had tried prior to the ban to regulate my use, hoping to be able to practice the ideal moderation of only 30 minutes a day of social media, and found myself to be utterly hopeless at that when left to my own devices (pun intended). Enter trials of different ways to control screen time, including my very own GTFO Your Phone February Challenge (and journal, which by the way I do still stand by all the tips in there). The problem with phone blocking apps, screentime limits, trying to leave my phone in different locations in my home, and even the journal I created was that they all depend on multiple willpower choice points. I’m most likely to want to be on social media and scroll when I’m tired, my will power is lacking, and I want to be entertained or numbed. A behavioral scheme that requires your least strong point to be the time when you have to make good choices is a behavioral scheme made to fail.

How The Brick Device Has Been Different

The Brick Device is a small square magnet that now lives on my refrigerator, and to use it you download an app on your phone. When your phone is on “brick” mode, the only way to unlock it is to bring it to the magnet. You can unbrick your phone through the app without the device, but only five times for the life of the brick, and then the device won’t work anymore. This limit, the physical boundary, and the numerous active bad decisions I would have to make to undo it or move the device towards breaking is what has made it so useful for me so far. Is there a way to hack it or jerry-rig it? I’m sure. But it is not so obvious as deleting apps or changing focus modes on phone, and that has made the difference.

In the app, you can make endless modes of blocking and schedules for blocking that function in some ways like the focus/do not disturb modes on the Iphone. For example, I have one that just blocks TikTok, which is the app most adept at stealing my attention and keeping me stuck. I have “90’s Rom Com Apartment”, which blocks everything except phone calls and Facetimes (because I think a Facetime is within the bounds of the spirit of the law of how a protagonist would hang out in a Nora Ephron NYC apartment in 1997). I have a “You are NOT working” mode that blocks me from checking emails or other places that social media work or clinical work can build up but do not need to be checked at 8 pm on a Sunday night.

In addition to different modes, the app has a schedule function, meaning you can set these up in advance, without having to go to your magnet and “brick it” on. These don’t end, so you have to wait until you’re by your brick to turn it off again. How I use these is that overnight, my phone goes into Brick mode, so when I wake up, I cannot scroll. Even though my coffee maker is right next to my fridge, there is something about admitting defeat/opting out that early in the day that my ego won’t allow. I also have come to know about myself that me in motion or standing is very different from me in sitting and scrolling mode. I have a hypothesis this may be true for more than me, and if this is you, I think a device like the Brick that makes you have to get up to make a choice you mostly don’t want to make is key.

Lastly, the app tracks your time spent bricked up (yes, I still think this is funny, yes at 31, yes as an academic. Sorry. Y’all SAID you want more humanity in medicine). One of the ways I find this personally and generally psychologically helpful is that it is a positive metric. Instead of looking at screentime as a metric and feeling a sense of shame for where you are at—even when you’ve been improving—following how much time your phone is on Brick mode shows you functionally the same thing but as increasing wins. I think so many people right now already feel overwhelmed, anxious, isolated, and self-critical. Shame is part of normal human emotions, and has a function12 , but when it becomes the central place we move from, it often becomes disruptive to function outside of its “normal” use without our Rolodex of emotion.

Pitfalls to Avoid This Becoming the Digital Equivalent of An Unused Gym Membership

For many people, the initial phase of anything can have more flexibility and be open to establishment of norms than once we are in routine. The first of the month, New Year’s Day, a new routine, a new school year—all of these offer an opportunity to establish how you want to behave in a new way because set routines and behaviors are not yet in place. The more new the setting or stimuli is, the more the field is open for behaving differently (more open, but not necessarily unbogged down by prior experience and learning). Getting this device is no different—the field is open, and your past experience is chomping at the bit to assert itself, but there are other choices that stand a chance to be made.

• Pitfall 1: You don’t put any schedules in place, so the device becomes another thing that only works if you choose it at your low will power points.

  • The same problem as the prior solutions can emerge if you are going to require yourself to opt in every day. The more you don’t use it, the more you forget it is there, the more your prior behaviors generalize into this new situation.

  • Suggestion: When you’re getting started, beginning with a gentle schedule that challenges you 10% is a good place to start. Make it so you have to get up and opt out to not do the behavior, rather than get up and opt in.

• Pitfall 2: You try to go all or nothing, and end up with a whole basket full of negative emotions or experiences you’ve been prior using your scrolling to soothe.

  • I tend to be a therapist of the belief that people do things for reasons, and that behavior is often rational or was functional and rational to an environment and set of stimuli at some point. If you don’t want to be on your phone as much as you are, if your phone and scrolling makes you feel bad, and you’ve tried and not been able to stop, that tells us something. The screen use may be designed to create dependence, but there is also something that may be present that the screen use helps you cope with. We don’t need to seek to eradicate this or even judge it—we just need other tools in the toolbox so that screentime doesn’t become the only way to process or soothe. The self-compassion here does bring in the fact that these apps over years and in the height of a pandemic have been made to keep your heart and attention enthralled with them, and the fact that this conversation is common means you are very much not alone in this. While the best way to work on dealing with emotions and coping differently is in a therapeutic relationship or with someone in real life who knows you well, I recognize that isn’t possible for everyone. Here is my bookshelf of books I recommend and have been helpful to me and to my learning over the years. Many of available at your public library or there are interviews with the hosts. My bookshelf at Bookshop.com is here, and disclosure is this is an affiliate link.

  • Suggestion: Start small (again, 10% scary is what I recommend). Consider this like you would the gym—you don’t go in and try to bench press 300 pounds. You will injure yourself, and you will avoid the gym for a long time. We want to right challenge and the right support. If your screen time has been 4 hours every night after school or work, then suddenly trying to stop is like putting yourself under that heavy bench press bar. Can you block it for 30 minutes, already set up right when you get home? Can you set up a creative hobby or plan to facetime or call someone while you cook instead of scroll? And then, can you celebrate a small win.

    • Note: While the concept of addiction and dopamine is vastly oversimplified on the internet and even in some books, and while I don’t know yet that I would qualify screen use as an Addiction in the same way substances are because of the differences in direct physiology, there are some parallels. The reason I bring this up is because when people come off of substances, there is often a period that we have to slowly come down because otherwise the withdrawals are either so painful or so dangerous that the majority of people will not be able to sustain it. Many of the cold turkey no social media people abound online, and that’s great if that works for them or for you. But I have a feeling you’re reading this because it didn’t, and because unlike something like cocaine, most people can’t totally go offline and live in a cabin by the sea, because tech is part of their job, their social life, their fun.

• Pitfall 3: I’m off my phone…now what?

  • Boredom! Ennui! Anxiety that you should already have plans by now! The desire to create a project to take up time because what the hell is free time! All of these goblin thoughts will rush in when your phone isn’t rushing at you. I invite you to take a moment and breathe, and recognize that this is part of the getting off your phone process. This is maybe where the GTFO Your Phone Workbook is the most helpful, because it helps you explore how to fill your time or at least contend with it.

  • Suggestion: Consider making an Analog Bag, as TikTok has been talking about, before you try out the Brick Device. Prepare yourself like when you’re going somewhere without internet. There’s no honor in making something that is already challenging for you more challenging. There is a level in which our ability to have free time has atrophied due to phones (more on this soon). People talk frequently about why screentime and social media themselves are directly bad, but over time I’ve grown more concerned with how they indirectly impact the rest of our time. Am I overwhelmed because I truly don’t have time, or has my glowing device just unnecessarily sucked that time out of me without any good return? Is there so much to do an think about all the time, or is listening to 5 hours of content across platforms each day just leaving me with no space to think? The empty time will feel odd, as any new thing does. Start small, go slow, and validate when possible that it makes sense that this feels disorienting.

Let me know what questions you have in the comments, and I’ll do my best to respond to each of them as thoughtfully and cited as possible. I know this is a problem many people have, and as we go into winter and the cold, dark times of the year, over scrolling can be even harder to feel some control over.

For 10$ off, click here for my Brick referral code.

Take care & take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

Different ways to support my publication:

Affiliate links for recommendations (Aka things I’ve loved for years)

My Book Shelf (Mental Health recommendations, feminist fitness, and my favorite fiction)

Brick Device Affiliate 10$ Off Code

Etsy Journals: Avoidance Advent, GTFO Your Phone, The Daily Seven Self Care Framework

I was nervous as I arrived, possibly because I was running late, it was raining, and i had 4-5 odd shaped objects. By the end, I was delighted and grateful for how the group opened up, and honestly impressed by each of their posters. I have a friend who tells me my account name is a misnomer, as he thinks most of art I do doesn’t really end up being very bad at all, and I told them I had the same feeling that night.

The workshop was art-prompt based, and my singular instruction was to use materials that evoke the least sense of mastery from each person. This was to make it at the start okay to be a beginner, and even to aim to make art that is not going to be good, so you can flow a bit more with the creative process and real time responses your body and mind give you. I’ll talk about all of the prompts at another time, and maybe even do a virtual version of this workshop sometime in December, but today I want to tell you about the one inspired by one of my favorite quotes that I cite often here.

As we continue with 75 Grow, I think the third habit of creative practice and play (P in M.A.P), can feel daunting. We can want to make creativity into something we will do and accomplish. I don’t underestimate the importance of mastery and how incredible it feels to see yourself grow in something, and so I don’t totally discourage this. However, I think that creativity is also a brain process, and that in the age of hyper-consumerism of both products and content, growing in the ability to tap into the capability of our brain in the mundane and in our Artistic Endeavors can be its own sense of mastery.

With that said, here is a non-exhaustive list of 20 things that I think can be hugely creative, and I invite you to come up with your own from your own life or observations as well.

My List of Things That Count

1. The way I pick out mugs to use each season, and then store the rest on a top shelf. The simplicity I feel in only picking from 3, but the delight that is renewed because I haven’t seen them since the autumn prior.

2. A good, sharpened tucked into my pinned up hair for a day of work. This one includes both the updo that comes from years of watching youtube hair gurus (particularly, Kayley Melissa) as well as the choice of pencil (sometimes a red colored pencil if it’s that kind of day).

3. The books I keep on my coffee top as part of my Coffee Table Curriculum for the month (aka books or craft supplies I leave out to pick up and peruse or play with if I so desire while my phone is bricked up) (yes I know what that means) (yes I think it’s funny).

4. Now that I have decluttered my beauty products (honestly there were not that many, but still more than the container I have for them), my beauty rituals and when I have extra time to play around with the products I do have. I view this is I view using other art supplies: many different portraits can be painted from one set of paints.

5. The baked good I choose to make each week, the topping I put on the loaf of bread I make, the pan I choose to bake it in for shape.

6. Picking a dance/ballet inspired workout outfit for each Pilates class I teach, and getting to pretend like I am an instructor like the ones I saw in dance movies growing up or from the old photos of early Pilates x Ballet teachers from the 1950s.

7. How I organize and then run therapy sessions with the kids I work with, picking out tools and toys that will help us process and learn skills about emotions and cognition.

8. What Facetime face-to-animal animation I choose to use when I Facetime my twin two year old nephews.

9. How I let the light into my beautiful, grown up apartment that was once a dream to me up until the last year—how the light hits the prisms set up to refract them, the mini disco-ball chandelier, the way the light slants against hung up art.

10. How I write here, on TikTok, and Instagram.

11. Every time I pick up my guitar to play a Taylor Swift song, just as I have been doing since I was 13.

12. How I color-code or don’t color-code my bookshelves.

13. The way I have decluttered and set up my drawers in my closet, so that every time I reach into one I actually know what is there, and this functional creativity has brought calm into my life for there to be more space for choosing how I dress each day

14. The addition of a new spice or special flavoring to a well-loved and well-worn recipe from my recipe box.

15. What shade of red or clear I paint my nails.

16. What gifts I choose for my close friends and family, and what cards I think most match.

17. How I format and then flow with the podcast episodes I lead on

    How to Be Patient.

18. How often I time my walks or jogs or commutes to be able to see the sunset over the Charles River.

19. What I choose to be pinned to my corkboard or to my fridge any given month, which in this makeshift collage becomes a sort of canvas itself.

20. What poem I choose to start or end my Pilates classes with.

The list could go on. The point is to see how each of these small decisions—some clearly artistic, some not so clear—require submersion in flow and divergent thinking, and that when we understand it as such, our mind opens to all the places creativity can and does live in our days.

What are your Things That Count? I’d love to know where your creativity lives.

Take care, and take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day.

And so I write again and again about 75 Grow, and about focusing our attention just a bit more on things we can change versus things we cannot (or, we won’t see change anytime soon, though our efforts continue). I’ve found in my life and in my line of work that the mundane take up most of it—going to the grocery store, flossing, doing the dishes, going on a jog. They can be a source of annoyance, and at worst a source of overwhelm and then a grey sort of suffering. They will always be a little bit annoying, but they can also be a daily practice of creativity, problem-solving, devotion, and even joy. As a psychiatrist and therapist primarily working with people in care-giving roles (interpersonally and professionally), big insights are often the crown jewel in therapy. They are not the gilded crown’s frame. The quotidian done well—these are the background that are where the big insights and big purposes are painted on top of. Without the background, simple details, the large insights or big dreams often fail to come to fruition or to satisfy our desire for meaning.

I was recently interviewed to talk about 75GROW on Popsugar, which yes was a dream for my inner 16 year old who read all the beauty blogs. You can see the interview and the writer’s plan for 75GROW here. It is a joy in real life, in my own life, and in virtual life to see a framework that helps me help other people. It also becomes a self-sustaining cycle as I then get motivation and ideas from seeing how other people take the frame and make it theirs.

As we go into the final 75 days of 2025, including the slowing and darkening of winter, the glitter of holidays, and the eventual question a new year always poses, here’s five ideas about how spending these 75 days focusing on the three habits of movement, avoiding avoidance, and practicing creativity (M.A.P) might be useful (including my own intentions and hopes for what it will bring as I wind down the year).

1. Keeping promises to ourselves feels good, especially when they are promises of the right size.

There are the advocates for “floss one tooth” a la the book Atomic Habits. There are advocates for “big hairy audacious goals.” There is the mythology both that if you imagine and visualize and manifest where you’d like to be you’ll either somehow “use up the dopamine” in your brain and not have motivation, or it will make it bound and inevitable to happen. If any of the above work or have worked for you, great! As a psychiatrist and therapist, if it functions for you and doesn’t hurt anyone, I love it! But if the above have not helped you, here’s another option: a 10% scary practice.

When I talk or write about my “Avoidance Diaries” on TikTok and here, I often reference this, and it comes from my work in the OCD world in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), as well as my work with understanding executive function and organizational supports. In ERP, there can be many approaches, but the main thing is over time we put clients (collaboratively) in versions of the thing they have a phobia about or are avoiding to the extent that it’s causing issues in other parts of their life. 1% is usually not enough to feel proud of when you finish it, and bigger percentages like 50% or 90% can get perfectionists stuck in the cycle of being frustrated with their limitations, then overdoing it, then avoiding it, and repeat. So we do 10%—enough that it’s unpleasant and a little scary, but not so much that we are making it really awful as an experience and something you need to recovery from the rest of the day. This—when thinking about our habits for these 75 days of 2025—are what I like to think of as right size promises.

2. Winter Arc but actually the Arc is that you do things that are sustainably good for your mind to help with the seasonal blues (or go to a doctor for clinical level care).

This is where I say that lifestyle changes especially when done in isolation are not enough for mental health conditions, so see to clinical care if you need. But, for those not in the clinical level of depression in winter, there are things that help our brains and wellbeing. Movement (especially when done with at least moderate intensity for 20 or more minutes most days of the week) is great for our brains also, but also tends to be lacking in the colder months. Having a clean environment and reducing your procrastination anxiety ghost that hovers as you look at your dishes, your angry oil change light, and that one email you were supposed to send last week. Practicing creativity or play invited you out of the 5 pm darkness and sees if your imagination can be used for fun or doing something interesting at night instead of succumbing to scrolling every weeknight (some scrolling is fine and dandy though, don’t worry).

3. How you end can impact how you start.

I believe in starting over whenever, but I also know how a fresh 1st of the month or the year can unlock some special magical source of motivation for many of us. In this challenge, I don’t want you to ask how you’d like to look, appear, be seen as, or judged as on January 1st. I don’t want you to focus on the extrinsic—making yourself into another product that is observed and judged as its main function in life. The question I’m asking myself is—how would I like to live most days as I start a new year? How would I like to feel and tend to my emotions? What would good connection and healthful habits be like in my day to day? Living into the process is, as always, much more the point.

4. The holidays can be lovely and bright AND overwhelming and disorienting—simple habits can reinforce routine.

Holidays and winter are known to be times that trigger grief, nostalgia, complex family dynamics, and basically everything in between. Then, there is the indigestion, sleeping on a mattress in your aunt’s basement, and the cranky child (yours or someone else’s). All of these things can roll into a cluster of delightful memories and panic attacks, but one of the things that can help is continuing to have a smaller, travel-friendly version of routine. This will inherently need flexibility, but if you get in the practice of doing yoga a few times each week, maybe during Thanksgiving, you go to a class in your hometown or practice with your morning coffee before or after others are awake. Maybe you bring your journal, and offer to go get donuts one morning, and write a little bit about what you see or feel. The habits can be modified and moving like a river, but being able to still touch the foundation under you while in the chaos of the holidays can be a huge comfort.

5. These three habits are fundamentally habits of care and connection, and that is what the world and our local neighborhoods need right now.

As we go into short days of sun, long nights, and cold weather, it can feel natural to isolate and hibernate. I’m very much for slowing down, resting, and not trying to force ourselves to feel the same energy levels at all points in the year. This time of year is also one for kindness and care, given how difficult it can be. While you may wonder how this is relevant for self-development-esque challenge, consider this:

• You move more, and as you go to a studio or gym or running trail, you slowly recognize friendly faces. When they aren’t present the Monday before Thanksgiving, you talk with them after they get back and hear about the very good pumpkin pie they had, and the not so good cold they got from their second cousin. You feel a little better in general with movement, and so your brain quite literally is better at listening and maintaining more energy through the day. Your wellbeing let you be there for them, and have more capacity to do so.

• Avoiding avoidance makes you feel less overwhelmed all the time. You are less on edge. You are 10% less snappy. You don’t feel the need to rush, and you notice people a little bit more. Even if that is just not honking so quickly at the driver ahead of you who you later realize is a 15 year old terrified of learning how to turn left (this may just be me).

• Practicing creativity is not just about learning how to do a Formal Art. It can be—it can also be spending the evening making a cake for the hell of it rather than scrolling, and bringing it into work for your friend’s half birthday or just because. It can be making a homemade card that turns out pretty cute for your sister’s birthday. It can be inviting people into a decorated and cozy apartment that you put your time and imagination into. This is play, and this is creativity done in connection. It is often what I think of most when I think of creativity and an “artful” life now.

Whether you’re joining this final 75 of the year or not, I hope this post invites you to slow down, and to ask how you’d like to spend this season. I hope you ask that with kindness, and with a tenderness to the parts of you that freeze up because they’re afraid you’re going to ask them to do one more thing even though you’re already overwhelmed. Maybe your challenge is seeing where you can ask for support or offload things for the rest of the year, or go easier on yourself.

Take care & take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

It’s my laundry chair.

Now what’s this? I came here for a listicle with 50 ideas of inspiration for how to finally squash the rising panic of having no time, no rest, and no backup plan. Why is she giving a diatribe?

Dear reader, I’m giving you a story before the list because the list flits into your “saved” folder online for some future date, where as a story is like gum that sticks to your subconscious and comes back to you while you’re waiting for the bus. A story—lived or told—is the most effective way to change. We remember it.

Back to that devilish laundry chair. I’ve been a woman who struggles with keeping a tidy space for my whole life. Messy backpack, messy childhood room, messy adult apartment. I’ve also been a person who overstuffs her schedule, and like the laundry pile, the pile of overcommitments rear themselves out from the places I’ve shut them away just like that laundry pile.

Inevitably, the stress and displeasure of overwhelm eventually overtakes me and I spend a spree of folding, cleaning, checking off to-dos. Now, before any of you diagnose me—yes, this is within the standard of normal human behavior (new readers, I am a psychiatrist). Is there a bit of anxiety and maybe attentional concerns? Sometimes. But I also think that this overwhelm is something so many of us feel right now, and that when so many people are feeling one way, we have to ask if there is something in our environment that is making us so.

My mother has been trying to help me be tidier (gently) for 30 years has given me lots of advice. Every time I finally take one and it works, I facetime her and say, “Yes, mom, you were right and you can say I told you so if you like.” And we laugh. And I think we both feel lighter in our own ways.

Recently, I started my fellowship in child psychiatry. With the start of a new phase of training, there is inevitably the increased time, emotion, and learning that comes with trying to acquire a new set of skills to help people with. Am I always surprised at this and confused why it feels badly for the first few weeks of a new chapter in my life? Yes. But I figure out why it feels bumpy much faster than I did in, say, Freshman year of college. New people, new commutes, new concepts—all being figured out and mapped anew for me. With this on top of regular routines—well, laundry pile. Overwhelm.

Reader, before you attempt to change things or consider steps I’ve taken in the last few weeks to lighten the (laundry) load, the above step is important. Getting kindly curious about why our sense of overwhelm, busy-ness, anxiety, or ease to frustration is happening can help direct us to what we need. It can also help us give ourselves compassion for why the laundry pile is a bit larger lately.

Now for the philosophical and tactical piece of advice from my mother: Your laundry will be much easier to do and put away if you let your drawers only be half full. Pick out the clothes you use all the time and set them aside—like you’re going on a two week trip. Put those in the easiest to access places. Next, take your special occasion or clothes you wear only a couple times a month and put them in the next easiest place. For things you wear hardly never—or that you pick up or put on and feel uncomfortable and would almost always choose something else 9 times out of 10—put them in a bin or a box and tuck them under your bed. Repeat with most of your clothes and shoes—again, pretending like you’re going on a 2 or 4 week trip.

Live like this for a couple weeks. Notice how often you need to open one of the boxes (you’ll find it’s probably not often). When you put laundry away, don’t fold things that don’t need to be folded (underwear, workout clothes, pjs) and just throw them in their drawer. Fold the few things you need to, and hang the few things you need to. Easily close the door of the drawer with space to spare, without having to tetris all your clothes so they easily fit.

Do you already feel how a small detail like that, made better, can matter? Some small thing that pisses you off or makes you feel anxious when you look at the pile or can’t find the shirt you want because it’s jammed into the overfilled dresser can add up when we practice it everyday. The laundry pile stops existing because putting away laundry takes two minutes. Getting dressed in the morning becomes easier because you’re sure where you clean and dirty clothes are, and where.

In two weeks or a month, return to the boxes, or just one box at a time. Review what can be donated, or should have been in the drawer. If you add something, you may need to take something out, because the drawer still needs to be roomy. I call this Montessory dressing (like they do with kids with their toys), as when you’re bored of some clothes, you use the others and swap em out.

As with your laundry, so with your time. Now that I’m saving time each day with getting dressed, putting things away, and maintaining a clean and clear home, I’ve had time to reflect on how this method can apply to my schedule and my intake of content/social media/stimuli. I am very aware I am overfilling my cup at times, but I can keep much of what matters to me if I’m willing to declutter the junk time-spenders, and put some things I care about into the metaphorical box under the bed until another season. This idea feels like a relief, especially in a busier, new time in my life. It might be for you, this fall, too.

Lastly, it’s true that all of us have different responsibilities and different levels of flexibility in our lives and our communities. Take from this how you can, but find the dose of change and choice that you do have in your life, and go from there. Maybe your drawers can’t be only half filled, but they could be 2/3rd filled, and that level of space for error and slowing down may be enough to have a big impact on you.

Take care, and take your time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day

I grew up in a small town in Illinois, without the luck of city lights to keep the winter interesting. I also am 30 year old, meaning the smartphones didn’t really exist until I went off to college, and the most interesting thing about the internet for a kid was Club Penguin and Webkinz (and, of course, AIM instant messenger as a teen). My childhood winters were filled with family dinners, being mediocre in multiple school sports (the gift of going to a small parochial school is everyone makes every team), the rise and fall of seasons in the Church, and lots of baking. When I went to college a few hours north in South Bend, Indiana (Go Irish), my freshman year of college was marked (some might say scarred) by the Polar Vortex winter, and my sharpest memory of that is walking 20 minutes against the wind, into the snow, to get to 8:30 am organic chemistry (which I struggled mightily in). Afternoons there were filled with visits to the dining hall, hot chocolate at the small cafe in the old liberal arts building, and movie nights in my all girl dorm.

In medical school in St. Louis, and in residency out here in Boston, similar rituals of winter repeated, but what changed was my awareness of how winter impacted my friends, my family, and eventually, my patients, differently. In hindsight, this was true in college as well, when I think about my friends from warm regions of the country or world and how truly horrendous the cold was for them. As a psychiatrist, I know there is a biology to this, and even a genetic component. Also as a psychiatrist, I know that most mood states and energy changes for people come from a diathesis-stress model—there’s something that can increase your risk for a condition, and environmental factors that make that risk into a reality of symptoms. (For more on Seasonal Affective Disorder from a clinical psychiatry perspective, you can check out this episode from last year of my podcast, How to Be Patient).

You’ll be hearing more from me here and on Tik Tok and Instagram for tips on making it into, through, and deepening into fall and winter. For now, here are 10 ideas of how to help yourself prepare for winter before November 2nd.

Below the Pay Wall: 10 concepts—5 from psychiatry, 5 from creativity—to help better our winters.

First Up: Five Things I’ve Learned from Psychiatry

As always: I am a doctor, I draw on my clinical experience and reading of the clinical literature, but I am not your doctor, and therefore this information should be taken for education, entertainment, and maybe a starting off point, but not direct recommendations for you.

1. I will say—if winter has been hard for you 2-3 years in a row or more, and you’ve never talked with your healthcare provider or therapist about it, I’d recommend bringing it up now. Many people may have S.A.D. and could be helped by a formal treatment plan for it, but don’t realize it’s happening until they’re in it.

2. If fatigue is the big change: The vitamin D debate is actually somewhat controversial at present. If you get a lab, and you’re very low, and your clinician tells you to supplement it, that’s a clearer case. If, however, you do spend some time outside, get nutritional intake, and haven’t had a lab, I wouldn’t assume you definitely need to take it. Vitamin D, complete blood counts (CBC), talking about how heavy your period is if you are a menstruating person, iron panel, sometimes TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), and talking about sleep/snoring/sleep apnea are all my first considerations for my patients who notice fatigue more in the winter. Some people are fatigued all year, but they really notice it when there is less natural light/invitation to be outside/structured schedule in the winter.

3. “Happy Lamps”—aka lights that emit at least 10,000 lux—come in many shapes and sizes, and can be a big help for people with both clinical level seasonal affective disorder and the subclinical, coloquial “winter blues".” There are ones for 30-40$ on Amazon and Walmart, but if you’re interested in spending a bit more and shopping small, and want a more aesthetic one, I like Northern Light Technologies, which have been in the game as a family run business for decades.

4. If you can—eat enough, sleep enough. I KNOW! I KNOW! I hate when doctors say this too! I hate saying it! Unfortunately, it is true, and that sucks but also it’s kind of cool how there are some behaviors we can do to help our winter brains. Most adults need somewhere between 7-9 hours of sleep, but sleep patterns change in older adulthood and geriatric years, so if you’re 50+, you may need closer to 7 hours. If you struggle with insomnia, I’ll assume you’ve already covered the basics of sleep hygiene (low screen use, no napping during the day, keeping a regular schedule, no caffeine after 1 or 2 pm etc). The other thing I would add is that there are many effective apps that can help people do self-guided CBTi aka CBT for insomnia, which is perhaps the most effective intervention we have, even in app form (compared even to medications). It takes a level of commitment to the bit (the bit being CBT), but I’ve seen it be life changing for folks. Eat enough means that for some people, your energy is low because you are underfeeding yourself (whether on purpose or, by accident) OR your eating schedule is so unpredictable that your body is kind of confused. This doesn’t mean you need to eat the same thing at the same time each day or your body will be upset—but if you’re tired at 4 pm but have only had a bowl of soup, a coffee, and a cookie…space your nutrition in a bit more.

5. Exposure to sunlight (and still use some spf) via walking can help. The cold and cloud coverage can be issues, and this is where some of the dressing warm enough and having options (like insulated coats, wool socks, layers) is key. This one is a double win as it is both exercise and sun exposure.

   

My Five Favorite Winter Habits or Plans

6. Play with temperature: There are components of sensory displeasure that automatically come with winter: the wet bottom of your pants from walking in the half melted snow, the blast of cold at 7:30 am when you step outside for the first time, the lack of sunlight as you leave your work at 4:45 pm. One positive sensory experience I like to add back in is the use of temperature— particularly heat— in the winter, especially close to cold exposure. This is a pleasure, and it’s also a heightened sense experience to pair them in contrast. This can be done in so many ways, from free to very luxury. A few I like:

   1. A hot bubble bath with epsom salts after getting home on a dreary Monday evening.

   2. joining a gym in the winter months with a sauna.

   3. hot tea on the stove the moment you get home after work, in from the cold.

   4. Warming up your towels or blanket in the dryer before bed or before that bubble bath.

   5. Hot soups and coffees for your midday lunch or coffee break at work.

7. Plan a Trip: Easier said than done, I KNOW! However, I want you to also be real with me and with yourself—is it that you absolutely cannot go on a trip somewhere novel or warm, or that usually by the time you realize you need to escape the cabin fever of February, it’s too late and too expensive and, dammit, you’re tired anyway? Right. The full expression of this is to go somewhere it is not winter where there is plenty of heat and sunlight—so much so that some clinical guidelines on SAD actually mention this as a strategy. Other expressions are a day trip from your town, or to a local health spa with a sauna, infrared, or heated stone massage. Novelty and exposure to warmth and light—these are the core elements. This one is out of touch for some in this current economy (hello, me last year), and I recognize that, but I would be amiss to not mention this one as it can be a big help for those to whom it is accessible.

8. Create Routine When Daylight Doesn’t: Something we can take for granted is the way that in the lighter months the outdoors provides a rhythm for our days. The fall and winter do, too, and we will come back to that, but for most of us darkness at 4:30 pm is not going to cut it, and I don’t recommend trying to sleep at that time. Because of this, though, sometimes part of difficulty in winter can be the way time stops having clear cut offs throughout our day. If it’s dark by the afternoon, then we don’t have cues until the next sunrise. When do we eat dinner? When do we start cleaning up and moving towards bed? When do we get up? When is the workday over? If possible, adding a little structure to your day can help with the sense of listlessness that the lack of the sun creates.

   1. Have a five minute end of day ritual when transitioning from wherever you work to Not Working. Make your to-do list for the next day, clean up your desk, listen to a playlist or non-work related podcast, call a friend on your commute—anything that done routinely will signal to your body that the work portion is done for today and we are moving towards play, connection, rest.

   2. Bring light into how you wake up. While I love my Hatch alarm, I also have been getting up at 5:30 am a few days a week to teach 6:30 am pilates, and have needed a bit more assistance in getting up. I had gotten color changing, smart Lightbulbs, and have learned how to schedule them so they turn on on a timer. Now, my alarm goes off, and a few minutes later, at a warm low tone, all my lamps turn on. It can be a calmer way to wake up but still powerful enough to actually wake you up on dark winter mornings.

   3. Bring some joy into your eating rituals. Consider an afternoon coffee break as a special 15 minutes of time. Sit at your table for dinner, or light a candle, plate your food well.

9. View the quiet and dark season as an invitation towards creating color and light through your interior world. Yes, this is where the mysticism part comes from. I studied theology in undergraduate, and one thread of old Catholicism I loved were the contemplative saints and mystics. So much of mysticism and contemplation sprung from the ability for stillness, repetition, and listening. Creativity often comes from these slow, still places, too. What if winter is the season of vivid imagination? The season you finally take that dance class, learn to water color, or make a new pastry every other week? What if you switched roles with the sun, and the responsibility of illumination became yours? How might it feel to remember that in a few months, the world will be vibrant, abundant, and busy again, and this is your time to tune into the inner vibrancy of your own soul?

10. Practice rest—most of us are bad at it. Hustle culture, fast fashion, social media addiction, productivity, health optimization—all of this is about constant, cancerous growth. Winter asks if you can slow down, and most of us—me definitely included—struggle to answer that call without judging our bodies and our emotions for not being the same every season. Winter can be a practice of seeing how much sleep feels good for our own bodies, not just what the wellness podcast protocol was. Winter can be a time to notice how much blank space we enjoy, if we let ourselves do so with criticizing it for being a waste. This can be a time that, for once, we stop hurrying. Can you imagine?

All of these ideas are for you to take or leave, to find what feels good as you read it, and to throw away what feels like another burden to take into winter with you. One of the lies that depression or anxiety can tell people is that they are isolated in their suffering—that there is something wrong about their pain or discomfort, and no one else feels it. This isolation can be devastating, and silo us off from our connection, support, and resources. This winter, solitude can be beautiful, but solitude is not the same as isolation.

I hope these ideas bring you some comfort, somewhere to start, and a way to help the dread of winter.

Take care, and thank you for your attention and time,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day