The woman in the waiting area doesn’t look up as she scrolls. Her thumb moves in an automatic, almost devotional manner. For the first ten minutes in the office, her therapist will gently ask her to place the phone face down on the side table. She’ll fight back. The majority of people do. In 2026, therapy will look like this. These days, the main grievance isn’t always a breakup or an unfavorable boss. It’s the news more often. Clinicians frequently use the term “news-induced anxiety,” which has the subtle, sneaky feel of something that isn’t quite sure it’s a diagnosis…
Author: Jack Ward
Observing someone perform their duties from the wrong side of the bed can be subtly disorienting. In the neonatal intensive care unit at Sisters of Charity Hospital in Buffalo, Caitlin Vaccaro has been the soothing presence that other parents sought for ten years. She has monitored incredibly tiny lungs, consoled strangers, and discovered the language that families use when they are afraid but are still unsure of it. She became one of them this past week. Caleb, her son, was born at 34 weeks. six weeks ahead of schedule. According to Vaccaro, her initial response was more of a dark…
Certain types of fame conceal their true costs. For years, Paula Abdul has had to deal with that paradox. None of it fully captures the story, not even the choreography, her flawless smile under the stage lights, or the way she still throws herself into a hook from “Cold Hearted” at sixty-three. Unbeknownst to most fans, the body behind it has been argued with, medicated, surgically corrected, and persuaded to return to work numerous times. She has openly discussed several circumstances that most people would find difficult to handle one at a time, both in fragments and over time. osteoarthritis.…
When a writer who has spent her career discussing grief suddenly claims she is unable to speak, a certain kind of silence descends. At the end of April, Cheryl Strayed found herself in that situation, announcing on Instagram that her husband, Portland filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, had been diagnosed with a “serious, fatal illness.” She didn’t say what it was. She didn’t have to. She obviously meant for the words to have the weight they did. The foundation of Strayed’s 57-year-old literary career has been personal loss. The 2012 memoir Wild, later adapted into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon, was about…
After every Grand Prix, there is a brief moment that is rarely shown on television. After exiting the vehicle and removing the balaclava, the driver stands on the scales. Like a boxer at a weigh-in, it appears almost ceremonial, but the goal is completely different. How much of him has vanished over the past two hours is what the FIA wants to know. Most of the time, the weight falls between two and three kilograms. That’s about four to six and a half pounds lost, mostly through perspiration. It may be closer to two in the cooler races, such as…
People seem to be carrying a certain kind of fatigue these days. It’s evident in the slow exhale that precedes someone opening the news app and in the way that conversations at dinner inadvertently veer toward distant events. It’s neither quite fear nor quite grief. The low hum of a world that no longer pretends to be steady sits in between the two. The emotion beneath it is referred to by therapists as existential. Of course, existential fear is nothing new. Since Frankl wrote about meaning and Kierkegaard wrote about dread, it has been studied. Maybe the volume is different.…
Michelle, a mid-fifties executive, told her physician that she had always been the reliable one. Then, before her eyes had fully adjusted, she began to wake up at three in the morning with her heart racing and reaching for her phone. Her doctor recently shared her story in a newsletter, and it has become nearly universal. The same thing is being reported by therapists in the US, UK, and Australia: patients who have spent decades managing boardrooms and family crises are now collapsing due to their feeds. Oddly, the best intervention isn’t a pill, an app, or even something very…
When the same bridge keeps showing up on the evening news, week after week, with new cracks every time, a certain kind of fatigue sets in. You no longer notice it as much as you once did. Then, one morning, the anchor mentions that a portion of it collapses during rush hour, and all of a sudden, a stranger you will never meet makes your stomach tighten. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently that occurs these days. In the middle of winter, water mains burst, roads buckle, and transformers blow. A quieter thing is happening to the viewers somewhere in…