While I’m sure I would have benefited from stretching out on an Eames lounger and waxing poetic about my problems to a tweed-wearing Freud wannabe starting around age 12, I didn’t make it into an accredited therapist’s office until I was well into my 20s.
By that time, America had done a full 180 on the stigma around mental health services. Therapy, which had been seen by my parents’ generation as an embarrassment to hide, had become normalized to the point of ubiquity for my cohort. Indeed, I don’t know how many Tweets or Reels or other miscellaneous takes I’ve seen that say something along the lines of “don’t date him unless he’s in therapy.”
That’s not the reason I started my course up, incidentally, but I call out therapy-as-a-dating-requirement because I believe it’s that level of ubiquity which indicates a bubble is cresting. The Devil works hard, but the toxic man works harder, and nowadays it’s impossible to tell at a distance if the mere fact of “being in therapy” is doing any good for someone.
Smarter people than me are already writing about “bad therapy” and its impacts, but since I believe mental health supports are sufficiently normalized that my opinion won’t negatively impact anyone who does need to see a therapist, and I’ve had a variety of good and bad experiences with different therapists over the years, I wanted to share my model for how to be your own therapist.
Physician, heal thyself
One breed of therapist I’ve encountered seems particularly dedicated to the art of a doodle, as if any concept worthy of discussion is pointless unless it can be captured with five or eight lines and a set of cocktail napkins.
Phil Stutz might be the champion of the doodle-as-therapy movement, especially since Jonah Hill made that titular documentary about him, but as a recovering consultant—I can see the doodle’s appeal. When your world is crashing down around you, it’s easier to call to mind something simple than a hundred pages of self-help prose.
One doodle in particular has stuck with me ever since a former therapist used it to describe the analogy of my tank, as in the gas tank of a car and the gas that fills it. He did a quick sketch and handed me the doodle in order to describe my life and well-being in terms of the activities that emptied my tank versus those that filled me up.
The doodle, as you can see, is fairly basic (and I promise my recreation is 90% accurate to what I was originally handed).
But basic sometimes works best, and in a world where I can forget family members’ birthdays and the names of my friends’ partners, I’ve managed to hold onto that image for years. It shapes how I look at my life and well-being and especially the activities and labors I take on.
This model, along with lots of other things and the occasional martini, allows me to semi-effectively therapize myself. If I start to notice the wheels coming off, I take a minute and look at the level of my tank, and the breakdown of activities draining it versus filling it.
Note that this model doesn’t make moral judgements about tasks that drain your tank versus those that fill it. Just like a ship isn’t built to stay in harbor all its life, a car is meant to be driven, and gas is meant to be used.1 Many of the activities that drain you, be they caring for an ailing parent, supporting a friend through a difficult breakup, or just the ho-hum of your day job, are necessary and good.
It’s also worth mentioning that the energy in your tank is more psycho-emotional-physical than pure caloric energy burn. Anyone climbing the Appalachian Trail is going to work hard and use a lot of standard energy, but I suspect that for most of them such recreation is a tank-filling activity. That said, if you’re in a bad mood, the first step should be to drink a glass of water, eat a snack, and walk around the block. If you’re still in a bad mood after all that, congratulations! You really do need help.
Not all therapy is good, not all leisure is good
What I’m recommending you do here to start is take stock of your own life and well-being in terms of what fills you up versus what drains you. My suspicion is that it’s easier to identify the latter than the former.
Cards on the table, I’m sharing this in part because I see far too many people in my life that don’t have sufficient activities that regularly fill their tanks. This is further complicated because we unfortunately live in an era in which it’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’re relaxing, when we aren’t getting the tank fill-up we need, or even potentially draining it further.
The problem is that not all leisure is rewarding leisure. After all, do any of you really feel better after scrolling the fortieth or even four hundredth Instagram Reel?
Relationships also operate like this, and may even provide an illustrative analogy. While friendship as a blanket term sounds like a good thing, it’s perfectly possible for a relationship to drain you under the guise of being a good thing.
For example, I’ve long told my girlfriend that my rule for liking versus disliking friends of hers has very little to do with the individual characteristics of the friend involved or their personal compatibility with me. She can hang out with Kate Middleton or the GEICO Caveman or anybody in between for all I care. If they make her happy, I’ll love them all the same. What matters to me is when she returns from whatever hang with said individual, is she generally feeling loved and supported by the interaction or is she generally drained by it? The ones that leave her drained regularly? Well I won’t pretend to be the biggest fan.
Whether it’s relationships or leisure activities, I think this model works if you start to look at them in terms of what they give versus what they take. Luckily, smarter people have come up with better phrases to describe our goal.
Cal Newport coined the term “high-quality leisure” in his 2019 book Digital Minimalism and expanded on it in 2024’s Slow Productivity. The concept’s essence is to look at our leisure, which we can substitute in for our “tank-filling activities,” to describe intentional or skill-based activities that might demand more effort than passive or low-quality leisure, but pay dividends in terms of their actual restorative effects and levels of satisfaction for us.
I think that you should apply this frame to your list of activities that fill your tank, and while any list is bound to be highly personal, I’ll offer a few thoughts to get you started.
The genuine article, i.e., tank-filling activities
Any hobby that involves craft and skill and work with your hands, including but not limited to cooking, painting, knitting, writing for pleasure, and whittling a majestic wooden schooner by hand
Athletic endeavors, especially those that involve some amount of team interaction (note: run clubs do not count, run clubs are speed dating for the sexually promiscuous and they’re giving us other runners a bad name and the occasional STD)
Volunteering, which might sound counterintuitive, but I promise nothing will fill you up more than sometimes giving something back
Three toxic habits in a trench coat, i.e, tank-draining activities masquerading as leisure
Any digital activity for which scrolling can be used as an operative verb
Any viewing experience for which binge can be used as an adjective
(Forgive me in advance, New York City) Drinks and dinners out with your friends
An extra word or two on that last one. New York City is partially great because of it’s hustle culture, and that always-on energy underpinning the whole frenetic vibe. But, and this is a big but, far too many people’s lives consist exclusively of work, sleep, and drinks with friends. As one friend of mine so eloquently articulated last week, there’s a time and a place for a dash of hedonism, but for most of us—most of the time—boozy socializing does as much to drain the tank as it does to fill it back up.
But again, these are just starter suggestions. What I’m hoping you take away is that while professionals will always provide great support, you can manage a lot of your own ups and downs by fine-tuning your internal energy management. Just make sure the things you think fill you up actually get the job done.
Thanks for tuning in. As always, if you love every word or if you think I’m the internet’s dumbest boy, feel free to let me know directly or in the comments. See you next time.
Thank you to Littlefoot, Ducky, and the rest of the crew from The Land Before Time for their contributions to that end.
The land before time footnote produced an audible chuckle.