The case that distraction can be survival, not avoidance. How Online Pop Psychology & Life Coach Grifters Cannibalize Nervous System Regulation

I’m recovering from major surgery while caring for my sixteen-year‑old dog, who came to me at four weeks old and is now fading. My body still aches. My sleep is fractured. And beneath it all is the trauma of five years working in healthcare through COVID, the death of my father to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and the absence left when my other dog died two years ago. The grief feels ambient, woven into every breath the last few years. I told my friend the other day that I felt like the angel of death. That I’m surrounded by death while being alive myself. But no, I’m not always journaling. I’m not doing guided breathwork. I’m not unpacking every feeling. Instead, sometimes I watch a show I’ve seen twenty times. I scroll through lighthearted threads on Reddit. I nap until the world dims. I procrastinate and literally distract myself. These are not acts of avoidance. These are ways of simply staying alive.

You don’t have to be on all the time. You don’t have to be a project.

Healing Is Not a Template

Healing doesn’t follow Instagram’s blueprint of breathwork, affirmations, and regulation protocols. As a clinician, I’ve seen people crack under the pressure to “always be in the work.” Some regulate through movement. Others cannot move without breaking. Some find grounding in meditation. Others in a silent pause. Sometimes a rerun helps more than therapy. Sometimes you can’t do deliberate work until you allow yourself to feel a little less.

The Performance of Regulation Isn’t Healing

There’s a whole online industry—pop psychologists, wellness influencers, self‑styled trauma coaches—that has cannibalized nervous system regulation. They distill polyvagal theory into carousels, claim that constant calm equals healing, and equate visible composure with resilience. But control masquerading as recovery isn’t healing. Regulation is a tool, not a performance. When it becomes a performance, it silences your system rather than restores it.

The Wellness Hustle: How Discomfort Became a Business Model

Online grifters and self-anointed life coaches have mastered the art of monetizing your distress. They take complex psychological concepts—like nervous system regulation, attachment theory, or trauma responses—and flatten them into digestible, click-worthy slogans they can sell back to you. A carousel post tells you that if you’re not calm, you’re “dysregulated,” and if you’re dysregulated, you’re broken. But don’t worry—they have a course, a webinar, a somatic journaling bundle, or a group coaching cohort that promises to “heal your nervous system” in six weeks. They package pseudo-clinical language with just enough scientific jargon to sound credible, all while bypassing the reality that nervous systems don’t heal on command, and that regulation is a fluid, shifting process—not a lifestyle brand. What they’re really offering is the illusion of control. If they can convince you that staying perfectly calm means you’re doing it “right,” then they can also convince you that your discomfort is proof you need to keep buying.

This isn’t education—it’s commodification. They exploit legitimate suffering, especially among people living with trauma, burnout, or long-standing emotional pain, and promise transformation through rigid self-management. The entire premise centers on self-blame: if you’re still anxious, still reactive, still exhausted, you must not be regulating hard enough. Meanwhile, they elevate themselves as gurus of stillness and spiritual composure, often with zero clinical training, no peer oversight, and no ethical boundaries. They recycle neuroscience buzzwords—polyvagal, vagus nerve, parasympathetic state—without contextualizing what they actually mean or how they function in complex human systems. What they’re selling isn’t healing. It’s a polished, marketable version of bypassing, wrapped in a calming aesthetic and priced at $497 workshops and $99 workbooks.

Why Critics Are Calling It Out

Scott Lilienfeld and Sally Satel’s Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience offers a sharp critique of pop neuroscience culture. They argue that flashy brain‑scan narratives often reduce complex human behavior to oversimplified biology⁶. A New Yorker piece echoes the concern, warning that neuroscience is overprivileged in culture while the mind—beliefs, desires, stories—gets sidelined⁶. This neuro-hype feeds the illusion that looking calm means you’re okay.

Real Alternatives That Work

Don’t adopt regulation as doctrine. Instead:

• Shift-and-persist: A resilience strategy shown to reduce inflammation and protect health among people facing chronic adversity, especially those from low‑SES backgrounds. It combines cognitive reappraisal (“shift”) with maintaining purpose and optimism (“persist”)⁷⁸.

• Affect‑logics and emotion–cognition alignment: Healing arises when bodily sensations and thought patterns support each other—not when one suppresses the other.

• Intentional silence and sensory grounding: Physical quiet and slow sensory input can soothe the autonomic nervous system more than forced meditation¹¹.

What to Do When Over-Regulating Isn’t Possible

• If breathwork creates more tension, pause. Try something else.

• If social media overwhelms you, take a silent walk outside with your dog or just sit with the breeze.

• Replace scripted breathing with sensory grounding: notice your pet’s coat, taste something crunchy, listen to a single track.

• When instruction feels suffocating, prioritize whatever soothes—even if that means doing nothing for a minute.

Distraction Is Not Denial

Watching a sitcom, lying in bed, eating a bag of chips—these are often labeled “distraction.” I call them preservation. If your system is too depleted to be present, letting yourself fall apart a little is not failure. It’s self‑kindness.

The Screen Is Not the Enemy, Intent Is

Studies show that four or more hours of unstructured screen use per day may double depression and anxiety risk¹². Excessive scrolling can harm focus, sleep, and stress tolerance¹³. But intentional, gentle screen time—low-stimulus shows, humor, ASMR-like content—can improve mood, soften ruminative thinking, and offer emotional pacing³.

A sitcom isn’t therapy. But it might keep you company until therapy becomes available.

Medication Isn’t the Enemy, It Can Be a Bridge For Some

For many people, psychiatric medication doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. And for those who do need it over the long term, that doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong. Medication can be one of the most effective ways to interrupt the cycle of suffering when someone is in a deep depressive episode, experiencing mania, or navigating symptoms of psychosis. In those states, it’s often impossible to meaningfully engage with therapy, breathwork, somatic tools, or even basic self-care. Medication doesn’t erase the pain, but it can create enough distance from the crisis to allow someone to begin making sense of what they’re experiencing. For some, that window of stability lasts a few months. For others, it becomes part of what sustains them for years. Both are valid. Both are healing.

The issue isn’t the medication itself. The issue is the cultural narrative that says if you really wanted to get better, you’d do it naturally. That if you just tried harder, ate cleaner, journaled more, or downloaded the right meditation app, you wouldn’t need pharmaceutical help. But the brain doesn’t work that way. Neither does trauma. Neither does the lived reality of mood disorders. Sometimes the nervous system is so flooded that nothing else can reach it until the internal chaos settles. Medication can be the thing that makes space for the rest. And in a world that already makes it hard to ask for help, the stigma around psychiatric meds adds another weight onto people already carrying too much.

What we need is not more moralizing. We need a model of care that respects complexity. People should be able to choose from the full range of support—medication, therapy, creative work, body-based practices, rest, movement, nutrition, community—without shame or pressure to prove they’re doing it the right way. Healing isn’t a competition. It’s not a linear path. It shifts with time, circumstance, and capacity. For many, medication is what allows the other tools to work in the first place. It buys time. It offers relief. It keeps people safe. And that should never be treated as a last resort. It should be treated as a real and legitimate part of healing.

Break the Binary Trap

Pop psychology thrives on false opposites. Meds or natural. Distraction or presence. Regulated or reactive. You’re either doing “the work” or you’re failing to evolve. This thinking flattens the human experience into a checklist and creates the illusion that healing is a fixed destination you can earn your way toward by being good enough, calm enough, mindful enough. But life doesn’t follow that script. Neither does grief. Healing is not a binary state. It’s not about choosing between stillness and chaos, between medication and meditation. It’s about having access to whatever helps you stay afloat in a given moment and trusting that those needs might shift over time.

And while we’re here, let’s talk about the people trying to sell you healing like it’s a product you can download. The life coaches. The online trauma influencers. The pop-psychology accounts that co-opt clinical language, cherry-pick neuroscience, and promise transformation if you just buy their nervous system workbook, enroll in their six-week “self-healer circle,” or join their community of emotionally fluent strangers on Slack. These people will always have something new to sell you. A better journal. A deeper somatic method. A flashier way to access your “regulated state.” And guess what—they’re never going to stop, because the business model depends on you never feeling finished. You are not a home improvement project. You are not broken drywall or a spiritual fixer-upper. And you do not need to keep handing over your money in order to be okay.

There is no shame in needing support. But be wary of people who present healing as a formula they’ve mastered and now sell in monthly installments. The truth is, healing doesn’t come from someone else’s funnel. It doesn’t live in a podcast transcript or a workbook that asks you to self-diagnose and self-fix in thirty days. Real healing is often boring, slow, inconsistent, and deeply personal. It happens in conversations with people you trust. It happens when your body finally gets a break. It happens when you feel safe enough to stop performing progress. And more than anything, it happens when you start rejecting the idea that you need to be better, calmer, or more together to be worthy of care.

You’re allowed to be complicated. You’re allowed to not have a five-step morning routine. You’re allowed to take meds and also cry during cartoons. You’re allowed to scroll, to shut down, to rest, to start again. Stop measuring your growth by whether or not you’re doing it “right.” Stop letting people sell you your own wholeness back to you. You are not a project. You are a person. You are already enough.

A More Realistic Coping Framework

1. Honor your capacity: Some days are about stabilization, not progress.

2. Do what helps now: a rerun, a walk, a snack, a nap, a pill.

3. Let healing come in stages: stabilize first, integrate later.

4. Blend methods: therapy, medication, sleep, embodiment, distraction.

5. Release the performance: you don’t have to show you’re healing. Just feel human.

What the Research Actually Shows

1. Heavy recreational screen use (4+ hrs/day) is linked to higher anxiety and depression across age groups¹²

2. Excessive screen use disrupts emotion regulation, sleep, impulse control, and stress resilience¹³

3. Randomized studies show reducing phone use (≤ 2 hrs/day) improves mood, sleep, and stress⁶

4. Continuing antidepressants six months or more post-remission cuts relapse risk nearly in half⁴

5. Therapy plus medication delivers stronger long‑term outcomes than either alone⁵

Let Me Spell It Out

If you’re recovering from illness, holding grief, watching someone you love decline, and still trying to function—you don’t have to operate like a self-help manual. You don’t have to breathe through everything. You don’t have to sit with every feeling. You can close your eyes. You can laugh at something silly. You can let silence come in. That is not shameful. That is survival with softness.

You don’t have to perform healing. You only have to keep going.

Sometimes survival looks like distraction. Sometimes relief comes through the quiet surrender of being still.

You don’t have to be a project. You just have to be human.

If this resonated with you—if you’re tired of the performance of healing, if you’re looking for honest conversations about grief, mental health, and what it actually means to survive—subscribe to my Substack. I write about the mess, the nuance, the in-between spaces that pop psychology tends to skip. No quick fixes. No wellness hustle. Just grounded, real talk from someone who’s been in it professionally and personally. If you want more of that, I’d love to have you here.

Footnotes

1. Chen & Miller propose the “shift-and-persist” strategy combining cognitive reappraisal with maintaining purpose, shown to reduce inflammation and support resilience among people facing chronic stress⁷⁸.

2. Lilienfeld & Satel, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience critiques how pop neuroscience oversimplifies trauma and brain-behavior relationships⁶.

3. New Yorker commentary on neuro-hype warns against reducing mind to brain alone, calling for balanced psychology-physiology integration⁶.

4. Psychological studies show that continuing antidepressants for six months or more after remission reduces relapse risk by roughly half⁴.

5. Clinical meta‑analyses confirm that combining psychotherapy and medication leads to stronger, longer-lasting recovery⁵.

6. Controlled trials reducing recreational screen time showed improved mood, stress, and sleep when usage dropped below ~2 hours/day³.

7. Research linking 4+ hrs/day screen use with increased depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth and adults¹².

8. Studies show excessive screen usage impairs emotion regulation, attention, sleep, and stress tolerance¹³.

9. Affect‑logics and cognitive‑emotional alignment theory emphasize interactive healing that integrates body and mind rather than suppressing emotion.

10. Silence and sensory grounding have measurable autonomic nervous system benefits, offering real physiological regulation¹¹.