Why Trying to Fix Your Life Can Make It Feel Worse, According to Carla Bezanson

You know that moment when you look back at last year and think, how did I actually live through that? Not because one huge thing happened, but because everything felt harder than it should have. Your brain wouldn’t slow down. You were exhausted in a way sleep didn’t fix. You kept moving, kept busy, kept telling people you were “fine” while low-key feeling like you were barely holding it together.

On Don’t Think, host Carla Bezanson speaks directly to that in-between space. She gets honest about anxiety spirals, emotional burnout, and what happens when trying to “fix” your life only makes things feel heavier. Instead of a dramatic reset, she breaks down the small mental shifts that helped her feel steadier over time—the kind you don’t notice working until one day, you realize you’re standing up again.

Carla Bezanson Opens Up About Why Getting Better Feels Invisible

Getting better is invisible

“I don’t know what your 2025 was, but for me…this time last year was probably the lowest I’ve ever been in my life,” Bezanson admits. “And that says a lot coming from somebody who’s been depressed for literally as long as I can have memories.”

She means low low. Low enough that being alone wasn’t an option because her anxiety was spiraling that badly. Her parents, brother, and friends stepped in and coordinated coverage so someone was always with her. “They were basically in a group chat scheduling shifts like they’re managers at McDonald’s,” she jokes. “Who’s got Friday covered? Who’s got Saturday morning?”

That panic didn’t stay contained. It followed her everywhere. She remembers sitting on a plane, fully convinced she was having a heart attack. Instead of calling for help or alerting the flight attendant, she bought in-flight Wi-Fi and asked ChatGPT if things would ever get better. In her words, “nothing was working.”

What stands out is how she describes what came next. There was no big moment where everything clicked. “Looking back now,” she says, “the improvement did not happen all at once. It’s kind of invisible.” First she couldn’t get through the day without help. Then she could get through the day, but was still barely hanging on. Then she didn’t need constant support anymore, even though she was “still really miserable.”

That’s the part people don’t talk about. Getting better doesn’t feel like relief while it’s happening. It feels like surviving in slightly less intense ways. You usually only notice it later, when you realize you’re not where you started.

You actually can control your thoughts

“We do have control over our thoughts,” Bezanson says. “I hate when people say this. I have OCD, okay? I’m like the spokesperson for not having control over your thoughts, having intrusive thoughts. So I understand that it’s nuanced.”

But here’s the distinction she makes: you can’t control what pops into your head. You CAN control what you do with it. Think of it like the radio. You turn it on and some talk show you hate is playing. Do you have to sit there and listen to it for 20 minutes? Or can you just…change the station?

For Bezanson, the station she kept getting stuck on sounded like this: “My career is over. No brands want to work with me. I’m irrelevant now. Nobody thinks I’m funny anymore. I’m going to have to go back and get a desk job.” Once that thought showed up, she’d build on it for hours. “It would just make things worse and worse and worse,” she says.

That spiral has a name. Psychologists call it rumination, which is when you replay the same negative thought over and over until it starts to feel true. Your brain looks for proof. You panic. You try to fix it. The fix backfires. Then your brain goes, see? I was right.

Bezanson realized the issue wasn’t the thought itself, but how much time and energy she was giving it. So she started interrupting it. “The way that I started doing this at first was with a thought interrupter,” she says. “I would just tell myself, ‘That’s not a useful thought right now.’ The thought would come back ten seconds later. She’d say it again. Annoying, repetitive, and not very glamorous. But it worked.

Over time, her brain stopped taking the thought as seriously. The interruption became automatic. “Your thoughts can’t actually bother you if you stop them,” she says. “They can’t touch you if you just say, ‘No, I’m not thinking about that.’”

You don’t need a good life—just a good minute

“A good life is made of good years,” Bezanson says. “Good years are made of good months. Good months are made of good weeks…Good hours are made of good minutes.”

The pressure to be happy, healed, thriving—it’s overwhelming. But nobody’s asking you to have a perfect life today. You just need one good minute. Then maybe a good hour. Watch a show. Eat something you like. Take a deep breath and tell yourself something good might happen.

“You do not need your life to be amazing to feel okay for 10 minutes,” she says. “So start there.”

What’s wild is that psychology research backs this up. Studies on “savoring”—basically practicing noticing and appreciating small good moments—show it can boost well-being and positive emotions over time. You’re not faking happiness. You’re training your brain to actually register it when it shows up.

Bezanson had her own breakthrough moment with this. She was buying a lottery ticket with her boyfriend, talking about what they’d do if they won, and suddenly felt this overwhelming sense of joy—even though nothing had happened.

“I was like, ‘Wait, why do I feel like this? It’s not even real,'” she recalls. “Oh, you want to know why? Because the feeling of joy does not come from the outside validation or the outside thing. It actually comes from inside of you. And it’s always available.”

That doesn’t mean you can manifest your way out of depression. But it does mean that even in the worst times, there are moments of relief available if you know how to access them. And those moments add up.

For more insights, listen to Don’t Think with Carla Bezanson, streaming now.

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