You probably don't remember exactly when it happened.
At some point, play became something you grew out of. Stories became something you consumed efficiently. The podcast went on during the run. The vacation got cut short to check in. Even rest got optimized — eight hours, tracked, scored, reviewed. James Clear will tell you how to make it automatic. Atomic habits for the person who already does too much.
Somewhere along the way, the beautiful, unrepeatable fact of a human life got shoehorned into an efficiency machine.
Physicians, pilots, and high-stress executives didn't abandon play because they were weak. They abandoned it because every hour that wasn't productive started to feel like a liability. The internal calculus happened slowly, then completely: rest is laziness, play is indulgence, anything that doesn't move the work forward is waste.
What's left is a person who is objectively high-functioning and quietly running on fumes — with no name for it, because exhaustion that looks like discipline doesn't get recognized as exhaustion.
So they watch The Pitt. Or disaster movies. Or true crime — legendary among clinical social workers, and I'll admit I've worked through more than a few things in that genre myself.
A physician told me recently:
"The Pitt is therapy."
She said it matter-of-factly. Like it was obvious. And it is — once you understand what's actually happening when fiction reaches past the part of you that's always managing, always assessing, always holding it together.
That's not sentimentality. That's a nervous system finding the only outlet it's been given permission to use.
Humans have used story to make sense of the world for as long as there have been humans. Long before we had language precise enough to name what we carried, we had narrative, play, and ritual — the three oldest processing technologies we have. They didn't exist to entertain us. They existed to help us metabolize what direct experience couldn't hold.
This isn't soft. It's anthropology. It's neuroscience.
Dr. Stuart Brown is a psychiatrist who came to study play through an unlikely door — researching homicidal males in Texas after the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting. What he found, across more than 6,000 life histories spanning serial murderers to Nobel Prize winners, was a consistent thread: the absence of play. He went on to found the
He went on to found the National Institute for Play, and his research established that play is a biological drive as fundamental as sleep or nutrition. Its absence doesn't just make people harder to be around. It makes them more vulnerable to depression, immune dysregulation, and stress-related disease.
Physicians know this about their patients. They are considerably more reluctant to apply it to themselves.
Another physician described her relationship with The Pitt this way:
"I need to make sure there's a therapy appointment after a Pitt watching session."
She's not avoiding the show. She's preparing for what it opens. She already knows something is in there. She's making sure she has somewhere to take it.
That's not a person who needs to be told she's struggling. That's a person who is already paying attention — and who deserves a place to do something with what she finds.
EMDR works in a similar register. It isn't talk therapy, analysis, or being given better thoughts to think. It's the nervous system finally getting to complete what it started — to process what it has been holding at arm's length for years, sometimes decades. When that work happens, something unexpected returns. Ease. Curiosity. The capacity to be in a room without mentally leaving it.
Not as a reward for working less hard. As evidence that they were never lazy. They were just never allowed to rest.
If The Pitt is hitting harder than you expected — if the disaster movie wrecked you, if the true crime episode sat with you longer than it should have — that's information. Something in you is still paying attention.
Is The Pitt hitting harder than you thought — and is it time to work through that?
Strategy sessions are complimentary and confidential. You can book one here →
Katherine Driskell is an EMDR therapist based in Minnesota, serving clients across the state and in intensive format for clients in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts.
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