Things That Are “Therapeutic” But Aren’t

I know the title sounds confusing, but hear me out. Some activities have been aggressively marketed as therapeutic and sanative—like they’re one yoga mat away from fixing your life. But in reality? Those same activities often send you into an emotional spiral you did not sign up for. This isn’t a self-care guide. It’s more of a reality check: a list of things that are supposed to help you heal but somehow end up making your emotional state worse than it already was. To make my thesis make sense, let me give some examples.

Organising

Organising starts as a “clean space, clean mind” situation and ends with you sitting on the floor at 1 a.m., holding random objects and questioning your entire personality. Every single time I start cleaning; organising drawers, dusting cabinets, rearranging shelves, I crash out. Never in my life—not once—have I been peaceful pre-, mid-, or post-cleaning. If anything, I come out more overstimulated and emotionally unstable than I went in. Whoever came up with the “clean space, clean mind” theory has clearly never been in my room. Possibly Einstein. And respectfully, sir, you were wrong.

Music

This is a hot take, and honestly, music can be maddening in more than one way. 

First of all: sad playlist + headphones + being alone = emotional freefall. I’m not judging anyone for listening to heartbreak songs while already feeling low, but be so for real—are you actually trying to feel better? Because there is no universe in which listening to Justin Bieber mourn a relationship from 2013 is going to lift your spirits. That’s not healing. That’s emotional sabotage.

Secondly, music is literally just a collection of frequencies that mess with your brain chemistry. Instead of “clearing your mind,” it often clutters it; adding brain fog, amplifying emotions, and dragging out feelings that would’ve passed faster in silence. If therapy is the goal, voluntarily feeding your brain emotionally charged noise is… a choice.

Google even agrees. And I quote: “Music can have negative effects, primarily through fostering emotional rumination, worsening anxiety or depression when listening to sad music during distress.” So yeah. Not just me.

Journaling

Journaling when you’re already overwhelmed is a perfect way to not fix anything. Sometimes we don’t need to “process” our emotions—we need a hot minute to calm down. When you journal in the heat of the moment, you’re usually just spewing the most churlish, unfiltered thoughts imaginable. Writing them down doesn’t release them; it turns them into evidence. Suddenly, fleeting thoughts feel permanent. Documented. In ink.

Especially after an argument or during a wave of regret, journaling can backfire badly. I vividly remember furiously jotting down absolute insolent gabble, only to reread it days later and feel genuinely horrified at how dramatic and ungrateful I sounded. And for the record, it never helped my mood while I was writing. It only made me more anxious. Don’t get me wrong, journaling has its place, just not when your nervous system is already on fire.

Late-Night Productivity

Then there’s the productivity angle, since apparently therapy also has a deadline. Everyone romanticises being productive at night—as if finishing tasks at 2 a.m. makes you disciplined instead of sleep-deprived. Sure, it feels powerful at the moment. Quiet. Focused. Almost cinematic. But then morning comes, and suddenly you’re exhausted, irritable, and questioning why you thought sacrificing sleep was self-care. Late-night productivity doesn’t fix burnout, it just postpones it with extra caffeine. And a small side note: every single “2 a.m. creativity rush” thing I’ve ever done seems immensely… questionable in the morning (when I’ve sobered up from the hormonal rush).

Conclusively? None of this is to say these things are evil or completely useless. They can be therapeutic, just not in the glorified, Instagram-caption way they’re sold to us. Somewhere along the line, healing got turned into a performance: clean your room, romanticise your suffering in a journal, curate the perfect playlist, hustle through the night. And when it inevitably doesn’t work, we’re told to try harder. Be calmer. Be more mindful. Be more disciplined.

But maybe—wild thought—the problem isn’t us. Maybe forcing “healthy habits” while you’re already emotionally hanging by a thread is just emotional gaslighting with better branding. Maybe healing isn’t supposed to be efficient, aesthetic, or productive. Maybe it’s messy, inconvenient, and sometimes looks like doing absolutely nothing without narrating it.

So no, this still isn’t a self-care guide. It’s a refusal to keep pretending that organising a drawer will reorganise your life, or that a sad playlist is a substitute for actual peace. Sometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do is stop trying to fix yourself like a broken project, and just let yourself exist. No playlists. No planners. No enlightenment. And honestly? That feels more grounding than any yoga mat ever will.