There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from working a long day or a bad night’s sleep. It’s the exhaustion of never stopping. Of moving from one thing to the next — from the alarm to the inbox to the meeting to the carpool to dinner to the inbox again — without a single moment that belongs fully to you. It’s the exhaustion of a life lived at the speed of demand rather than the speed of a human being.

One of the things therapy offers, in a culture that rarely offers it, is time entirely your own. Not productive time. Not optimized time. Time to sit with your own experience, to say out loud the things that have been running in the background, to figure out what you actually need.

For many people, the therapeutic hour is the only part of the week where they are not performing, not managing, not achieving anything except understanding themselves a little better.

That, in itself, can be healing.