As this year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on just how hard it has been. I’ve written openly about my own anxiety and anhedonia—the difficulty experiencing pleasure—shaped by a challenging childhood and intensified by profound life changes. In the past two years, both of my parents died (good grief, indeed), while a wave of new grandchildren arrived—deeply joyful events that were also destabilizing and demanding. These parallel experiences reminded me, once again, that I teach what I most need to learn.

At the same time, we are living in a culture saturated with anger, grievance, and revenge addiction—a very real phenomenon fueled by hate speech, polarization, and outrage-driven media. Add to that the endless barrage of high-stimulation, engagement-maximizing (anti)social media, and it becomes clear: our emotional and nervous systems are under siege.

This is why rebooting our pleasure brains is no longer a luxury—it is an urgent act of self- and collective care. Pleasure is not frivolous. It is regulatory. It is grounding. It is essential for emotional wisdom. That urgency is why I wrote Why Good

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