Dr. Susan Roets

21/08/2026

As a physician, I spend a lot of time with patients who cannot figure out why they are so tired. Here is the answer almost nobody wants to hear.

We are drowning in doing and calling it swimming.

The car has a podcast. The walk has an audiobook. The shower has a waterproof phone holder now, which means we have officially run out of places in our lives that are allowed to just be wet and quiet.

Cooking dinner requires a show on the counter. Folding laundry requires a show on the phone. We voluntarily eliminated the last three minutes of unscheduled silence in our day, and we did it from a toilet.

Someone invented a toothbrush that connects to an app. Your teeth have a digital footprint now. We looked at the one activity that required nothing but an arm and some paste and said this needs WiFi.

You listen to a podcast while you exercise while you answer emails while you worry about something from yesterday. That is not multitasking. That is five things being done badly at the same time by a person who will later say I do not know why I am so tired.

Rest now requires equipment. A weighted blanket, a sound machine, a sleep mask, an app that plays rain sounds from a forest you will never visit, and a wind down routine that takes longer than the sleep it is supposed to produce.

We turned walking into a sport with metrics. How far, how fast, what zone. You took a walk. The walk was nice. The walk does not need a performance review.

We eat lunch at our desk and call it efficiency. We answer emails at dinner and call it dedication. We scroll in bed and call it winding down. We have renamed every form of self neglect as something that sounds like ambition.

Someone will read this while doing something else. Eating, walking, waiting in line, lying in bed. You did not even notice, because you are doing two things at once.

Your grandmother sat on a porch and stared at the street and called it evening. We would call that a waste of time. She would call what we are doing a waste of a life.

Your nervous system was never designed for constant input. It reads busyness as danger and stillness as safety, and it has not felt safe in years.

Put something down. Anything. See if you float.

What is one thing you are putting down tonight? Comment it. Then go do nothing, gloriously, for ten minutes.

13/08/2026

I took this on my walk this morning.

The lake was so still it had turned into a mirror. Every cloud in the sky was there again on the water, doubled, and for a moment it was hard to tell which was the real sky and which was the reflection.

I stood there longer than I meant to. And it reminded me of something I keep trying to tell my patients. Stillness isn't doing nothing. A lake can only become a mirror when it stops churning. All that clarity, the ability to reflect the whole sky, comes from being calm enough to go quiet.

We treat our own stillness as wasted time. The unscheduled walk, the few minutes of doing nothing, the morning we resist filling. But your nervous system does some of its most important work in exactly those moments. Your body needs the still water too. It's when things settle. It's when you can finally see clearly.

So this is your permission. Go find a few still minutes today. Not to accomplish anything. Just to let the water go calm.

When did you last let yourself be still?

30/07/2026

There's a reason the windshield of a car is enormous and the rearview mirror is small. You're meant to spend most of your attention on where you're going, and only an occasional glance on where you've been. A driver who stared into the rearview mirror the whole time would crash almost immediately.

A lot of people drive their health entirely by the rearview mirror.

They spend enormous energy staring backward. At the years they feel they wasted. At every failed diet. At the weight they used to be, or the health they used to have, or the choices they wish they'd made a decade ago. The mirror fills their whole view, and meanwhile the road ahead, the part they can actually steer, goes unwatched.

Here's the truth every driver knows in their body. You cannot steer using the mirror. The past is genuinely behind you, and no amount of staring at it changes the road. The only thing that responds to the wheel is what's coming.

Glance back when it helps you learn. Then put your eyes back on the windshield, because that's the only direction you can actually drive.

What's one thing ahead of you that deserves your attention more than what's behind?

29/07/2026

There's a particular kind of hope in a single lit window at night.

You've seen it. Driving home late through a dark stretch, everything black and quiet, and then one warm window glowing in the distance. It doesn't light up the whole night. It can't. But it's enough to tell you that somewhere out there, someone's awake, something's alive, the darkness isn't total. One small light changes the entire feel of the dark.

I think about this when people tell me their situation feels hopeless. The diagnosis, the numbers, the years they feel they've lost. It can seem like total darkness, like there's nothing to do but sit in it.

But you don't need to floodlight the whole night to change everything. You need one lit window. One small habit that proves the dark isn't total. One walk. One good night's sleep. One meal that leaves you steady instead of crashed. It won't fix everything by morning. That was never the point. The point is that a single light means the power isn't out, that you can still turn things on, that more is possible.

Light one window. Then light another.

What's one small light you could turn on tonight?

23/07/2026

The people you keep meaning to call won't be there forever.

20/07/2026

20/07/2026

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19/07/2026

How Buried Anger Leads to Depression & How To Heal
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18/07/2026

I want you to actually do this one, not just read it. Put one hand flat on the center of your chest.

Feel that? That steady thump under your palm. That muscle has not taken a single day off since about three weeks after you were conceived. Not one. Not when you had the flu, not through your worst heartbreak, not on the nights you didn't think you could keep going. It just kept the beat.

It was beating before you had a name. It beat through every year you can't remember and every one you can. It will have beaten somewhere close to three billion times by the end of your life, and it never once asked you to notice.

Now here's the part I need you to sit with. That same faithful muscle is the one most affected by the things we treat as small. The sleep we shortchange. The stress we let run. The blood sugar we let spike, meal after meal, for years.

It has never stopped showing up for you. Not once.
The question is gentler than any diet ever asked. After a lifetime of it keeping you, what's one small way you could keep it?

Hand still on your chest. That's who you're doing this for.