You Can’t Heal a Bird While Keeping It in a Cage

I was sitting on the floor of my closet when I realized I wasn’t the problem.

I had my meditation app open. The little blue circle on my phone was expanding and contracting, telling me to breathe in peace, breathe out tension. I was on my lunch break from a job that had me working eighty-hour weeks. My hands were shaking. My chest was tight. I was twenty-eight years old, hiding in the dark among my shoes, trying to “regulate my nervous system.”

I had spent two years trying to fix myself. I was in therapy. I was on medication. I was journaling, and doing yoga, and drinking green juice, and reading books about boundaries. I was doing everything the wellness industry told me to do to cure my “anxiety.”

And I was still crying in my closet at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.

It took me another year to understand what was actually happening. I wasn’t broken. I was a bird in a cage, frantically flapping my wings, trying to heal my exhaustion while the door remained locked.

By the end of this, you’ll know why we are obsessed with diagnosing the individual instead of the environment, what the research actually says about how toxic systems create “symptoms,” and how to tell the difference between needing to heal and needing to leave.

First, the honest part.

We live in a culture that loves a pathologized individual. It’s so much easier to say I have anxiety than it is to say my boss is abusive or my relationship is killing me or the expectations of this society are fundamentally unlivable.

When we name our pain as a personal failing, we get sympathy. We get medication. We get a diagnosis. We get an identity.

When we name our pain as an environmental problem, we have to do something terrifying: we have to change our environment. We have to quit the job, leave the marriage, sever the friendship, or fight the system. And fighting a system is so much harder than fighting your own brain.

So we internalize it. We decide the problem is our brain chemistry. We decide we just need to be more resilient. We buy the app. We sit in the closet.

Now the mechanism. Not “therapy is bad.” Something more precise.

The research on this is surprisingly clear. In 1977, psychiatrist George Engel introduced the biopsychosocial model of health, arguing that illness isn’t just biology—it’s a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. Yet decades later, we still treat mental health as if it lives entirely in the skull.

More recent research on what psychologists call “social determinants of mental health” backs this up. Studies consistently show that factors like financial insecurity, workplace toxicity, systemic discrimination, and lack of community are massive drivers of depression and anxiety.

Dr. Johann Hari, in his book Lost Connections, spent years investigating this. He found that when we treat depression and anxiety purely as brain chemistry errors, we ignore the fact that human beings have fundamental psychological needs—for meaning, for belonging, for autonomy, for a future. When those needs are stripped away by our environment, our bodies react. The anxiety, the exhaustion, the numbness—these aren’t malfunctions. They are smoke alarms.

If your house is on fire, you don’t get annoyed at the smoke alarm. You put out the fire. But when our minds ring the alarm, we try to medicate the alarm instead of looking at the flames.

You know this exhaustion.

It’s the one where you leave a family dinner feeling like you need a week in the woods to recover. It’s the one where you spend your whole weekend dreading Monday. It’s the one where you read another book on self-care, and another article on “setting boundaries,” and you wonder why you’re still so tired.

It’s the exhaustion of being told you need to “do the work” on yourself, when the actual work is in a room you are trapped in with someone who refuses to change. It’s the exhaustion of being the only one in the relationship doing the emotional labor, and then being told by your therapist that you need to manage your own reactions better.

You are trying to be a well-adjusted bird in a cage that wasn’t built for you. And you are blaming your wings for getting tired.

But here’s the part I’d rather skip.

I’ve been the one holding the cage door shut.

Not literally. But I have spent years of my life diagnosing my own pain to avoid changing my circumstances. I’ve called myself “anxious” when I was actually in a relationship where I was constantly walking on eggshells. I’ve called myself “lazy” when I was actually working for a company that demanded my soul in exchange for a paycheck. I’ve called myself “depressed” when I was actually just grieving the life I wasn’t allowed to live.

I have also been the one pathologizing other people. I’ve looked at friends in toxic dynamics and thought, She just needs to work on her attachment style. I’ve looked at women in abusive marriages and thought, Why doesn’t she just leave?

It was easier to see a broken person than a broken system. Because if the system is broken, then my comfort is built on someone else’s suffering. And if the system is broken, then I might have to give something up to change it.

So what do you do with this?

One: stop asking “What is wrong with me?” and start asking “What is wrong with this room?”

Take a piece of paper. Draw two columns. In one column, write down all the symptoms you think are “you” (exhaustion, anxiety, inability to focus, constant crying). In the other column, write down the realities of your environment (the hours you work, the way your partner speaks to you, the financial stress you are under). Look at the second column and ask: Would a healthy person struggle here?

Two: separate the diagnosis from the cause.

You might genuinely have depression or anxiety. Medication and therapy are wonderful tools. But they are not a substitute for a healthy life. You can take all the anti-anxiety meds in the world, but if you go back to the person who is actively hurting you every day, the alarm is going to keep ringing.

Three: stop trying to fix a bird in a cage.

If you are doing all the “right” things—the therapy, the journaling, the meditation—and you are still miserable, it might be because you are trying to heal a broken leg while someone is still standing on it. You do not need to become more resilient to survive a toxic environment. You need to leave the toxic environment.

I quit the job. It took me six more months to actually do it, and I was terrified the whole time. I had convinced myself I couldn’t survive without it.

Two weeks after I left, the panic attacks stopped. Not because I had finally learned to regulate my nervous system. Not because I had finally cracked the code on my anxiety. They stopped because the threat was gone.

The bird wasn’t sick. The bird was just exhausted from living in a cage.

The question was never how to heal while you are actively being hurt. The question is why we spend so much time and money trying to fix ourselves, instead of fixing the conditions that are making us sick.

You are not fundamentally broken. You are a human being responding to a world that is asking too much of you, or a room that is refusing to let you breathe.

You can’t heal a bird while keeping it in a cage.

Stop trying to teach yourself to fly in the dark. Open the door.

I write about the gap between what we say and what we mean—including the gap between the sickness we diagnose in ourselves and the sickness we are actually living in.