How tired are you?

Do you understand what is happening to us? Why the morning starts with the news feed before we’ve even opened our eyes. Why at two in the morning our thumb keeps scrolling, though we read everything we needed long ago. Why our shoulders are up by our ears, our jaw is clenched, and when someone asks “How are you?” we want to say “Fine” — and change the subject.

We lived through a pandemic. Now there are wars in the world — not one, but several. Prices, jobs, loans, borders, holiday plans, life plans — everything that seemed solid has become fragile. The rules we lived by are being rewritten on the fly, and nobody sends us the new version.

And the psyche can’t keep up. It is used to holding on to what it understands: this is right, this is not allowed, this is how it will always be. But “always” no longer works.

I know how that feed is put together, because for many years I made it myself. I’ve been in the media since my last year of school: television, youth projects, then news and current affairs, then chief producer at Moscow 24. I know how a news story is born, why it unsettles us and why it is so hard to look away. It is designed that way.

At some point I realised that I needed a different skill myself: not keeping up with the flow, but being able to step out of it. Getting myself back. That is why I went into psychology.

Our community came together in 2020 among master’s students of psychology at HSE University — back then we were still studying. When the pandemic came, we started to help, offering free consultations, first of all to doctors and to people hit by the pandemic. Twenty-one of us got together, and we launched PSY.one.

Today it is a fully fledged professional journal about psychology and a new community that grew out of a small handful of people who cared. We still talk, we are still friends, and we keep building good psychology for people.

What the psyche needs now is not to “hold on” but to become softer. More elastic. Able to bend without breaking, to let go of what no longer works without losing its footing. This can be learned. That is what our journal is about.