In the debut episode of Self-Centered, hosts Tori Lazar and Olivia Owens explore what support really looks like when productivity culture turns self-care into performance and rest into another metric to optimize. Together with Van Newman and Minaa B., they unpack how healing, resilience, and wellbeing have been co-opted by the systems that made us unwell—and what it takes to reclaim peace on our own terms.
When did caring for ourselves become something to prove?
“Mental health” is everywhere. Ad campaigns. Onboarding paperwork. Influencer captions. We talk about burnout, boundaries, therapy, rest. And yet, for many of us, actually feeling better still feels out of reach.
In this debut of Self-Centered, Tori Lazar and Olivia Owens slow down to ask what support really looks like when productivity culture swallows self-care, healing becomes performance, and rest turns into another thing to optimize. What does care feel like when it’s not measured or monetized? And how do we find our way back—especially in a world that keeps asking us to push through?
In each core episode of Self-Centered, we sit down with two guests: one to help us explore the self, and one to help us examine the systems that shape it. Together, their perspectives reveal how personal experience and structural design are always in conversation.
To ground the conversation in lived experience, we turned to Van Newman—a writer, designer, and cultural strategist who has spent the last decade creating digital, physical, and narrative spaces where people can feel more like themselves. From platforms like Somewhere Good to the writers’ room, Van’s work blends systems thinking with lived experience to ask: What does it take to feel safe enough to be honest? In this conversation, we dive into the importance, and the challenges, of finding community in an ever-changing landscape.
To help us explore the systems that impact our mental health, we sat down with Minaa B.—a licensed therapist, author of Owning Our Struggles, and founder of the media company I’m So Mature. Her work lives at the intersection of mental health, workplace wellbeing, and cultural care. A former social worker turned consultant, Minaa challenges the ways we’ve turned healing into performance, and invites us to choose presence instead. In this episode, she keeps it real about the urgency of challenging the systems we’ve inherited.
Healing shouldn’t require heroics.
When systems rely on individual resilience, they outsource care. Support should reduce the need for constant endurance.
Palatability keeps us small.
Performing “fine” to stabilize a room fragments authenticity. Permission to be messy is part of being whole.
Devotion > discipline.
Discipline optimizes; devotion nourishes. The point isn’t to become “better,” it’s to remain in honest relationship with yourself.
Rest is not a reward for endurance.
If rest only arrives as recovery, we’re already overdrawn. Treat it as a sustaining rhythm and ritual of return.
Language can liberate or limit.
Labels help us name; overuse helps us avoid. Precision without compassion dilutes connection.
Care that counts.
Move beyond “performance wellness” toward practices that prioritize rest, reflection, and repair over metrics and measurement.
Soft leadership as a standard.
Leaders modeling repair through transparency, boundaries, and accountability—replacing endurance with empathy.
Care by design.
Workplaces and teams intentionally building systems for rest, flexibility, and regeneration before burnout becomes the norm.
Community as infrastructure.
Mutual-aid networks, peer support, and workplace cultures that make dignity and connection non-negotiable parts of how we work and live.
Minaa B.
Van Newman