I’ve been getting my hair braided ever since I was a little girl. In elementary school my Moesha obsession meant Brandy-style box braids; in middle school, Alicia Keys was the reason behind my cornrows, and even now, a vacation is not a vacation without a head full of boho braids. 

I always thought of braids as a healthy alternative to what I could be doing with my hair: no more chemical straighteners with their awful smell, inevitable scalp burns, and adverse health effects.

Earlier this year, however, the Silent Spring Institute — which researches the environmental causes for breast cancer — released a study that made me question how healthy that choice actually is. 

Elissia Franklin is a chemist and exposure scientist at the Institute who decided to test what chemicals are in braiding hair after noticing a phrase pop in her colleagues’ work that was familiar to her. 

“They were helping study participants swap out their couches because they wanted to reduce flame-retardant chemicals in the indoor dust in the homes,” she told me. “Anytime I bought my braiding hair, it said flame-resistant. It just dawned on me: If they’re trying to get rid of flame retardants from couches, why can we so intimately use these products in our everyday lives?”

Franklin evaluated 43 hair extension products and found “chemicals that were associated with cancer, birth defects and reproductive harm. Chemicals like flame retardants, organotin compounds, and phthalates.”

These chemicals don’t just pop up in hair extensions — they’re in many other cosmetics too. “Sometimes people just see this as a women’s health issue,” Ami Zota, a professor of environmental health studies at Columbia University, told me. “Everyone uses some kind of cosmetics, whether it’s soap or lotion or toothpaste.”

So how can consumers navigate these everyday products? Zota tells us on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, including more with Franklin and other experts, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

How does cosmetic regulation work in the US?

It’s largely industry-driven and mostly voluntary forms of regulation. The FDA provides minimal oversight, and they also have minimal funding to actually make sure that the industries are following the regulations that are there. 

Most of the regulations testing the companies do is to make sure there aren’t adverse immediate reactions like eczema or skin rashes. The system of regulation is less effective at gauging long-term risk, like those that may lead to cancer or difficulty in getting pregnant. It’s mostly testing one product at a time and looking at short-term effects. 

You write about the “environmental injustice of beauty.” Can you explain what that means? 

The idea is to shine a light on the social and historical factors that drive what we find beautiful because beauty is a very old form of power. It’s a gendered form of power. It’s one of the forms of power that were most available to women historically, and it’s impacted by things like colonialism, racism, sexism. 

There is a hierarchy of beauty like a pyramid, and it’s really driven by Eurocentric notions of beauty that favor lighter skin, straighter hair, thinner bodies. Simply put: The closer you are to the top of that pyramid, the greater benefits you’ll see, whether it’s a higher likelihood of finding a suitable husband in South Asian countries like my native country of India, or in this country, the greater likelihood of getting a certain job if you’re a Black woman and you wear your hair straight.

When you look at the back of a bottle of shampoo and you see that list of ingredients, it can feel like you need a PhD in biochemistry to read it. How do I understand what’s going on there, and what I should be avoiding?

There are apps that can help you do that. You could use an app Clearya and where you could take a picture of your ingredient labels and it’ll flag the problematic ones for you. Skin Deep is another one that will give you a score that tells you how hazardous your products are. Then there’s the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and they have a nice list of some of the most common ones there too. 

Give me an example of one cosmetic and walk me through what I should look out for.

Take lotion. Lotion doesn’t get enough attention, but it has a lot of preservatives and often it’s the preservatives that give it a longer shelf life. That often can be some of the stuff we want to stay away from. And there are a lot of different lotions; you can have a lotion that has four products, or you could have a lotion that has 50 products including formaldehyde releasers. There’s formaldehyde itself, but then there’s these chemicals that can degrade or release into formaldehyde. We have found that lotion, because it sits on your skin for a long time, you’re not rinsing it off, is actually an important one. 

When we talk about beauty justice, it’s also the right of people to be able to present themselves and use the products they want to use without having to risk their health. The goal is not to police everyone’s behavior or the products they use, but to help give them tools. 

Companies respond to consumer pressure and consumer demand. You have a lot of power with your dollar. Asking companies to make safer hair products, especially that will serve the needs of Black women and other women of color, is in and of itself really powerful because federal policy just takes a really long time. Have everyday conversations about how we choose to show up in the world, [because] so much of that gets shaped when we’re young.

More than 63 million people in America are caregivers — of kids, of parents, and loved ones. And nearly half of caregivers under the age of 50 are taking care of a parent and a child at the same time. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you’re also trying to hold down a job and handle everything else that life throws your way. And maybe it’s got you feeling spent. When we think of burnout, we often think of work, but caring for a loved one can leave you exhausted too.

Amy Goyer is the AARP’s National Family and Caregiving Expert, and she also knows this exhaustion first hand. Goyer has been a caregiver for most of her life, beginning in her 20s — first, for her grandparents, then, later, for her parents and her sister. 

“I felt like I was living four people’s lives,” she told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “When you have someone, especially someone that you love, who is going through so much, and it’s physical stress, it’s emotional stress, financial stress, you know, every type of stress you can think of, you may be absorbing that. And that’s on top of the normal stress of caregiving. It’s like the membrane between the two of you kind of gets thin.” 

Goyer says this phenomenon is known as secondhand stress. In the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Goyer explains the signs of secondhand stress, how you can recover from and prevent burnout as a caregiver, and more.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What is the definition of secondhand stress?

It’s the emotional strain of being with a person who is experiencing pain or trauma or stress. You start to find yourself also feeling those things — feeling the anxiety, the sadness, the frustration. It’s not your experience, but your experience with them. It’s almost like catching somebody’s emotions, like catching a cold from that person. It’s like you are absorbing those things and that starts to cause you stress as well.

Recently, we talked about burnout at work. And the thing about work is that you can quit if you absolutely need to. But with caregiving for a loved one, that’s not really the case. You can’t just walk away the way you would in another situation.

Wanting to walk away is one of the big red flags. I have a philosophy that I developed during those years when I was caring for so many people at once. I was driving my car, and I realized I was on fumes; I had no gas. You know, that feeling of, “I’m not going to make it.” So I went straight to the gas station and filled the car up. 

As I pulled out of the station and started driving, I thought, “Wow, you know, the car runs better on a full tank of gas.” I could feel a difference in how the car was driving. That was my “aha moment.” I expected myself to run on empty all the time and be just as efficient. That doesn’t make sense. So I thought about what fills my tank, what fuels me so that I can keep going. 

Mostly, it’s little fill-ups. You may not have $60 to fill your tank, but you’ve got $10. So maybe I have 10 minutes, and I’m going to do some stretches, or jumping jacks, or walk around the block, or I’m going to get a good cup of coffee or tea. I’m going to call a friend. I’m going to text with someone. I’m going to [join] an online caregiving group. I kept fresh flowers in the house; that filled me up. I had Pilates once a week. That was kind of my deal-breaker; I only canceled for a true emergency. You know what those premium fill-ups are for you. 

The other big thing that I learned as a caregiver is that I can do anything, but I can’t do everything. So what are the things I can outsource and have somebody else do? What are the things that have to be me?

The cost of care is just so expensive. That can be stressful, and it gets harder over time. What role do finances play?

For me, the finances were one of the most stressful things. My parents planned. They had a financial adviser. They did the best they could. Their budget paid for caregivers while I was working. Then, I started absorbing the costs above their budget. When they moved in with me, I paid the mortgage, I paid for all the food, I paid for their clothing, and it added up as their needs increased. 

After more than a decade of this very intensive caregiving, my mom passed away in 2013. My sister passed away the following year, and I had to empty her house and manage her estate and ended up still caring for dad at the same time. The upshot is by the time he passed away, I had so much credit card debt that I was using to try to catch up with things. And I kept thinking, “I can handle this. I’ll dig out.” And I ended up in bankruptcy. I can tell you that’s one of the most difficult, humiliating, terrible experiences. But I talk about it openly, because I know I’m not the only one. I know many, many caregivers are struggling financially, and nobody talks about money.

Try to look at any benefits they may be eligible for. I eventually got my dad enrolled in veterans’ benefits, which was a huge help. See if your loved ones have long-term care insurance that might help pay for some things. Some people may qualify for help just paying their energy bills. You can contact your area agency on aging and ask about any type of help with benefits and case management and care management. They will connect you with someone who can help you with those kinds of applications.

How does that also shape your relationship with the person you’re caring for? What are some things people can do to navigate that?

I think the most important thing is to have a financial adviser for yourself — somebody who looks at the situation and gives you some good advice. 

There are things I probably should have done differently. Long-distance caregivers actually spend more than caregivers living nearby, and that’s partially because of the travel. They have to go back and forth, and they’re paying people to do things they can’t do. So look at the ways that you can maximize any services they can get, any benefits, anything like that. That’s one really important thing to do. 

Also, just to have a handle on what the costs actually are. There’s still a lot of people that say to me they thought Medicare was going to pay for long-term care, and Medicare does not pay for ongoing long-term care. The vast majority of people are cared for at home, because the cost of assisted living in nursing homes is just exorbitantly expensive.

This can be a lot to process. Are there resources and tools that people can turn to when this part of life becomes emotionally overwhelming?

Emotionally overwhelming is kind of the biggest piece of it. I just wrote a Care for the Caregiver guide for AARP this past year, and it’s free. You can get counseling, even if it’s not ongoing. I really recommend that. Caregiver support groups — I think connecting with other caregivers is maybe your top priority, because we get it. We understand each other, and it is a relief sometimes just to talk about it.

If you could go back in time and say one thing to the version of you that began caregiving, what would you say to her?

I think I would say, chill out a little bit. I can’t control the diseases my loved ones have or what happens to them health-wise, but I can control my own mindset. 

I think that’s the most important thing. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of caregivers across my career and different people will have very similar situations, but they have very different attitudes, and they come through it differently. 

It’s not even the resources they have; it’s their mindset about it and how supported and at peace they feel with it. The biggest difference is their mindset. 

Jonathan Malesic knows burnout firsthand. He was working his dream job, teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. He was publishing papers, working toward tenure — doing all the things on the professor checklist. He was happy; until one day, he wasn’t.

“I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work,” Malesic told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. A combination of unenthusiastic students, a budget crisis, and seeing colleagues let go had him on edge and feeling “sort of useless.” He didn’t recognize himself.

Eventually, he realized something had to give. He left academia, but remained curious about what derailed his career. It turns out, the answer was burnout. He discovered the work of psychology professor Christina Maslach, who literally wrote the book on burnout. 

“There are three dimensions to burnout,” Malesic explained. “The first is exhaustion, and the exhaustion is something that has to be chronic. You can’t be burned out for a week or a month. It’s a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization: You treat people as not full persons. And that can manifest itself in anger, gossip, and frustration. And the third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything.”

Malesic took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the standard test that measures burnout, and he found he was in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. “In American society, we value work so highly,” he said. “We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work.” Eventually, he wrote a book called The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives.

Danielle Roberts had a similar experience. After a pandemic layoff, she started to seek out balance. She found it, and now, as a career coach, she helps other people find it too. Or as she likes to say: as an anti-career coach. 

“I think we are at a point where dream jobs don’t exist,” she told Explain It to Me. “We have to start questioning the systems and the structures that are causing burnout in the first place, rather than making it a personal problem or a professional weakness.”

So how do you do that? And what are the different ways burnout has manifested itself through the decades? Roberts breaks it down for the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Has burnout always been a thing? Or is it just a young person’s game? 

I grew up in a blue-collar family and was one of five kids. My dad did tile and marble for a living for 40 years. He just retired and what he got for a lifetime of hard work was a broken body and a pin to say “thank you for your service.” 

For older generations, their burnout often looked more physical. Gen X, their burnout often looks more mental. And then millennials and Gen Z, our burnout often looks more emotional and existential because we were taught that our work equals our worth and to pour so much of ourselves into it. 

It’s not that one generation is more burnt-out than the other; it’s just that it manifests differently based on the world in which we grew up.

What do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently?

We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would’ve prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. 

We often hear that they’re lazy and entitled and that nobody wants to work anymore, but think about what they witnessed growing up. They saw their parents or their friends’ parents be loyal to companies that laid them off. They saw millennials put themselves through college and get a tremendous amount of student debt just to be laid off or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I think they are looking at everything that other generations have done and saying, “No, thank you.”

Are there ways to avoid burnout at work in the first place?

It all starts in the interview process and being mindful of what to look out for in the language that your team uses. If people are describing their company like a family, run. That is a red flag. I don’t know about anybody else’s family, but mine is full of dysfunction and you’re expected to give a lot, and not always get a ton in return. 

Then when you are in the onboarding process, start talking about what you need from your manager early on. There’s something called a working styles worksheet, and it includes questions like, “When I’m stressed, what I need most from my coworkers is blank. The best way I receive feedback is blank. My meeting participation style is blank.” That will give you a lot of agency and autonomy in how you show up in your work and how you allow other people to treat you. We teach other people how to treat us.

These days, it’s hard to get a job in the first place, on top of the cost of housing and health care and so many things. That makes leaving a job or even having boundaries at the job you have now really, really hard. 

If you can’t afford to quit your job, are there steps you can take to prevent burnout?

The world is a dumpster fire right now and the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. 

There’s something called an energy management audit where for a week, you track your time from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed and you figure out what your energy patterns are, then see what you can do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels. 

In a workplace that could look like taking a meeting with your camera off or going on a walk. Or if you know you have a particularly draining meeting at 12 pm every single day, you take a five-minute block and get up and just shake out your nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on your favorite song. You can just close your eyes and give yourself that rest for 30 seconds. You can set a reminder on your phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into your body a little bit more.

Is there anything you’d recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is going to make it harder. 

Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push. And also thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society. We take on so much emotional labor on top of the day-to-day. 

If you are feeling stuck on a problem at work or you’re feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours. That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it’s going to be a disservice to you. Look at your workload realistically and say, “What can fall off?” We can’t self-help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. 

I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break, because if we continue to take on everything and our employers are like, “Oh, Danielle’s got it. She can keep doing all of this and it’s fine,” then they’re just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say, “I’m letting these two things fall and break and it’s the company’s responsibility to fix them,” then maybe I’ll actually finally get some help.

When I was growing up, my dad and I would play a game at the grocery store: As the cashier was ringing up the items on the list my mom had given us, we each would guess what we thought the total would amount to. Whoever was closest won bragging rights, and maybe if we were feeling indulgent, the candy bar of our choosing.

I’m shopping for just myself now, but I’m still pretty good at this game. That means I’m always paying attention to how prices change. What used to feed a family of three is now just enough to cover my own grocery bill, and those prices just keep going up. So what gives? Is this just regular-degular inflation? Or is something else driving up the price of the items we use day to day? 

On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we look into three goods and why they cost so much right now: gas, coffee, and milk. 

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Gas prices: The war with Iran and you

First up, a trip to the gas station. Sam Ori is the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and he says the issue with oil right now is global. The war with Iran is choking the Strait of Hormuz, limiting the amount of oil available to the rest of the world. 

“The price of gasoline that we pay at the pump is set in the global oil market,” he tells Vox. “Crude oil is like the feed stock that makes gasoline. More than half of the price that you’re paying at the pump is just directly the result of the price of crude oil in the global market.” 

That price, plus federal and state taxes along with profit mean Americans are paying more to fill up their cars. 

The United States is still the largest producer of oil in the world. But self-sufficiency isn’t really an option. “The United States still imports a lot of oil because the refineries that we have in this country are configured to refine a certain quality of crude oil,” Ori says. “It’s not easy to change the configuration of those refineries. The United States produces what’s called light, sweet crude oil. We still need a lot of heavier, sour crudes. So we import those and then we export the light oil.”

Coffee: A climate change story

Our next stop is your local cafe. Gone are the days of hand-wringing over millennials squandering their wealth on $5 lattes. Those lattes have easily crept up to $10. 

Bloomberg reporter Ilena Peng says the price of coffee has been going up since early 2024, and we can blame that on the weather. Vietnam and Brazil are the world’s biggest coffee producers, and both have had dry weather recently. “The boogeyman is ultimately climate,” she says. 

But tariffs also play a role here. Last year, President Donald Trump put a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, where most of the beans at your local coffee shop likely come from. Eventually, in November, coffee and other products were exempted from tariffs, and in February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs.

The exemption, Peng says, “helped roasters quite a bit with being able to plan, even though a lot of them are still dealing with leftover costs. You contract inventories months ahead.” That means there’s a major lag between that cost and the cost at the consumer level, so we may be paying a lot for those lattes for a while.

Milk: Small costs add up

What about the milk that goes in that coffee? Dairy prices are high right now too: The national average for a gallon of milk is $4.03. Charles Nicholson is an economics professor at Penn State University, where he teaches about supply chain management and food supply. He says the way we go about setting dairy prices gets a little complicated. 

“Farms actually get paid on the basis of what the milk is used for,” he tells Vox. “So the highest value and the highest price that you would pay a farmer for milk is for milk that’s gonna go into that carton at the grocery store.” 

Unlike with gas and coffee, it’s hard to point to any specific factor driving up the cost of milk. Instead, it’s a story of small price hikes all the way through the system: Other costs include the processors who put the milk into the cartons and food retailers. Transportation is a factor (remember those rising gas prices?), along with the care and feeding of livestock. 

We may also see this price change outside that carton of milk too. If you’ve ordered a pizza recently, you’ve experienced where most of the milk in the United States goes. “Close to 40 percent of the milk that we produce goes into making cheeses of various kinds,” Nicholson says. “A lot of that is mozzarella cheese that would go on a pizza. And pizza restaurants can also play around a little bit with — how much cheese am I gonna put on that pizza?” That cheddar is costing some serious cheddar. 

I never realized how much sugar was in my life, until I gave up sweets for Lent. I go on a walk and outside the grocery store I see the Girl Scouts pushing their product. I go to a friend’s birthday party and the cake stares at me from across the room. I head to the coffee shop, but that matcha latte just doesn’t hit the same without a little simple syrup. 

Sugar is the nutritional boogeyman ready to leap out from behind every corner, a ubiquitous presence at our kitchen tables: per person on average Americans eat about 120 pounds of the sweet stuff each year. 

Maya Feller, a Brooklyn-based registered dietician nutritionist, said she’s seen a shift in how we talk about sugar over the years. “I would say the difference is the demonization,” she told Vox. “Currently we are in a battle of wits and morality around sugar. Back in the 1980s when I was young, people were going sugar-free. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, you’re a bad person if you’re having sugar.’ We fully entered into the morality that’s associated with sugar.”

So how do you make the best food choices for yourself without spiraling? And if you want to reframe your relationship with sugar, how do you do that in a healthy way? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What do you think has caused the shift in how we view sugar?

Some of that is coming from what we refer to as wellness culture and this overall desire to be slender and able-bodied. So when you have these foods that have been demonized and then a person eats that food, then it’s like, “Oh, well, you’re not going after the gold standard. You don’t want to be slender and able-bodied. And if you’re ill, that’s your fault.”

When someone comes to you and they say they want to cut back on sugar, what are the questions you ask them?

My first question is “Why?” 

Is it because you’re concerned about your cardio metabolic health? Are we talking about diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease? Or perhaps you are aware that you’ve been eating three pounds of sugar every week. 

Once I know what the why is, then we can start to get to the meat of really figuring out where it’s showing up in your day and then how to address pulling it back while not getting lost in “you’ve done good/you’ve done bad.”

What are some of the biggest challenges your patients face with sugar? 

It’s everywhere. When I say everywhere, it is everywhere. There’s sugar in ketchup. There’s sugar in tomato sauce. If you’re buying boxed, jarred, canned or frozen food, sometimes it’s added in. It’s not just pastries. 

So that’s the biggest challenge. You really have to become that informed consumer and read the nutrition facts label. You’ve got to read the ingredient list and then understand how that food fits in the context of your day.

Do you recommend going cold turkey?

Oh no, absolutely not. Any change that you make in your overall eating pattern, you want to make sure that it’s something that’s sustainable and that you can replicate it over time. For most of us, it’s not realistic to say that we’re not going to eat any added sugar. Last night I was at dinner and dessert was brought out, and if I wasn’t eating added sugar, then I couldn’t have taken part in dessert. 

I do say slowly reduce to a place that you feel like you can sustain the majority of the time. Think of it in a way where it’s not all or nothing, because sugar really is everywhere.

Some of us love sweets more than others. What’s your advice for those of us with a sweet tooth?

Here’s the thing: One of the challenges when we’re shopping is we rarely purchase one single cookie. Perhaps it’s a bag of cookies. Is there a way to change how the cookie comes into your home? Instead, is there a bakery close by? Could you bake a cookie? 

Then maybe it’s just having the cookie after lunch or after dinner. I prefer to have it up against a meal just because you’ve had some protein and fiber in the meal to help slow down the absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream.

Is there a way to retrain our taste buds? A way to make the sweet tooth stop?

You absolutely can. It takes time. When I’m working with folks, I like to figure out how much sugar you have on a regular basis, and in what form you’re getting it. Is it a liquid sugar or is it a solid sugar? 

The reason I ask about the liquid is because if someone’s sitting down and they’re having a two-liter bottle of a soda, we can cut it down by half a glass per day over X amount of days. But if it’s like a sleeve of cookies or a cake, then we’re going to have to know what your sugar interactions are over the course of the day. Is it possible that we could reduce it to two sugar interactions from three? Can we cut the portion size? Can we change when you’re having it? Can we change some of your behaviors around what you do after you have it? We go through that level of detail because we eat multiple times per day. 

I want to make it applicable to work, relaxation, all of the things, so that when you’re doing that stepdown, it’s not like, “Oh, I’m on my sugar reduction journey now, but it doesn’t apply to other parts of my life or other scenarios.”

We’re living in really stressful times, and I think for a lot of people, a sweet treat at the end of the day is a reward for making it through. But is that a crutch? Are we ultimately doing ourselves more harm than good when we do that?

I don’t actually think so. I understand foods being comforting, and I’m not going to be the person to say, “No, you can’t have that thing after you’ve lived a whole life.” I won’t do it. 

But what I will say is, what’s your current health? How can we create a space where you can really enjoy that sweet treat? Let it be a moment, and then move on from it so that it doesn’t become a four-hour activity.

I gave up sugar for Lent this year, and in a few weeks, Lent will be over and I’ll once again be staring down those cookies at my favorite bakery, trying to decide how this is going to fit into my life. What should I do when that happens?

This is forethought: Okay, I know that this is coming and I’m going to have to figure out how this fits in. 

I am a huge believer that if you want to have a cookie, it can be a once-in-a-while activity. Once it becomes a staple, then it’s a different story. You can go to the bakery, get that cookie that you love, and savor it when you have it. So don’t eat it walking down the street, but find a special place. If it’s a park bench, if it’s your home, if it’s with a friend or whatever, savor that cookie and then it becomes special. 

There was a time when we used to go out for ice cream, and that was a special thing. We’ve lost the specialness of special moments. A treat is supposed to be special.

It often feels like people fall into one of two categories: those who throw things away easily, and those who hold onto everything. For those of us who fall into the latter category, tasks like spring cleaning and downsizing can be a challenge, especially when you take into account the amount of stuff we as Americans tend to accumulate. 

In fact, 71 percent of Americans say they buy things they already have because they can’t find the original in all of their clutter. And as baby boomers age, they and their children are trying to get a handle on all the things that have accumulated between them. 

So what’s the difference between someone who might have a few too many things and someone who could be considered having a hoarding problem?

Mary Dozier is a clinical psychologist and professor at Mississippi State University. She studies hoarding disorder and specializes in intervention to help older adults with hoarding problems, and she says that at the end of the day, it’s subjective. 

“The level of clutter that one person finds to be completely functional, another person might find that they can’t use their home the way they want to anymore,” she told Vox. “That’s how I always think about it: is the level of clutter keeping you from using the home how you would like to use it?”

How can we learn to get rid of the clutter in our lives? And when should we hold onto things? Dozier answers these questions and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

You work with people who hold on to too much stuff in a way that really limits them and impacts their lives in a negative way. But I think a lot of us struggle to manage our things. Why do we hold on? What’s going on with us?

I think of the items we have as an external manifestation of ourselves. We tend to hold onto things from either our past or family members’ past because it gives us this sense of where we’ve come from. But we also often hold onto things because of the promise of who we could be. 

The silly example I have from my life is a pasta maker. It’s embarrassing, but a whole decade ago, I took a pasta-making class with my husband, and in the class, it was really easy, and so we were like, “We’re definitely going to go home and make pasta.” We tried it once. It was not easy. And I think some of those dreams are easier to let go of than others.

How often is throwing everything out the answer? Like, should we just throw that pasta maker in the garbage?

I felt my heart rate go up when you said that. Truthfully, one of the things we know is that when people have really, really severe hoarding problems, it’s not safe for them to be in their home. 

Sometimes what has to happen is this massive cleanout, but it’s an incredibly traumatic thing that it’s the same kind of a PTSD response as if you lost your home in a tornado, because in essence, you did. A tornado swept through your home and took everything away. 

I know that there’s a broad spectrum of minimalism to maximalism, but I think I’m a fan of keeping the things around us that help us feel like who we are. It’s that external way that we present the world, whether it’s through our clothing or our accessories or the clutter that we have in our handbags. The things that we choose to keep on ourselves or to keep in our home signal to the world of who we think that we are.

I’m curious if things like the Marie Kondo method or any of those other kinds of minimalist decluttering hacks work for the people that you help. Is it that simple or is there a little more there?

I think there’s more to it, and especially to the idea of sparking joy. If you put a puppy in front of me, I’m going to say this puppy is sparking some joy right now. There’s a difference between happiness and fulfillment. 

I always encourage people to go through your clutter and think about what you want to keep and what you want to let go of. Starting before you even do that, ask yourself what are your values? What do you care about in the world? What’s important for you in a broader sense? And then as you’re going through these items, thinking through if that item is consistent with those values. 

You don’t have to hold onto something out of guilt. If somebody gives you a present and you don’t want it, that’s okay. It doesn’t say anything about you or your friendship with that person to not keep that item. That guilt shouldn’t be part of why you’re holding onto things.

In your opinion, what are some of the good reasons not to get rid of stuff?

Come back to that sense of what this item is doing for you. Is it that this is the one thing that seeing it gives you that connection to your grandfather? I think sometimes people get lost in, “I’m going to hold onto everything that reminds me of my grandfather. I’m going to hold onto everything that’s about this dream I could be.” Try to think through why you keep things and how many of those things you need to keep.

Are there ways that we can reframe clutter to better serve us?

I think it can be helpful to take that step back and think, “If there wasn’t anything in this home, what would I want to be in here?” Everything that you keep, you’re making a decision to keep, and sometimes people default to that decision because it’s hard to think through. 

But you’re still making that choice. That inaction in itself is still an action, which I think is probably one of those broader truths about life. Are you staying in a relationship because you’re choosing to be in that relationship every day, or are you staying in the relationship just because it’s what you’ve been doing? You can kind of think about our relationships with our items.

I think, as boomers age and younger generations start to get more of their stuff, it can be like, “What do you do with it?” Do you have any advice for that?

There’s something called Swedish Death Cleaning. I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it’s basically putting the responsibility on the baby boomers: They’re the ones that should be going through their things before we’re inheriting it. It’s this idea of cleaning out your things before you die. 

It’s something that I deal with a lot of my patients that I’ve treated. These older adults who will say things like, “I could get rid of these things, but I want to make sure it goes somewhere where it’s going to be appreciated. I want my daughter to inherit my wedding china but I know that right now she doesn’t want it.” And so they’re holding onto it as this responsibility for it. Our responsibility is to people, but not necessarily to things.

Is it possible to be a happy maximalist? 

Absolutely. It comes back to if it’s dysfunctional or not. If your home is filled to the brim, but you’re living a healthy, happy life in that environment, that’s absolutely okay. 

It’s all about the subjectivity of it. Just because there might be a current cultural norm for minimalism or — I know cottagecore was in for a while — these trends come and go, but think about what’s your truth of how you like your space to be. 

Are you someone who likes a completely blank wall, or do you want it to be gallery style? I think whatever somebody’s truth may be is good if you’re healthy, if you’re happy, if it’s not hurting anyone.