Is The “This Is My Therapy” TikTok Trend Dangerous?

If you haven’t seen one of the “my therapy” videos flooding Instagram and TikTok, let me describe one to you: a woman who looks to be in her 30s is strutting down a sidewalk. One I saw recently showed a woman strutting down a sidewalk, sunnies on, shaking her head with a mock-apologetic wince. “I can’t today, I have therapy,” reads the text overlay. Cut to the next shot: she’s in a luxury store, weighing two pairs of strappy heels before pivoting to inspect a leather handbag. “The therapy” pops up on the screen. The comments section is a sea of validation. “Love everything about your therapy,” one follower cheers. “Love this vibe,” writes another. “Best therapy,” adds a third.

This clip is just one of hundreds flooding TikTok and Instagram. The “therapy” in question varies, but it usually involves shopping, self-care or Pilates. It’s an evolution of the “girl therapy” trend from a couple of years ago. But dropping the “girl” to leave “therapy” on its own has made me… uncomfortable. As someone who’s spent a decade in clinical therapy and has such a better quality of life because of it, I worry the trend trivialises all that work — and could even be dangerous. But am I taking it too seriously? Does it, in fact, make asking for mental help less taboo? I asked two therapists — Carly Dober of Enriching Lives Psychology and Amber Rules of Rough Patch Counselling — for their takes.

Dober hopes the term is being used facetiously and notes that “therapy” carries cultural nuance. For example, in some African cultures, it involves community dancing, and in some Caribbean cultures, community art. Rules is less convinced. She says that while she respects the need to find catharsis wherever you can, she feels protective of the word “therapy”.

“Registered talk therapists – psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists — invest years of training into a practice that carries major responsibility and risk,” she says. “To conflate clinical work with exercise or consumerism is a grave disservice to how essential the process is for many.” The issue isn’t the activities themselves — it’s the false equivalence. Among the “therapies” in the trend, Dober notes that physical movement is the closest to being truly therapeutic, though the objects differ fundamentally. Exercise heals the body, while psychological therapy restructures the mind.

The core difference, she says, lies in the biology of the brain. While both shopping and therapy activate the brain’s reward pathways, the retail high is a transient spike in dopamine that offers no structural change to how we process distress. Therapy physically restructures the brain, strengthening connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (the rational part of your brain) and the amygdala (the reactive part). It effectively trains the brain for resilience in a way a reformer class can’t. 

“It’s complex, nuanced and, at times, deeply challenging,” says Rules. “Buying a new pair of shoes simply can’t do that work, however good it feels in the moment.” She adds that therapy is a relational process – the vehicle for change is the client’s relationship with the therapist, not their knowledge or advice. Which is exactly why no retail purchase or fitness class can replicate it.

Dober encourages people to think about the return on investment from 6-10 sessions with a psychologist, working on how they might be getting in their own way. “If in five years, you are free from the pain that has been making your life difficult — it’s probably one of the best investments you can ever make,” she says.

The way I see it? The “shopping as therapy” trend might be intended as a light-hearted joke, but humour is a powerful tool for normalisation — and in this case, that’s not a good thing. Labelling a retail high as “therapy” might be stripping the word of shame, but it’s also potentially taking away its significance. If we keep calling anything that makes us happy “therapy”, we might eventually forget how great — and, for many, life-changing — the real thing can be.