Sanity Optional

In this episode, Alexis breaks down the emotions most people spend their lives trying to avoid and explains why avoiding them is exactly what keeps people stuck. She walks through the fear family, sadness, anger, shame, disgust, and more, getting into where each one comes from, what it's actually trying to tell you, and what it takes to heal it. Alexis also gets into the fears that quietly run peo...

In this episode, Alexis digs into one of the most disorienting questions you can ask yourself: who are you, actually? She breaks down the difference between identity and ego, why so many people are living out a version of themselves built around earning love or staying safe, and what it feels like when you finally stop performing and start just being. Alexis gets into the nervous system roots of p...

In this episode, Alexis gets into something she has been wanting to cover for a while: the history of mental health. And it is not a comfortable story. From spinning chairs and ice pick lobotomies to forced sterilizations funded by Rockefeller and Carnegie, she walks through how we got here and why so many people still carry a deep fear of mental institutions and psychiatric care. She also gets in...

This episode does not have a tidy theme and Alexis is the first to admit it. She starts with some genuinely good news, talks about quitting vaping through hypnosis after two years of trying everything else, and then goes somewhere bigger. She gets into why everyone has become so mean online, why we have lost the ability to have fun, and why the loneliness epidemic is not going to be solved by anyo...

Alexis has a bone to pick with ChatGPT. She works through the most googled mental health, sex, and dating questions and makes the case that most of what people are searching for has nothing to do with information; it’s about wanting to know that someone else feels the same way. She also gets into burnout culture, why community has quietly disappeared from modern life, and why the simple act of tal...

The sex episode is here, and it goes somewhere unexpected. Alexis starts with performance anxiety, orgasmic disorder, and why we are all so weird about sex in America, before pivoting into the conversation she really wanted to have. The one nobody wants to have. She gets into sexual safety, predatory behavior, how to talk to your kids about body safety, and what she learned from the years she spen...

In this episode, Alexis gets into dating habits, and she does not hold back. She starts with a quick history of how we got here, from property arrangements and goats to situationships and Instagram story surveillance, and makes the case that nobody ever actually taught us how to do any of this. From there she gets into why dating apps are burning everyone out, why meeting in person is worth bringi...

The Women's Episode is finally here. Alexis comes in with a lot of coffee and a lot to say about the generation of women she sees behind closed doors every week. Women who are running companies, raising kids, doing everything right, and still standing in the mirror telling themselves it is not enough. She gets into where that perfectionism comes from, why so many women have repressed rage they hav...

In this episode, Alexis scraps her original plan and gets into something more pressing: what actually happens when life is going great and then suddenly, for no obvious reason, it isn't. She talks about the difference between a sad wave and a real regression, why spirals happen and how to interrupt them, and why your brain is not actually trying to destroy you even when it feels like it is. She al...

The Men's Episode is finally here. Alexis has been teasing it for a while, and she does not hold back. Drawing from a decade of working with male clients, she gets into the fears and insecurities that don't get talked about enough, and why so many men are suffering in silence when they don't have to be. She covers body image, height, porn, performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, and the financi...

In this episode, Alexis tackles anxiety and makes a case that it's not the enemy most people think it is. She breaks down why anxiety is really just your body's alarm system, why ignoring it only turns up the volume, and why the brain's obsession with worst-case scenarios tends to make everything worse. She gets into why anxiety spikes at night and after drinking, why so many people confuse it wit...

In this episode, Alexis picks up where she left off on relationships, and gets a little more personal along the way. She gets into why the person who seemed totally fine in the first few months of a relationship suddenly disappears. Why calm can feel more threatening than chaos. Why the fights that never get resolved are almost never actually about what you think they're about. And why so many peo...

In this episode, Alexis gets into why so many people crave connection and then panic the moment they actually have it. She breaks down the nervous system roots of self-sabotage, why you lose interest when someone is finally kind to you, and why you keep choosing the same person with a different face. She also gets into the difference between gut instinct and anxiety, and why vulnerability is actua...

In this episode of Sanity Optional, Alexis takes an honest look at depression and the many ways it can show up in our lives. Drawing from personal experience and years of therapeutic work, she explores the different roots of depression, including burnout, trauma, nervous system patterns, and the pressure to constantly perform. Alexis breaks down the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses and ho...

In the very first episode of Sanity Optional, Alexis introduces the show and the reason it exists. She’s tired of mental health being framed like a grind, and she wants this to be a place where the taboo stuff can be said out loud without shame. Alexis shares her own story, including moving through depression, fear, and a long search for what actually helps. She talks about why “getting it” intell...