It’s Just Nature: How I Stopped Raging at CVS (And You Can Too)

One essay on remixing mindfulness to deal with pharmacy frustration, two new articles on mental health, and three books you’ll want to read.

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I like to think that I’ve become pretty even-keeled in middle age. But one thing consistently drives me to frustration: Trying to navigate our healthcare system.

There are good reasons for this emotional response. To start, I’m never feeling physically amazing when I seek medical care. Pain, fatigue, injury, and illness don’t bring out my best. And, if I were going to create a formula for my bugaboos, it might be: 

1 part human-created + 

1 part unfair + 

1 part uncontrollable + 

1 part threat to something I deeply value (like my health)

= 4 parts “Gahh!”

While this exactly corresponds to what it’s like to have a medical encounter these days, I don’t love feeling “Gahh!,” so I wondered whether I could tweak the formula to get a different result.

When I looked at the components, I could see right away that the last three elements were not really in contention. I don’t want to stop caring about my health. I can’t personally control the healthcare system. I don’t need to tell myself that it’s fair for anyone (including myself) to have difficulty accessing healthcare. No thanks.

But the first, “human-created,” was ripe for a reframe. When I believe something is a problem because other people are choosing to make it so, I feel enraged. Yet when I see something as “just nature” (as in, that’s just the way things are or it’s expected), I don’t fight it so much, even if I still have negative feelings about it. 

The opportunity for a reframe isn’t about denial; it’s grounded in reality. After all, humans are part of nature, so it can be intellectually honest to take an astronaut’s-eye view and see human behavior as yet another natural phenomenon unfolding on our blue planet, rather than treating it as something separate from the natural world.

The refrain “it’s just nature” echoes wisdom I’ve heard from Dharma teachers over the years, who themselves join a 2,500-year-long line of wisdom-keepers who endlessly remix the Four Noble Truths and other Buddhist teachings. I like to think about that long transmission of wisdom because it normalizes my experience. That we humans have needed this guidance for millennia helps me remember that I’m not broken for needing it, too. 

And heeding that wisdom has helped me before. Take COVID-19, for instance. I didn’t feel mad that the virus existed. Viruses evolve. Unfortunately, they make people sick. It makes me sad, but that’s just the nature of viruses. However, I had plenty of anger in those early days for individual people’s responses to COVID-19, for what I perceived as their unwillingness to bear a little discomfort (by masking, by staying home) to help keep others safe. When I thought about the virus, I felt acceptance and grief. When I thought about individuals, I felt anger. 

But when I zoomed out and thought about human behavior as a part of nature, my anger lessened. People are social creatures. People have a notoriously hard time making long-term trade-offs. People tend to see themselves as exceptional. On some level, although disappointing and grief-inducing, the collective human behavior we saw in the U.S. during the early months of the pandemic was just nature taking its course. I didn’t have to like it, but I also didn’t need to hold on to rage over it.

Inspired by this successful perspective shift, I wondered if I could reframe my current bureaucratic healthcare headaches as just the nature of the contemporary medical system. I wondered if a little mindfulness on the go would help. 

That’s not to say that the system shouldn’t change, by the way. I ardently believe we need healthcare reform. But right now, in this moment, red tape, long waits, and unhelpful encounters are just the way things are. Anger is a useful feeling when you’re ready to take action to correct an injustice, but when it doesn’t have a helpful outlet, it just hurts (If you want to learn more about the emotion, I wrote all about anger for Everyday Health). 

I decided to try out this reframe during a recent trip to CVS to fill a prescription. It felt like a good starting point, since while I needed the prescription, it wasn’t life and death (in situations like that, anger can be a very useful catalyst for change!). 

Going to the pharmacy to pick up this particular prescription is always a pain, and this time was no exception. Although it had been filled, actually getting the prescription from the pharmacist’s shelf to my hands took an entire hour, punctuated by phone calls with my insurance company, a medical device company, and my prescriber. 

Normally, I’d start out the errand with intentions to stay calm. And that would work. For about 15 minutes. But by the second or third circular phone call, I would start to feel ragey. My limbs would tense. My jaw would clench. My breathing would get shallow. And I would spend the next three quarters of an hour using all my self-control not to snap.

So this time, I walked in with the intention to view the experience as “just nature.” When I felt a flare of tension around the 15-minute mark, I took a breath. A deep one. I felt the air travel into my nostrils and followed it down deep to the bottom of my lungs and all the way back up again to rejoin the outside world. 

“It’s just nature,” I told myself as the pharmacy tech made the first call needed to release my prescription. 

When she made another, because the first people said nothing could be done, I reminded myself: “This is how it is. And this is how it feels.” It feels like my toes in my shoes. It feels like my finger pads touching each other. It feels like the dizzying sensation of fluorescent lights.

This is what it’s like to wait. This is what it’s like to have them need to make a third call where they declare that, actually, we need to talk to the first person again. This is what it’s like to not be able to do anything about any of it. 

The hour passed unpleasantly. But, as I walked out the automatic doors into the parking lot, white bag crinkling in my hands, it felt like I had triumphed over something. I didn’t feel wrung out or like I’d barely contained a surging internal storm. I felt filled with compassion and acceptance. This time, I had overcome my own emotional reactivity. 

To be clear, accepting reality doesn’t mean cosigning it. I still believe our healthcare system is failing too many of us. That hasn’t changed. 

Accepting reality just means coming to terms with what it’s actually like to be one woman standing at a pharmacy counter in America in 2025. 

It’s feeling your feet. It’s feeling disempowered. 

But it’s also honoring what you can control, even when it’s not everything you want to. I can control how I breathe and how I speak to the pharmacy tech who’s just trying to do their job within an impossible system. I can even feel good about those things, because they advance what I value, sending out peace and respect like gentle ripples in a roiling sea. 

Since my CVS pharmacy experiment, I’ve used the “It’s just nature” reframe to get me through other frustrating medical encounters. And you know what? It really does help.

Even while engaging with a frustrating, dehumanizing system, I can be someone I’m proud of: even-keeled and values-aligned. That’s nature, too.

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My Latest Writing & Editing

• Are GLP-1s safe when you have a mental health diagnosis? GLP-1s have been around for about 20 years, but research on how they affect people with mental health conditions is still limited. For bpHope, I covered what we know — and what we don’t — about how these medications could impact your body and mind if you live with bipolar disorder: GLP-1s and Bipolar Disorder: What We Know — and What We Don’t.
• How can you talk to your children about your mental health while protecting theirs? My research-focused column for bpHope is still going strong! One of the things I love about going deep on one topic is how it ends up teaching you about other areas, too. That’s definitely the case for me and this column. For example, one of the studies I can’t stop thinking about from June’s edition (Bipolar Research & Insights: Personality, Parenting, Pain, and More | June 2025) is how best to talk to kids about their parent’s bipolar diagnosis. Sounds pretty specific, right? On the one hand, it is, but it’s broader than it first appears. The tips are just smart ways to talk to kids about anything that may shake a their sense of safety (for more ideas about how to talk to your kids about hard things, check out my free e-book).

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Book Recommendations

Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don’t Manage You, by Ethan Kross, PhD

I like the way Ethan Kross thinks about emotion (which is part of why I was thrilled when he agreed to speak with me for two articles for Everyday Health: All About Sadness: What Causes It, How to Cope With It, and When to Get Help and ​​How Not To Be Sad: 9 Tips for Managing The Emotion). 

Dr. Kross is the director of the Emotions & Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The premise of this book is that there are science-backed tools you can use to “shift” your emotions. Some align with conventional wisdom (changing your perspective or environment helps overwhelming emotions feel less so), and some don’t (distracting yourself can be healthy, actually!).

What sets this book apart is the tone. It can be hard to write about research while also being warm and nonjudgmental, but Kross nails it. He makes it clear he’s coming from a place of shared struggle and takes pains to emphasize that there’s no single correct way to manage your feelings. If you’re allergic to dogma in the mental health or personal development spaces, but still hungry for good information about how to be human, I think you’ll like this book.

Bookshop | Amazon

Orbial: A Novel, by Samantha Harvey

I’ve been craving fiction that can nestle right into my bedtime routine. The ideal pre-sleep book is beautifully crafted, comfy to read for longer or shorter stretches according to my fatigue level, without a stressful plot that could haunt my dreams, and ideally features a little philosophical bent. Orbital, the Booker Prize-winning novel about six astronauts on the International Space Station fits the bill. The title comes from the path ISS takes, which circles the Earth 16 times a day, and also informs the structure of the book. Like all my favorite fiction, this novel made me think about the human experience generally and specifically, and I learned a lot from the author’s careful research (in this case, about space exploration).

Bookshop | Amazon

Chorus: A Novel, by Rebecca Kauffman

Sometimes you have to travel far from home to discover what’s right around the corner. A former Good Housekeeping book club pick, Kauffman’s novel isn’t exactly under the radar in the United States. But when I picked it up as one of the only English-language novels in a small bookstore in Lisbon, Livraria da Travessa, it was new to me. The first pages sunk their claws in me, so I took it home. The book tells the story of the seven Shaw siblings, who we hear from in alternating perspectives in alternating years (ranging from the 1920s to 1960s). The result is, yes, a chorus of voices that together forms a true-feeling impression of this complicated, ultimately loving family.

(It’s a great read, but I did have one bone to pick: Fellow psychology nerds, see if you can find the anachronistic reference to a mental health credential!)

Bookshop | Amazon

Browse more books on my Bookshop | Read more reviews on my Goodreads

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