A new genre of video has begun appearing in my social media feeds:

“Ten years of therapy summarized in one minute.”

“Forty-five years of therapy in sixteen minutes.”

“Everything my therapist taught me, explained in sixty seconds.”

The most widely shared version in my feed features self-help author Mark Manson and podcaster Chris Williamson. Williamson reads a seven-point list attributed to Manson with advice like “take responsibility for your life” and “establish strong boundaries”. I have no quarrel with the list’s reasonably helpful principles.

But it is not ten years of therapy.

Mark Manson’s framing, when consumed in short-form video, reduces psychotherapy to advice delivery. Imagine a fitness influencer announcing, “Ten years of gym workouts summarized in one minute.” The video might say: Lift weights. Do cardio. Eat protein. Sleep well. Be consistent.

All reasonably helpful principles, but not remotely equivalent to ten years of training.

Knowing the principles of physical fitness does not produce strength, endurance, or cardiovascular capacity. Those emerge through repeated effort over time. You perform the exercises, tolerate discomfort, recover, and return.

Psychological change works in a functionally similar way.

Therapy Is Not a Transfer of Secret Information

These videos often rest on a mistaken assumption: Therapy consists primarily of a professional telling a client important things. It suggests that after years of going to therapy, the client has accumulated a collection of profound lessons. The influencer can now reveal the best ones in under a minute, saving everyone else years of time and money. That is not how effective therapy works.

Most therapists are not guarding a vault containing the secret sentences that will finally help the person understand what they are struggling. Across more than 30 years of helping people with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, and other evidence-based interventions, I have found that many clients already understand a great deal about what they are struggling with.

As an old psychodynamic supervisor of mine used to say, “Insight and a buck-and-a-quarter will get you on the subway.” That line also tells you how long ago he said it.

The difficulty is rarely an absolute shortage of information. The difficulty is learning to behave differently when fear, shame, grief, anger, craving, uncertainty, or old habits show up.

That cannot be accomplished in sixty seconds.

Insight Is Not the Same as Learning

A person may have an important realization during therapy. Sometimes a therapist offers a phrase, metaphor, or question that stays with someone for decades. But even a powerful insight is usually the beginning of the work, not its conclusion.

Consider the advice to “set boundaries.” That sounds simple until setting a boundary means disappointing your mother, confronting your employer, risking conflict with your partner, or being willing to experience that someone may think poorly of you. That requires practice.

An aphorism says, “Set a boundary.” Therapy asks: Which boundary? With whom? What do you fear will happen? How can we practice this new commitment, and what are you going to do when the first attempt doesn’t turn out as planned?

A one-minute video can tell you to set a boundary. Therapy helps you uncover what makes that difficult, practice it with feedback, and refine it until it becomes usable in your life.

To give another analogy, a cooking video can explain how to make candied bacon cashews for Thanksgiving dessert. Watching it does not mean you have developed the skill.

Manson Actually Helps Make the Point

To his credit, Manson becomes considerably more nuanced in the longer podcast conversation. He says that earlier in his career he believed personal growth was mainly about finding a few crucial pieces of information. He now thinks the principles are often already familiar and that people need consistent rituals and reminders to keep them present in daily life.

Therapy Also Happens Between People

The “therapy in one minute” format minimizes another central ingredient of treatment: the therapeutic relationship.

For many clients, therapy provides an unusual interpersonal environment. They can speak honestly, observe how they relate to another person, receive feedback, experience disagreement without abandonment, and practice behaving differently in real time.

Sometimes, more simply, they can have someone safe to cry in front of.

As I learned from Mavis Tsai and Robert Kohlenberg, the originators of Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, the relationship is not incidental packaging around therapeutic wisdom. It can be an active context in which change is noticed, shaped, and practiced.

The Problem Is Not Brevity

I am not opposed to concise psychological education. I have spent much of my career trying to explain complicated behavioral principles clearly. Sometimes I am even successful at it.

A short video can introduce a valuable idea. It can normalize an experience, teach a coping strategy, challenge a misconception, or encourage someone to seek help.

The problem is the grandiose framing.

“Here is one idea I learned in therapy” is honest.

“This concept changed how I think about anxiety” is plausible.

“Ten years of therapy in one minute” implies that treatment is mostly bloated explanation—and that years of professional work can be replaced by a clever monologue delivered over dramatic music.

It also encourages the fantasy that transformation should be immediate. When viewers understand the message but continue behaving in familiar ways, they may conclude that they are weak, resistant, or broken. They may scroll through hundreds of short-form videos, continue to suffer, and take that as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with them.

There may be nothing mysterious about it. Understanding something quickly and learning to live it are different achievements.

Therapy Should Still Be Accountable

None of this means that more therapy is always better. Treatment should have clear, values-based goals. Therapists should measure and evaluate whether their work is helping. Some clients benefit from brief interventions. Remaining in ineffective treatment for ten years is not an accomplishment.

Clinical psychology should be challenged when it becomes vague, stagnant, unnecessarily prolonged, or detached from evidence.

But the alternative to bad therapy is not pretending that psychological change can be reduced to a TikTok video.

The One-Minute Version

So here is my attempt to summarize ten years of therapy in one sentence:

We learn to notice what is genuinely present here and now, recognize that we are bigger than our thoughts, feelings, and memories, choose what matters, practice living it, and use feedback—including the therapeutic relationship—to track whether our actions are moving us toward a more vital and meaningful life.

That sentence took less than a minute to read.

Now comes the part that takes time: doing it regularly.

That is why Siri Ming and I wrote Finding Your Why and Finding Your Way as a workbook: insight becomes useful through practice, not passive consumption.

A video can offer a direction. It cannot travel the distance for you.

A reel can point toward the gym. It cannot do the repetitions.

A one-minute insight may be genuinely valuable. It still is not ten years of therapy.