Mercury is in retrograde again. Your phone glitched. Your ex texted. A conversation with your partner went sideways for no apparent reason. You feel foggy, anxious, and slightly off — like the world tilted two degrees and nobody else seems to notice. And somewhere in the back of your mind you are either blaming a planet or rolling your eyes at the people who do. Either way you are reading this. Which means something about Mercury retrograde resonates with you — even if you cannot explain why. This post is not here to tell you that astrology is real. It is also not here to tell you it is nonsense. It is here to ask a far more interesting question — why do millions of intelligent people feel drawn to systems like astrology, numerology, tarot, and spiritual intuition? What are these hidden languages that exist alongside traditional science? Is there anything to them? And what does it all have to do with your mental health?
What Is Mercury Retrograde — The Science
Let us start with what is actually happening in the sky. Mercury retrograde is an optical illusion. From Earth’s perspective Mercury appears to move backward in its orbit for approximately three weeks, three to four times per year. It is not actually moving backward — it just looks that way because of the relative positions of Earth and Mercury in their orbits around the sun.
Neil deGrasse Tyson — the astrophysicist who has become the unofficial spokesperson for scientific skepticism — has been characteristically blunt about this. He described the phenomenon by comparing it to a car on a racetrack that appears to reverse direction depending on where you are sitting in the stands. The car is just going around the track. Nobody would call that a car in retrograde. He has written sarcastically that when Mercury retrograde ends you will need to find something else to blame your problems on until it retrogrades again 100 days from now. His position is clear — a planet in the sky has no influence on what happens in your life.
From a pure astrophysics standpoint Tyson is correct. There is no known physical mechanism by which Mercury’s apparent retrograde motion could affect communication, technology, relationships, or emotions on Earth. The gravitational influence of Mercury on a human body is immeasurably small — less than the gravitational pull of the chair you are sitting in.
And yet.
Why Does It Seem to Fit?
Here is where the conversation gets interesting — and where dismissing Mercury retrograde entirely might be as intellectually lazy as believing in it uncritically.
Confirmation Bias Is Real — But So Is Pattern Recognition
The scientific explanation for why Mercury retrograde seems to fit is confirmation bias — you notice the things that go wrong during retrograde and ignore the things that go wrong the rest of the time. Your phone glitches every month but during retrograde you notice it and think aha. This is a well-documented cognitive phenomenon and it is certainly part of the explanation.
But humans are also extraordinarily good at pattern recognition. It is one of the defining capabilities of our species. We notice rhythms, cycles, and correlations that are not always visible in controlled laboratory settings. The question worth asking is not just are you imagining it but why do so many people across so many cultures and centuries independently arrive at similar observations about planetary cycles and human experience?
Seasonal and Cyclical Psychology
There is solid research showing that human behavior and mood are influenced by seasonal cycles — Seasonal Affective Disorder, circadian rhythm disruption, and even crime rates correlate with time of year and light exposure. The idea that humans might be subtly influenced by other natural cycles — lunar, solar, planetary — is not as absurd as pure materialist science might suggest. We just do not yet have the instruments or frameworks to measure it definitively.
The Power of Shared Belief
When millions of people believe that Mercury retrograde is a time for reflection, slowing down, and being careful with communication — and they collectively adjust their behavior accordingly — the retrograde period does become different. Not because of the planet but because of the collective intention. Shared belief creates shared reality. This is not woo — it is social psychology.
Why Did We Create Astrology in the First Place?
Astrology is one of the oldest knowledge systems in human history — predating modern science by thousands of years. The Babylonians developed systematic astrology around 2000 BCE. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, and Mesoamericans all independently developed astrological systems. For most of human history astrology was not considered separate from astronomy — they were the same discipline.
The question is not really whether astrology is scientifically valid by modern standards — it is not, and no serious astrologer would claim it is in the same way that physics is. The more interesting question is why did virtually every civilization on Earth independently develop a system for reading meaning in the stars? What human need does astrology serve?
The answer is the same need that therapy serves — the need to make sense of chaos. The need to feel that what you are experiencing is not random. The need for a language to describe inner states that are otherwise difficult to articulate. The need to believe that there is a pattern underneath the noise, even when you cannot see it clearly.
Astrology gives people a vocabulary for talking about their emotional lives. When someone says I am such a Scorpio or of course this happened — Mercury is retrograde they are using a symbolic language to process their experience. Whether Mercury actually causes anything is almost beside the point. The language itself has therapeutic value because it externalizes internal experience and creates a framework for self-reflection.
Why Do We Respect Some Belief Systems and Dismiss Others?
This is the question that sits underneath all of this and it is worth asking honestly. When someone says they believe in Mercury retrograde they are often met with eye rolls and condescension. When someone says they believe in prayer they are met with respect — or at least social tolerance. But from a purely empirical standpoint neither claim has peer-reviewed scientific evidence supporting its core mechanism. Both involve believing that an unseen force influences human experience in ways that cannot be measured in a laboratory.
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism — every major world religion asks its followers to believe in something that cannot be proven through controlled experimentation. The existence of God. The power of prayer. The soul. The afterlife. Karma. Reincarnation. These are articles of faith, not scientific conclusions. And billions of people across thousands of years have found profound meaning, comfort, and community through these beliefs.
Astrology, numerology, tarot, and other esoteric systems ask their followers to believe in something remarkably similar — that unseen patterns and forces influence human experience in ways that are felt but not easily measured. The language is different. The cultural status is different. But the fundamental psychological function is the same — meaning-making in the face of uncertainty.
This is not an argument that astrology is equivalent to religion in its depth, history, or moral framework. It is simply an observation that the human need to believe in something beyond the measurable is universal — and that dismissing one expression of that need while honoring another says more about cultural hierarchy than about truth.
What matters from a mental health perspective is not whether your belief system is scientifically valid. What matters is whether it helps you make sense of your experience, whether it connects you to something larger than yourself, and whether it supports your wellbeing rather than undermining it. If it does — whether that belief is in God, in the stars, or in the power of human connection — it has psychological value. And a good therapist will never ask you to abandon it.
The Hidden Languages — Astrology, Numerology, Tarot, and Beyond
Astrology is just one of many systems that humans have developed to navigate the invisible dimensions of experience. Numerology assigns meaning to numbers and their patterns. Tarot uses symbolic imagery to facilitate self-reflection. Tea leaf reading, palmistry, I Ching, runes — these are all ancient technologies for accessing something that traditional science does not have a good framework for measuring.
The modern scientific establishment tends to dismiss all of these as pseudoscience. And by the standards of controlled repeatable experimentation they are. But that dismissal often misses what these systems are actually doing for the people who use them — providing a structured framework for self-reflection, creating space for intuition to speak, offering comfort during uncertainty, and giving language to feelings that resist rational description.
Carl Jung — one of the most influential psychologists in history — took astrology seriously as a psychological tool. He used astrological charts in his clinical practice not because he believed planets caused personality traits but because the symbolic language of astrology provided insights into the unconscious mind that other methods missed. He coined the term synchronicity — meaningful coincidence — to describe the phenomenon of events aligning in ways that feel significant even when no causal connection can be established.
The question is not are these systems scientifically valid. The question is are they psychologically useful. And for millions of people the answer is clearly yes.
Dogs, Rainstorms, and the Things We Cannot See
A dog knows a rainstorm is coming before the first cloud appears in the sky. It senses changes in barometric pressure, electromagnetic fields, and atmospheric chemistry that are invisible to human perception. We do not call this supernatural. We call it biology.
Migrating birds navigate thousands of miles using the Earth’s magnetic field — a force that is completely invisible and that humans cannot consciously detect. Sharks sense electrical fields generated by the heartbeats of fish hidden in the sand. Plants communicate through underground fungal networks. The natural world is full of information channels that exist entirely outside human sensory awareness.
So when someone describes themselves as an empath — someone who seems to absorb the emotional energy of the people around them — or reports a strong gut feeling that turns out to be accurate, or senses that something is wrong before any evidence confirms it — is that supernatural? Or is it a natural sensitivity to information channels that most people are not attuned to?
Dr. Judith Orloff — a UCLA psychiatry faculty member — has spent her career researching empaths and intuitive sensitivity. She identifies multiple styles of empathy including intuitive empathy where a person has strong gut feelings and senses if someone is being authentic without being able to explain how, and spiritual empathy where a person connects to others through a dimension of experience that transcends rational understanding.
Psychology Today published research in 2026 identifying four distinct empathy styles — emotional, physical, intuitive, and spiritual — suggesting that the spectrum of human sensitivity extends well beyond what conventional psychology has traditionally acknowledged.
None of this means that every person who claims to be psychic actually is. But it does suggest that the human capacity for sensing information that is not accessible through the five standard senses is far more nuanced and legitimate than the skeptics might have you believe.
Creative People and Spirituality — Why Is There a Connection?
There is a well-documented relationship between creativity and spiritual or mystical experience. Research consistently shows that highly creative individuals score higher on measures of openness to experience — the personality trait most associated with spiritual seeking, mystical experience, and interest in alternative meaning-making systems.
Musicians, writers, artists, and performers are disproportionately drawn to astrology, tarot, meditation, and other spiritual practices. This is not because creative people are less intelligent or more gullible. It is because creativity requires access to the same psychological terrain that spirituality explores — the unconscious mind, symbolic thinking, pattern recognition across domains, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously.
A scientist needs things to be true or false. A creative person is comfortable in the space between — the maybe, the what if, the I do not know but I feel something. That comfort with uncertainty is what makes creative people both more open to spiritual experience and more psychologically flexible in general.
Interestingly, psychological flexibility — the ability to hold difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them — is also one of the primary goals of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and is strongly associated with positive mental health outcomes. The creative and the spiritual and the therapeutic may be drawing from the same well.
So Is There Anything to Mercury Retrograde?
Here is the most honest answer available. There is no scientific evidence that Mercury’s apparent retrograde motion directly causes anything to happen on Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson is right about that.
But there is also no scientific framework that fully explains why millions of people across thousands of years have independently described feeling different during certain planetary alignments. Confirmation bias explains some of it. Shared cultural belief explains some more. But dismissing the entire phenomenon as stupidity — which is essentially what pure materialist skepticism does — is its own form of intellectual arrogance.
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you — as Tyson himself has written. That cuts both ways. It means the universe is not obligated to conform to astrology. But it also means the universe is not obligated to conform to the assumption that everything important can be measured in a laboratory.
What we can say with confidence is this. If you feel anxious during Mercury retrograde — for any reason, planetary or otherwise — that anxiety is real. The cause may be debatable. The experience is not. And the experience is what therapy treats.
What Does Any of This Have to Do With Therapy?
Everything. Because what astrology, numerology, tarot, empathic sensitivity, and spiritual intuition all have in common is that they are attempts to make sense of inner experience. They are languages for the parts of being human that resist easy explanation — the anxiety that appears from nowhere, the grief that does not follow a timeline, the intuition that turns out to be right, the feeling that something is wrong before the evidence catches up.
Therapy does the same thing — just with different tools. A therapist helps you develop language for your inner experience. They help you identify patterns you cannot see on your own. They create a space where the parts of you that do not fit neatly into rational categories can be explored without judgment.
At Sunflower Counseling Montana we do not ask you to choose between science and spirituality. We meet you wherever you are. If astrology is part of how you make sense of your world we are curious about that. If you identify as an empath or a highly sensitive person we take that seriously. If Mercury retrograde is when your anxiety spikes we want to understand why — not dismiss it.
Because the goal of therapy is not to tell you what to believe. It is to help you understand what you are feeling, why you are feeling it, and what to do about it. Whatever language gets you there is a language worth speaking.
Do You Offer Therapy for Anxiety in Montana?
Yes. Sunflower Counseling Montana offers therapy for anxiety, existential dread, spiritual questioning, and the full range of human experience at our in-person locations in Missoula, Kalispell, and Butte, as well as online therapy for clients throughout Montana including those in Billings, Bozeman, Great Falls, Helena, and rural communities across the state.
Mercury may or may not be in retrograde. But if something feels off — if you have been anxious, foggy, emotionally reactive, or searching for meaning in places you cannot quite explain — that experience is real and it deserves attention. You do not need to know whether the stars are causing it. You just need to know that help is available.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mercury Retrograde, Astrology, and Mental Health
Q: Is Mercury retrograde real?
A: Mercury retrograde is a real astronomical phenomenon — Mercury appears to move backward from Earth’s perspective. However there is no scientific evidence that this planetary motion directly causes events, emotions, or disruptions on Earth. The psychological experience of feeling different during retrograde is real for many people and may be influenced by confirmation bias, shared cultural belief, and seasonal patterns.
Q: Can Mercury retrograde affect your mental health?
A: While there is no scientific mechanism linking Mercury’s motion to human emotions, many people report heightened anxiety, communication difficulties, and emotional sensitivity during retrograde periods. Whether the cause is planetary or psychological, the experience is real and can be addressed through therapy.
Q: What would Neil deGrasse Tyson say about Mercury retrograde?
A: Tyson has been consistently skeptical, describing Mercury retrograde as an optical illusion with no influence on human affairs. He compared it to a car on a racetrack that appears to reverse direction depending on your vantage point and has written that when retrograde ends you will need to find something else to blame your problems on.
Q: Is astrology scientifically valid?
A: Astrology is not scientifically valid by the standards of modern controlled experimentation. However it has been used as a psychological and symbolic tool for thousands of years across virtually every civilization. Carl Jung used astrological charts in his clinical practice as a tool for accessing the unconscious mind.
Q: What is an empath?
A: An empath is someone who experiences heightened sensitivity to the emotions and energy of others. Psychology Today identifies four styles of empathy including intuitive empathy and spiritual empathy. While the concept is debated in mainstream psychology, research into highly sensitive people and emotional intelligence supports the idea that some individuals process emotional information more intensely than others.
Q: Is there a connection between creativity and spirituality?
A: Yes. Research consistently shows that highly creative individuals score higher on openness to experience — the personality trait most associated with spiritual seeking and interest in alternative meaning-making systems. Creative people are comfortable with ambiguity and symbolic thinking which naturally draws them toward spiritual exploration.
Q: Can therapy help if I am spiritual or interested in astrology?
A: Absolutely. Therapy does not require you to choose between science and spirituality. A good therapist meets you wherever you are and is curious about all the ways you make sense of your experience — including spiritual and intuitive frameworks.
Q: Do you offer anxiety therapy in Montana?
A: Yes. Sunflower Counseling Montana offers therapy for anxiety and the full range of human experience at our locations in Missoula, Kalispell, and Butte, as well as online therapy throughout Montana.
Call or text Sunflower Counseling Montana today to get started: (406) 214-3810 or email hello@sunflowercounseling.com.
Serving clients in person in Missoula, Kalispell, and Butte — and online throughout Montana.
About the Author: Kerry Heffelfinger is the founder and CEO of Sunflower Counseling Montana, a multi-location therapy practice offering in-person counseling in Missoula, Kalispell, and Butte, and online therapy throughout Montana.