Take a bubble bath! Get a massage or a pedicure! Go for a walk and take deep breaths!
I used to be dogmatic about encouraging clients to practice self-care. “What are you doing for self-care?” I would ask.
I did public lectures about self-care, and the one I did at the Downtown LA library was so successful and compelling that I was invited to do a related talk for the next meeting of the local librarians’ guild. The most-viewed article on my blog is “100 Strategies to Help You Practice Self-Care”. Also popular, from late March 2020: “50 Coronavirus Self-Care Tips”.
Now, when I use the phrase “self-care,” I do it a bit subversively. The front page of my website says that “cussing is a form of self-care.” Occasionally, I’ll tell a client, “self-care isn’t just long walks on the beach; it can also be making a to do list, or screaming into the abyss.”
Because after two and a half years of being a therapist in a pandemic (not to mention pandemic parenting), it’s become abundantly clear that the traditional definitions of self-care are insufficient. Worse, they can actively cause harm and make people feel worse.
Here are some of the reasons I’ve stopped telling people to practice self-care, at least in traditional ways:
Self-care doctrine is victim-blaming
Here’s a classic example: A corporate workplace requires that its employees be, essentially, on-call all the time. The company pays their staff generously, and in return, expects that their people will work late evenings, weekends, and – often – while on “vacation”. Someone in a position of power gets wind that the company has a high rate of burnout. As a result, there’s higher turnover than ideal, and it costs the company money.
So the company asks someone from HR to enact mental health initiatives. Suddenly, there are lots of little office perks: kombucha on tap, a company-paid membership to the Headspace meditation app, yoga classes every Wednesday morning, and scheduled email reminders at the beginning of every week, reminding all employees to take time for self-care. (I’ve started calling these kinds of perks “waffle parties” in a nod to the excellent satire of these kinds of incentives from the Apple TV show Severance.)
Employees are still struggling, but now they feel like it’s their fault. “Look at everything our company does for us, they must really care! I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I still feel terrible!”
When someone is overwhelmed and we say “what are you doing for self-care?” it disregards the systemic problems that created the burnout in the first place. It lets the powerful people in charge of those systems off the hook, and puts the onus on the individual to manage the hardships of being in a broken system.
The workplace example is a really tangible, concrete one, but the same kind of burnout can happen just from being an empathic person living in a difficult world. This can happen when you’re at your wit’s end because you feel unsafe in a pandemic that the world is now ignoring, or another police officer was acquitted after shooting an unarmed Black man, or queer rights and abortion rights are under fire. And I’m very glad that I’m no longer the therapist who says, “ah, but how are you practicing self-care during this difficult time?”
Labeling something as self-care shuts down curiosity about its actual function
That being said, it is important to tend to yourself when you’re a member of an unjust system. The problem isn’t the idea that there are things you can do to feel better, it’s the phrase “self-care”. Sometimes, labels can serve as thought stoppers that shut down curiosity, and this is one of those labels.
How can drinking a bottle of wine, going for a run, writing in a journal, having lunch with a friend, flossing, using an adult coloring book, limiting your news intake, setting boundaries with your mom, eating more vegetables, eating more ice cream, and hiring someone to clean your home all be the same thing?
They aren’t.
And the thing is, harkening back to those lists of ways to practice self-care, I actually stand by all of those suggestions. Most of them are great things to do. Personally, I happen to love bubble baths and massages, and I know that my life is better when I set needed boundaries and floss regularly.
The problem isn’t the specific actions. The problem is the way we’re labeling them. This thing you’re doing… is it relaxing? A creative outlet? A way to numb out that could harm you in the long-run? A thing that helps your body feel better? A basic thing that you should be entitled to without having to label it as a special privilege (like a real lunch break at work)?
So, to be clear, I still want my clients to take proactive steps to care for themselves. And that may even sometimes look like things traditionally labeled as self-care. But instead of “how are you practicing self-care,” here are some of the things I ask:
- Where are you finding joy?
- Do you feel like you’re getting enough rest?
- Do you take space to recharge your battery, especially if you’re an introvert?
- What energizes you?
- How’s your social life these days?
- You’re taking care of so many people; who’s taking care of you?
- While you’re sitting in ambiguity, are you doing anything to occupy your brain with something else?
- Are you numbing your feelings or letting yourself feel them?
These things may seem like they’re all variations on a suggestion to practice self-care. If that’s what you’re thinking, you wouldn’t be the first person to accuse me of getting caught up in semantics. But unlike a suggestion to practice self-care, these are targeted, specific questions intended to invite deeper inquiry into an unmet need.
Self-care doesn’t get at the core project of constructing a meaningful life.
If you have a headache, you can take a painkiller and (hopefully) the intensity of the headache will decrease. If the headache is a symptom of a deeper medical problem, the medical problem isn’t fixed, it just doesn’t hurt as much.
Often, this is how self-care is used. “Everything is terrible and overwhelming, so how can I feel a bit better? Ah, I know, an hour at the nail salon.”
But I don’t want my clients (or my friends and family, or myself) to feel a bit better in an otherwise awful life. I want them to build a life they don’t need to escape from.
I want to help clients construct what psychologist Marsha Linehan calls “a life worth living”. This is much harder work. It can mean shifting relationships, changing jobs or careers, changing your narratives and attitudes about things, questioning things you take for granted. This shit is hard work.
And gah, it’s so tempting to just be like “have you considered doing yoga as the sun sets?” It is so much easier to do yoga as the sun sets than it is to reexamine the pillars of your life, and risk shuffling things in truly huge ways. But it’s escapist, not lasting.
The things we call self-care are often integrated into a full, thrilling life. You might feel strong when you do yoga, and relaxed when you take a bubble bath. (I do both of those things, and they do feel great!) But the fundamental shift here isn’t to sprinkle a few restorative moments into an untenable life; it’s examining what is and isn’t working in that life.
Reach Out
If you’ve been practicing self-care for a long time, and want support in finding a more sustainable way to manage feelings of overwhelm and burnout, I’d love to help. Reach out to schedule a free phone consultation!