I I have a short period in which I can take away all my problems. The rosemary bath salts are in, a candle is lit and I hope to erase all conscious thoughts. But something isn’t right. The water is too hot and the spicy smell is sticky. And what about all the jobs left undone – the bills not paid, the trains not booked?
This probably sounds familiar. If you’ve ever stepped out of the bath or left a yoga class feeling more stressed than before, you’ll intuitively understand the concept of fake self-care. In the Goop age we live in, everything from journals to air purifiers, from crystal jewelry to “poop stools” can be used. packaged and sold in response to stress, burnout and depression, a way for women – because this is all largely aimed at women – to be the best they can be. Too often, this makes us feel worse, not better.
Amelia Nagoski, co-author of Burnout: Solve Your Stress Cycle, goes so far describe it as an anti-feminist trap. For her, the idea that women need ‘self-care’ means that they should not be entitled to care from others. Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, meanwhile, calls it a “commodified, consumer-oriented Band-Aid that we have sold to help ourselves deal with the realities of living in a society that doesn’t care about us.”
Lakshmin, who lives in Texas, says she’s seen countless patients who believe it’s their fault they feel so terrible because they’re not doing a good job of self-care — as if the more flexibly your pigeon poses, or the better your candle smells, the more you deserve to be happy. Surface-level self-care is “largely full of empty calories and devoid of substance,” she writes in Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included). “It keeps us looking outward – comparing ourselves to others or striving for a certain kind of perfection – which means it can’t really nourish us in the long run.” Take it from someone who once had a panic attack at a gong bath: all the #self-care in the world will never be enough if you don’t address the underlying issues.
“It’s not that yoga is bad, or that hot tubs are bad, but it’s how you use it,” says Lakshmin. “Are you using it to escape another problem in your life?” If it’s just another job on your already long to-do list, it’s unlikely to take the sting out of your stress.
So, how can you practice meaningful self-care? The key is to figure out what will really benefit you, and not the influencer you follow who says the smell of spring rain made him feel super soothed. According to Lakshmin, someone reading this “might say, ‘My boyfriend has been sleeping on my couch for three months and hasn’t contributed anything to the rent; I need to have a difficult conversation with him.’ Another might say, ‘I’m not okay with answering emails on the weekend and I’m going to stop doing that.’”
In other words, if you’re stressed, you need to get to the root of what’s causing that stress. With any luck, this will have a trickle-down effect. Lakshmin gives the example of one of her patients, a burned-out mother of two, who through her sessions realized “she was actually pissed because her husband never took paternity leave.” He worked in a startup and “felt it was too much of a risk.” Her version of true self-care was continuing to have hard conversations with her husband. The result: around the birth of their third child, he applied for paternity leave and it was granted.
The woman was not an activist: she just said, “I’m not trying to hate my husband and get a divorce.” But, says Lakshmin, “because she started setting boundaries and saying what she needed, it created a cascade effect” that will impact everyone who works at the same company.
“The reason we all feel terrible – because we feel terrible almost all the time – is that we live in this world that is rigged against us,” says Lakshmin. She quotes the 30 million Americans who do not have health insuranceand the 25% of the working population cannot take a sick day, as well as NHS waiting lists and the lack of access to mental health care in Britain. It feels like we’re always swimming upstream. “And when you’re told, ‘Hey, just take a bubble bath, have a glass of wine,’ it’s condescending and, quite frankly, infuriating.”
For Nagoski, a “Covid long-distance runner” who is an ambulatory wheelchair user, it is frustrating, to say the least. “Do you know how difficult it is to take a bath, for example? It’s true, I feel better after a nice long, hot bath, but I have to sleep right after because it’s so tiring.
As has been emphasized many times, well-being as we know it today is: generally, for the already disproportionately good. The people who can afford the chic candles are often the people who are best protected against the harshest parts of the world. But the version of self-care that came to prominence in the 1980s was a way to try to cope with the kind of real hardships that came with living in a world that was pitted against you because of your race, sexuality or gender .
Audre Lorde, who described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” “writes about it as a form of revolution, where self-care is a way to stand up for oneself in the face of oppression and take care of oneself. as you navigate your way through a capitalist, white supremacist, or patriarchal environment,” says psychotherapist Dr. Dwight Turner. As Lorde wrote in her 1988 book A Burst of Light, while battling cancer, “Taking care of myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
The reemergence and reclamation of radical self-care as a movement, idea, form of community care and resistance has been associated with recent tragedies such as the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Turner emphasizes “how important it was for people of color to take care of themselves as they witnessed what was happening in the US. We are witnessing trauma and for many people it became active again.”
Crucially, the earlier version of self-care was community-based. The Black Panthers, Turner says, “worked for the community: they established schools and health care and whatever, as a way for communities to take care of themselves.”
True self-care, Nagoski agrees, “always involves other people.” It’s about “connecting with other people who care about you as much as you care about them, and accepting their help and exchanging cheerleading.” It is also about “letting each other know that they do not have to conform to socially constructed ideals from outside. You are already worthy of care and support, just as you are.”
For those of us who have even once sniffed a sage stick and thought we were helping ourselves deal with mental health issues, perhaps it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with the radical roots of the self-help movement, even as we acknowledge that we having to deal with nothing resembles the struggle for which it was designed.
Lakshmin often encounters people who have the illusion that they have to do something dramatic to feel good, such as going on a silent retreat for six months or signing up for an ayahuasca weekend. “In fact, the real solution consists of hundreds of small choices over time. That’s what really works and brings you sustainable change. True wellness is usually not like dramatic fireworks; it’s usually quite mundane.”