What is Self Care?
This is the second installment in the Body Peace Series. For more on how I define body peace, click here.
Today, I want to talk about self care. That’s right, I’m going to explore some thoughts I have related to one of the -- in my opinion -- cringiest subjects out there. If you’re anything like me, as soon as someone even starts to say “self ca--” you’re rolling your eyes so far back you start to wonder if your mom was right in warning you they might get stuck like that one day.
Honestly, if people keep saying this like it’s a trendy hashtag, my eyes very well might just say rolled back forever.
All jokes aside, self care is an extremely important concept that I think we’ve overused so much that we’ve lost sight of what it’s actually all about. Think about it: what comes to mind when you think about “self care”? Is it #selfcare? Is it the image of Issa and Molly on Insecure doing Self Care Sunday complete with yoga and weed? Is it images of face masks, bath bombs, and scented candles? Is it treating yourself to a decadent dessert once a month as a break from a strict diet? I could go on and on, but I don’t have to because all you really have to do is search the hashtag #selfcare on Instagram to see what I mean.
We’ve gotten to this place where we equate self care not only with a certain small niche of activities and routines, while forgetting that how we practice self care is directly tied to how we value ourselves. As a result, it’s become a not-so-subtle way to give ourselves a definitive list of what we do and don’t deserve, with the latter list becoming longer and longer than the former.
“Well what’s so wrong with knowing what you deserve and what you don’t?” In essence, it’s actually a really good skill to be able to discern your standards and act on them at any given moment, but that’s not really what I see happening here. What’s often happening instead is that we tell ourselves “I’m going to [insert self care act here] because I deserve it for doing [insert unpleasant thing here].” We create this cause and effect narrative around self care that trains us to only think we deserve being nice to ourselves when we’ve done something we didn’t really want to do.
This is inherently not self care. If self care is a reward rather than a given in your life, it’s important that you ask yourself why that is. Are you taking on responsibilities that feel at odds with your values? Are you forcing yourself to do things that don’t feel good to you to gain recognition or acceptance? Is most of your day to day taken up by things you wish you could fast forward through?
Rewarding yourself with a 20 minute face mask for living a life you’re unhappy with is hardly self care.
Tackling the elements of your life that make you unhappy and working your way to living a life that you are proud to wake up to every day, to me, is self care.
While I don’t mean this to say that self care is going to address and cure nuanced situations like mental illness or others that require professional treatment, what I am saying is that self care is about living in alignment with yourself.
This means that you get to decide what constitutes self care in your life. This means that your self care doesn’t have to follow anyone’s rules of what is best or healthiest or most effective, because recognizing and upholding your own preferences and experience is the first and most important act of self care. When you get real with yourself about what self care means for you specifically, you might find that you actually don’t get anything meaningful from drinking tea, or taking long baths, or investing in skincare. Or, you might find that these things keep you feeling nourished mentally and physically. Whatever it is you discover, learning what it is that you want, need, and enjoy is a crucial step to true self care.
A good place to start with this process is with the basics. If we simply break down the phrase “self care” and define it, it literally means caring for yourself. Caring for yourself, just like caring for anyone else, starts at the very base of how you curate the life you live. It’s everything from the environment you live in to the friends you spend time with to the media you consume. When you take your true values and preferences into consideration, do these basic needs line up with what you think is most important or what works best for you?
This isn’t about “deserving” or “earning” the things that you consider to be nice, comfortable, and safe for you -- it’s about knowing you are worthy of a life full of those things without having to even get out of bed in the morning. There is nothing that you can do in life to “earn” basic comfort and security because you are entitled to those things already by simply existing.
Similar to my ideas on body peace, I think that self care is neutral because it is inherently part of how we exist as humans. While face masks, bath bombs, and treating ourselves to tasty treats can all be part of how we care for ourselves, we can push past the aesthetic Instagram boundaries of #selfcare to understand the holistic nature of true self care.
When we uphold a narrow view of what it means to care for ourselves we compartmentalize it into something that is separate from our everyday lives. In truth, self care belongs in every moment of every day, woven into the decisions we make and the words we speak (and write). Self care is integral to our inner peace because when we prioritize our own values, preferences, and goals, we live in alignment with ourselves instead of at odds with ourselves. When we’re in alignment with ourselves, we no longer need the little treats and rewards to keep going because we’re genuinely motivated to be alive, and we can instead enjoy those things as the cherry on top of an already full and abundant life.
I chose to include this post in the Body Peace Series because I believe true self care begins with addressing the most basic human needs we have which originate in our bodies. Put plainly, the best foundation for self care is eating when you’re hungry and sleeping when you’re tired -- it’s trusting the physical signals your body gives you and learning to respond appropriately and adequately. It’s about putting those basic human body signals above anything else because you recognize how integral your body is to your existence.
For me, the logical next step after defining body peace was to define how to take care of this body (and therefore myself) that affords me all the human experiences under the sun. In my experience, body peace and self care flow into one another in an infinity loop. One always leads back to the other and vice versa, and as I am learning to truly care for myself I am also coming to be truly at peace with my body. Besides, it’s much easier to be at peace with a body that is well taken care of and knows it will always get what it needs.
How do you take care of yourself? Do you find it difficult to know where to start? Let’s chat in the comments below.