I have a brief window in which to soak all my troubles away. The rosemary bath salts are in, a candle has been lit and I am hoping to blot out all conscious thought. But something isn’t right. The water is too hot, the herby scent cloying. And what about all the jobs left undone – the bills not paid, the trains not booked?
This probably sounds familiar. If you have ever got out of a bath or left a yoga class more stressed than you were beforehand, you will intuitively understand the concept of faux self-care. In the Goop era in which we live, everything from journals to air purifiers, crystal jewellery to “poop stools” can be packaged up and sold as the answer to stress, burnout and depression, a way for women – because all this is by and large targeted at women – to become their best selves. But, all too often, this is making us feel worse, not better.
Amelia Nagoski, the co-author of Burnout: Solve Your Stress Cycle, goes so far as to describe it as an anti-feminist trap. For her, the idea that women need “self” care implies that they shouldn’t feel entitled to care from others. The psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, meanwhile, calls it a “commodified, consumer-oriented band-aid that we’ve been sold to help ourselves cope with the reality of living in a society that doesn’t care for us”.
Lakshmin, who is based in Texas, says she has seen countless patients who believe it’s their fault that they feel so terrible because they’re not doing self-care right – as if the bendier your pigeon pose, or the better-smelling your candle, 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 with others or striving for a certain type of perfection – which means it’s incapable of truly nourishing us in the long run.” Take it from someone who once had a panic attack at a gong bath, all the #selfcare in the world will never be enough if you don’t address the underlying stuff.
“It’s not that yoga’s bad, or that bubble baths are bad, but it’s how are you using it,” says Lakshmin. “Are you using it to escape another problem in your life?” If it is just another job on your already long to-do list, it is unlikely to take the sting out of your stress.
So, how can you practise meaningful self-care? The key is figuring out what will genuinely benefit you, not the influencer you follow who says they felt super-calmed by the smell of spring rain. According to Lakshmin, one person reading this “might say: ‘My boyfriend’s been sleeping on my couch for three months and hasn’t contributed to the rent; I need to have a hard conversation with him.’ Another might say: ‘I’m not OK with answering emails on a 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 is causing that stress. With a bit of luck, this will have a trickle-down effect. Lakshmin gives the example of one of her patients, a burned-out mother of two who realised through her sessions “that she was just actually piss-angry that her husband had never taken paternity leave”. He worked in a startup and “felt it was too much of a risk”. Her version of real self-care was staying in hard conversations with her husband. The result: around the birth of their third child he did ask for paternity leave and it was granted.
The woman wasn’t an activist: she was just saying, “I’m trying not to hate my husband and get divorced.” But, says Lakshmin, “because she started setting boundaries and saying what she needed, there was this cascade effect” that will go on to affect everyone who works at the same company.
“The reason we all feel terrible – because we do all feel terrible almost all of the time – is that we live in this world that’s stacked against us,” says Lakshmin. She cites the 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance, and the 25% of the workforce who aren’t able to take a sick day, as well as NHS waiting lists and the lack of access to mental health care in the UK. It feels like we are always swimming upstream. “And when you’re told, ‘Hey, just take a bubble bath, have a glass of wine,’ it’s condescending it’s frankly infuriating.”
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For Nagoski, a “Covid long-hauler” who is an ambulatory wheelchair user, it is frustrating, to put it mildly. “Do you know how hard it is to take a bath, for example? It’s true, I do feel better after a nice long hot bath but I have to sleep immediately after because it’s so exhausting.”
As has been pointed out many times, wellness as we know it today is, by and large, for the already disproportionately well. The people able to afford the posh candles are often the people best cushioned from the world’s harshest edges. But the version of self-care that came to the fore in the 1980s was a way to try to cope with the kind of genuine hardship that came with living in a world that was stacked 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, self-care being a way of standing up for oneself in the face of oppression and looking after oneself whilst working one’s way through a capitalist or white supremacist or patriarchal environment,” says psychotherapist Dr Dwight Turner. As Lorde famously wrote in her 1988 book A Burst of Light, while battling cancer: “Caring for 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, an idea, a form of community care and resistance has been linked to recent tragedies such as the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Turner stresses “how important it was for people of colour to look after themselves while witnessing what was going on in the US. We’re witnessing trauma and it was reactivating for lots of people.”
Crucially, the earlier version of self-care was community-oriented. The Black Panthers, says Turner, “worked for the community: they set up schools and healthcare and whatever else as a way of communities looking after themselves”.
Real self-care, Nagoski agrees, “is always going to involve other people”. It is 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 don’t have to conform to the outside socially constructed ideals. You are already worthy of care and support just as you are.”
For those of us who took one sniff of a sage stick and thought we were helping ourselves cope with mental health problems, perhaps it is time to reacquaint ourselves with the radical roots of the self-help movement, even if we acknowledge that we are facing nothing like the struggles for which it was designed.
Lakshmin often comes across people who are under the illusion that they need to do something dramatic to feel well, such as go on a silent retreat for six months or sign up for a weekend of ayahuasca. “Actually, the real solution is hundreds of small choices over time. That’s the thing that actually works and gets you to sustainable change. Real wellness isn’t usually some big dramatic fireworks type of thing – it’s usually pretty mundane.”
