What is Self-care?

When I first introduce the concept of self-care to clients, they often react negatively:

“I’ll lose all motivation, I won’t bother to get out of bed”

“I won’t get through my work – I work best under pressure”

“I’ll eat whatever I want”

“I’ll never stop spending”

“If I didn’t take keep a close check on myself, I would just enjoy myself”

“I’m responsible for my actions, when I keep myself in line, what would happen if I let myself off the hook?”

“Isn’t that just selfishness?”

I explain that self-care isn’t the same as self-indulgence, allowing ourselves ‘treats’ which will have negative consequences in the long or short term. It’s not about losing self control nor taking pleasure in immediate gratification to make ourselves feel good or temporarily boost our self-esteem – so it’s not splashing the cash, feeding an addiction or giving up on responsibilities.

So what is self-care?

If we were to imagine the perfect parent, they would raise children by considering what is best for the child’s long term well-being – taking steps to ensure that the child ate healthily, exercised and accessed medical help when required, supporting the child to focus on schoolwork, social activities, interests and rest when needed. They would encourage a healthy regard for respectful boundaries with others and encourage the child to communicate in an assertive way, listening with a compassionate, caring approach when the child is distressed, even when the child has fallen short of expectations in some way.

Real parenting isn’t perfect and will never meet the ideal, which is why therapists speak about the concept of the ‘good enough’ parent.

The responsibility for the individual progressively shifts from the parent to the child over the years and eventually the young adult takes over their own care, typically modelled on the care they received in childhood. The way our parents/carers have raised us will influence our capacity to take over the responsibility of taking care of ourselves later in life. If parenting was ‘good enough’ and the parents modelled healthy self-care themselves when under pressure, self-care in adulthood may be largely built into the young adult’s life.

However, if parents have been distracted and absorbed with their own issues, self-critical or struggling to care for the family, care of the child will have been affected. The young adult may have unconsciously learnt to control themselves with self-criticism and self-denial or lack self-control and act self-indulgently. In households under pressure, the child may have grown up to put others’ needs over their own, valuing themselves insufficiently to put their needs as a priority. This can lead to the child equating the necessary tasks of maintenance of a person’s well-being with ‘selfishness’, rather than understanding their importance.

So, being self-caring is acting in such a way that values our long-term well-being. It is a little like being the ‘good enough’ parent to ourselves – taking care of our physical and emotional needs, planning for the longer-term future, taking necessary responsibilities seriously, seeking assistance from others when necessary, encouraging ourselves through life’s challenges and persisting, communicating our needs clearly and assertively, removing ourselves from damaging situations, facing problems with courage and making good decisions.

So self care is about living up to life’s essential responsibilities, but also recognising that all humans are fallible and will fail to meet the ideal standard at times. On those occasions, the self-caring approach is to acknowledge the failure in a self-compassionate way, while making efforts to recover the situation as far as possible and seeing the bigger picture of life’s successes.

Does that all sound a bit … dull? Perhaps you were hoping to book a mini-break, put off that piece of work until next week, while you watch your favourite box-set series, run a bath and light a scented candle or leave your partner to take care of the children while you head out for a night out with friends? Well, the good news is that the principle of self-care does require us to change activity, connect with others and rest at some point over the week. More fundamentally, it requires us to treat ourselves as humans, rather than as machines, to see ourselves as valuable, worthy of our own compassion and care – to be the person who has our best interests at heart. Humans require rest and sleep, as well as productive activity to bring the fullest version of selves to each day.

If you want to know more about self care and rest, the psychologist, Suzy Reading, has written a series of resources on the topics, including ‘Rest to Reset’ and ‘The little Book of Self-care.’