Why Does Self Care Feel Like a Privilege?

 

The Internet is rampant with self help gurus spouting the importance of self care rituals. It’s a fad, one that everyone is hopping on board with, but for good reason! Self indulgence is often referred to as a guilty pleasure, but why do we feel this way? Why do we as a culture, and especially as women, feel bad about treating ourselves well?

In a recent poll I conducted online, people were evenly split on the reasons that they were lacking in their self care. Guilt, financial difficulties, and time were the top reasons, followed by motivation. Messages poured in from people expressing their difficulty with feeling like they could afford to treat themselves to the things that would make them feel better. “Self Care” is such a broad category that its hard to pin point exactly what it means for each individual. Some people consider vacations, pedicures, massages, new clothes, trips to restaurants and salon visits as a necessary part of their self care regime. Others say baths and bath bombs, essential oils, meditation, walks, alone time, naps, and even masturbation as their go-to pick me ups. 

What joins all these things? Joy! All of these tasks are things that inspire joy in us, make us feel good. So what is more important? The feeling these things create in us, or the physical effect that things of these have on our bodies? My answer is both. The two are really the same thing, and science supports the mind and body connection. A simple google search populates countless articles all pointing to creating joy in the mind to lift the chronic pain in the body. So why do we, as a society, marginalize the act of “self care”?

All of this hearkens back to our cultural view of the privilege of self care. Even now, most of the women I know view having to take “mental health days” as a sign of weakness. Instead, we are go-go-go until there is no steam left, and some sort of break down occurs like illness, fights, tears, etc. This should not be the norm, and yet it is. It’s a relatively new focus among people nowadays to carve out time for finding joy within ourselves, but social media has actually helped bring attention to the movement, granted through pictures and cheesy-yet-effective cliches (“You can’t pour from an empty cup”). We’ve become such a visually driven age that seeing someone else taking time to relax and create beauty in their lives is inspiring to others.

Psychologists all say the same things.  “The truth is that if you are truly taking enough time for self-care, you may not be performing up to par in at least one of the aforementioned areas. Extracurricular activities can then produce stress and guilt over the work that you could or "should" be doing instead. This results in trainees not only feeling bad from stress, burnout and fatigue, but also feeling bad about their perceived failure at self-care,” says Jennifer Doran in an article on the American Psychological Association website titled “The Unspoken Truth About Self Care.”

Those people who are viewed as having enough time to do these activities, while having the other areas of their life remain unaffected, represent the illusion of the privilege of self care. We continue to help perpetuate this illusion by refusing to carve out time in our own lives for these things, thus keeping the myth alive to create the omnipresent guilty feelings. It is important that we as a society, and especially as women, shift our mindset to view the care of our own happiness and our bodies not as a privilege, but as a right and a duty.

How do we solve the obstacles that stand in our way?

The biggest complaint is time. Not enough time to care for ourselves the way we need to. How can we fix that? If only we could add more hours in the day. That aside, the key to this lies in shifting the mindset from privilege to duty. You NEED to do this. You NEED to create this time for yourself. How? Trim the fat. Cut out the things that can be replaced with more meaningful activities. An article I found by Daniel Dowling on the mindbodygreen website said it best, “Prioritizing self-care starts with eliminating the distractions that waste your precious time.”

 

Take an honest audit of your low value habits, ie rolling through facebook daily, watching TV, wasting time on small talk, and replace them with higher valued ones. Pick one day a week to cut out social media, and spend that time showing yourself some love! Another suggestion is to take ten minutes a day to make plans for the way you will care for yourself. Write them down, and try to see where you can shift your mindset to care for yourself a little better. Plan out a weekly walk, healthy meal, 30 mins for reading, a night to pamper yourself and put on some make up (if that’s your thing), take a bath.

 

Set goals with it, and see if you can work in some of the more indulgent feeling self care things like massages, pedicures, special trips, restaurants. How many lattes would you have to cut out a month to pay for that? Or is your latte your self care? Does it bring you life? Does it bring you joy? If the answer is yes, keep it! Many of us feel that financially we are not capable of loving ourselves up. This is a hard spot. I am still working on changing my own mindset on this. I don’t have a bathtub so all those luxurious, flower filled baths you see all over Instagram are out of the question. Instead, I focus on making my shower as relaxing as I can. I turn on music, turn up the heat, get some great smelling stuff in there to perk me up. I picture all the negative crud rinsing off my body and going down the drain. You’ve got to get creative if you, like me, are on a budget.

 

The experts suggest bringing the focus to the present moment, and overloading yourself with sensory pleasures that don’t touch your hard earned moolah. Things like the feel of a soft or weighted blanket, bare feet in the grass, or rubbing an essential oil between your palms and smelling it for a quick pick-me-up. There is a plethora of free meditation apps to try, and anything that keeps your hands busy is a great way to hit those relaxing brain waves. Try knitting, crocheting, painting, writing, coloring, sculpting, playing with kinetic sand. Singing is a huge, free way to show yourself some love. Its backed by science; proven to juice up those feel-good brain endorphins, boost your immune system, help foster correct breathing, and is a huge energy and mood lifter!

I got quite a few emails with people listing a lack of motivation as an inhibitor for their self care. Mental health still carries a stigma that makes it hard to talk about, and depression can keep people feeling like there’s no point in trying to care for themselves. I get it. The best suggestion I have for this is to implement these self care things as habits in your schedule. Brushing your teeth is self care. Taking a shower is self care. Cleaning your space, putting on make up, washing your hands- these small things can all be self care as well! Count your small victories, make routines, and most of all talk to someone! Even if its over the Internet, reach out when you feel yourself lacking in the motivation to do day to day care rituals. The more we reach out to each other, and support each other in making self care a normal, every day thing, the less it will feel like a privilege and more like breathing- a necessary aspect to living.

 

 If you are interested, here are the articles directly referenced in this post.

http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2014/04/corner.aspx

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/how-to-make-time-for-self-care-no-matter-how-busy-you-are