Intro to Self-Care

It’s the hot button issue that’s sweeping the internet: Self-Care! Buy this book and you too can learn Self-Care! Read this list of 45 easy steps to achieving Self-Care! #TREATYOSELF! There’s a lot of literature out there on how to care for yourself, but not a lot on why it’s important (or not?). Therefore here’s my intro to self-care, and why it has become an issue in my humble opinion.

What is Self-Care?

Ok, so, first off we need to establish what self-care is. At the core of it, it’s literally everything you need to do to take care of yourself to stay alive. It’s also, crucially, what you need to do to stay mentally alive (am I hearing THOUGHTS??). This article does the best job that I’ve found of explaining the different facets of self-care, so I’ll let that do it for me.

Why is Self-Care?

Why does self-care suddenly seem to be such a big deal now? Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years, modern humans have been trucking along for tens of thousands of years, so why should we care so much now? (Prepare to clutch your pearls, anthropologists, there’s some potential pseudoscience incoming.)

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but modern life is stressful. Of course our ancestors had it pretty rough running from lions and having to track down their next meal for days, but those were problems that we’re relatively well equipped to deal with. We’re good at covering large distances, we’re great at using our hands, we’re exceptional at communicating, we kind of suck at dealing with existential fears. As a society, we have moved past the hunter-gatherer stage and zipped right into a world dominated by incredibly fast-paced technology, while our brains are still reacting to office job stresses like they’re a pack of cave lions.

This of course sets off a chain reaction of chemical responses, the good old fight-or-flight as we like to call it. This was intended to help us fight off another angry human or run away from an exciting nest of cobras. It was not intended to help us deal with the long term issues that we face now: worrying about making rent, wondering if we’ll ever succeed at our professions, climate change, whatever your particular brand of stressor is. Therefore we need to find some way of calming that constant influx of stress-reaction-inducing stimuli. Enter self-care.

How Do We Self-Care?

First, some depressing news: self-care is about reducing stress of various kinds, not all of which are under our individual control. These are stresses like lack of access to healthcare, lack of a social safety net, inadequate access to healthy food, worries about the stock market, concern about Mother Earth getting tired of our shenanigans and yeeting us off (I unironically love this term, FIGHT ME)… and so on. You know, existential stresses. Some societies do a better job than others at mitigating some of these concerns. An American has a far smaller social safety net than, say, a Dane. There is stress that is under your control, though, and this is easier to address. You can also address your stress responses.

This is only an intro to self-care, so I’m not going to get into any nitty gritties just yet. But I want to get you started thinking on self-care. It is essentially individual, so you have to find what works for you. The end goal, though, is to reduce your stress. Why does this matter? Because stress can make you sick, reducing your quality of life significantly. It can also make you angry, and then you might end up as a bitter old person who’s really just scared of everything.

Intro to Self-Care

There are plenty of articles out there that will tell you how to self-care (I wasn’t joking about the 45 Easy Steps), and to be fair these can be a good starting point if you’re starting from scratch. You can absolutely do self-care wrong: it’s not all about indulging yourself, and it never comes at the cost of anyone else. It’s about taking care of your body and mind in a deliberate way.

Start by identifying the things that make you most stressed. Then think about things that make you feel good. In some ways this is like banishing a boggart: how can you make those big stresses less stressful?

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More on this anon. I have more thoughts, but they’re not congealing today. You can sign up for email updates if you don’t want to miss out on what’s to come, or check out some past thoughts! In the meantime, I will provide a spot for you to sit while you think about your version of self-care.