On self-care that isn’t actually self-care.

I want to start off by saying that I am not trying to dictate what self-care is or is not. Instead, I’d like to provide some questions to ask yourself when defining what self-care is for you.

The 5 whys are something I consistently use at work, and I’m sure I’ve annoyed others by using it. It’s an “iterative interrogative technique” to get to the root cause of the problem.

Here’s how you can apply that to evaluate a self-care activity:

• Would you lie about it to people close to you? (I’m not talking about privacy)
• Does it stop you from doing something you care about more?
• Does it take up more of your time each week than things you care about more?
• Does it still feel like self-care after it’s done?
• Are you pretending it’s self-care because you’re afraid it will define you?

Scope Creep

There’s a difference between watching two hours of Netflix vs. calling in sick to work because you watched it all night, or in having a glass of wine to yourself every night vs. a bottle of wine.

Months into a job I didn’t like, I’d come home from work, eat dinner and spend the rest of the night on the couch. When my husband would go away on business trips, I’d spend most of Saturday on the couch. Then I’d spend the whole weekend on the couch, and tell friends and family I was busy when they messaged me to come out. I might even lie when people asked me what I did on the weekend. Clearly, I needed to decompress, and I needed alone time. But my life was passing me by. I wasn’t inside reading, writing, exercising or doing anything that was feeding me in any way. I was doing nothing, and it was quietly making me, an extrovert, a constant learner and a lover of taking care of my body, significantly more stressed out.

A friend of mine recently told me she bought a 24 of beer at the end of a long week. She ended up sitting down and not getting up to do more than sleep, eat or go to the bathroom until she had drank all the beers over the weekend. I was happy she told me about it, I was probably the only person she told. I knew the feeling intimately. That act is not about relaxing, it’s not about caring for yourself — even if the intention was in the right place to begin with.

Of course, there are the obvious things in life that fit into the self-care category that are drilled into us at an early age — drink more water, exercise more, eat healthier, don’t spend money on things you don’t need. There are going to be people in our lives who exemplify those behaviours and always seem to do the “right” thing. I’m not talking about small, daily habits of self-care, I’m talking about dedicated activities and practices that take up time in your life.

Self-care Praise & Judgement

My mother used to say that I had so much “discipline” when I got in a quick workout on the weekend, or after a long day. What she saw as a discipline, I saw as self-care. Working out is a way for me to release mental energy. I only work out alone, and I make as much time for it as I can. I skip workouts while I’m on vacation, but I’ve also cancelled plans with friends to fit one in because I knew that it was the best thing for me. I used to view my mom watching TV after work as “laziness”. But she was doing the same thing that I was — decompressing from what happened at work that day by watching shows that required little brain activity.

My goal is to prioritize cognitive and physical energy above other things that I want or crave temporarily. I think this will enhance and add more colour to the experiences and relationships I want to give my time and energy to. I want those things to be easy; easier than skipping out on the book I want to read to watch something subpar on Netflix.

I also want to remove the judgement around self-care. It is a good thing, sometimes a necessary thing for those who have burned out, and it’s something that’s very appropriate for the world we live in right now. But let’s have the good sense to not use someone we follow on Instagram with a very different life from ours to model our self-care activities on.

So while I’m probably not the person who is going to exercise in the morning before work, and I’m still going to stay home on Fridays, I can be the person that makes choices that allow me to live my life the way I want to. Point being, do the thing, don’t hate yourself for doing it, but do build the consciousness to be aware of the decision you’re making.

Self-care is about agency and autonomy, and it is truly about love. If it feels bigger than you, and you’re not truly confident calling it self-care — it’s probably not self-care.