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June 7 - June 19, 2024
By focusing on faux self-care—what I call the products and solutions marketed to us as remedies—we’ve conceptualized self-care all wrong. Faux self-care is largely full of empty calories and devoid of substance. 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.
If it’s someone else’s answer, it can never be your solution.
Our culture has taken wellness and foisted it on the individual—where it can be bought, measured, and held up as personal success—instead of investing in making our social systems healthy.
In other words, applying a methodology of faux self-care is reactive, whereas practicing real self-care is proactive.
Doing more does not always lead to feeling better.
This distinction between burnout and betrayal is critical: while burnout places the blame (and thus the responsibility) on the individual and tells women they aren’t resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them. “This whole pandemic is teaching us all how to roll with the punches,” someone wrote to me on social media, “because they are forceful and frequent, and if you don’t roll with them, you get steamrolled.” When you live inside social structures that make your life harder and force you to make morally impossible decisions, it’s not for lack of trying
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It’s remarkably clear that the people who benefit off of women’s labor and self-sacrifice are usually not women.
It also found that women with higher levels of mental load express greater levels of emotional emptiness; they are more likely to look around at everything they have and think, “Is this all there is?”
From here, Mikaleh began to cultivate dialectical thinking, which means acknowledging that two opposites can be true at the same time.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Eudaimonic well-being, in contrast, focuses on deriving meaning and having our actions be congruent with our values; it is the feeling that our lives are imbued with purpose.
Other people will have their own feelings about your boundaries, but they cannot create them. A boundary is about what you need to interact in the world.
Boundaries are hard not because you can’t identify yours, but because you are worried about the backlash.
Facing guilt requires accepting the fact that we cannot control and are not responsible for the emotions of other people. To effectively say no we must learn to tolerate other people’s disappointment and trust that it is not a moral failing on our part.
Basically, the way someone else reacts to your boundaries tells us more about them than it does about you.
Dr. Neff also draws a clear distinction between self-compassion and self-esteem. While self-esteem builds up our psychological defense by cultivating a feeling of high self-regard, self-compassion is a method for developing self-clarity. For example, while “I’m the youngest attorney to make partner in my firm’s history, so I must be doing something right” might help with self-esteem, self-compassion asks us to look inward and reflect on how we treat ourselves. It looks more like: “I felt scared while going up for partner, and I took care of myself with kindness.”
What I’ve found most helpful is to take a close look at the way I talk to myself when things are going wrong. When I inevitably end up criticizing myself, I practice substituting harsh and critical language with more kind and flexible thinking. I call this setting boundaries with myself.
With every transition in life, we will have to reorient ourselves.
When we are operating in Martyr Mode, we hope to control the reactions and responses of our would-be critics.
Humans thrive on shared connection—instead of resisting and turning away supports in your life, remind yourself that the people who offer help are receiving as well.
I see this same phenomenon with my patients—women who have subtle or not-so-subtle anger lurking under the surface. Historically, our culture has not allowed women to feel their anger, and because of this, instead of turning toward their very real feelings of rage, my patients spend time asking if they are allowed to feel this way—if their feelings of anger are justified. The thing is, that’s not how feelings work. Feelings are not rational actors. They just are. It’s our job to learn how to feel them, and then we can decide if we want to take action based on them.
Overly identifying with the “shoulds” in our lives—whether that’s in regard to a kitchen remodel or to a bigger decision like career choice or whether or not to have children—always takes us away from our values.
There are pros and cons to all of these choices—but when you make a life decision that aligns with your values, with your insides, then you don’t care about what you’re missing out on. It’s only when your life is out of alignment with your values that you end up conflicted, miserable, and unable to stop yourself from binge-watching five episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Rather, gratitude is a practice to tune your attention to what you have, so that you can then go on to appreciate what future good stuff will come your way. When you’re lacking this skill, you’ll forever be focused on the bad stuff, and even when the next gift arrives at your front door, you’ll be worried that it’s in the wrong wrapping paper.
Only when you fully acknowledge the wealth you have in life can you be ready for more. And a funny thing happens when you start appreciating and digesting all the good: You stop caring as much about getting that next thing. You realize that what you have right now is just as good as what you may have in the future.
We all have these peak experiences, yet we so rarely sit down and reflect on why they felt good. By taking the time to explicitly name our values, we can use them to inform future decisions so that we are setting ourselves up for more experiences that are truly nourishing.
Researchers have found that while optimism is the sense that everything will be okay, people who are hopeful have the understanding that things may not be okay, but that they have agency to make things a little better for themselves or for others.[2]
Real self-care and saying no in the face of tremendous stakes does always come with a price, but that cost is less than what they would have paid if they had just kept going and martyred themselves.
