You're Not Doing Self-Care Wrong. You're Doing Someone Else's.
Most self-care advice fails because it's aimed at the wrong target. In my coaching work, self-care comes up more than almost any other topic, and it's rarely because someone needs a new routine. Real self-care isn't a ritual or a purchase; it's whatever specific thing makes you feel safe, grounded, and like yourself again. For most women, that's not photogenic at all: it's paying bills so your anxiety levels drop, taking a long shower with nowhere to be after, leaving your phone in another room while you eat. If the self-care advice you've tried hasn't worked, you've probably been chasing someone else's version instead of asking what actually works for you.
Self-Care Isn’t a Performance
My best friend has led wellness sessions for healthcare professionals since COVID began, and we’ve been talking since then about the insidious nature of performative wellness. And then recently it came up again at the Triangle Business Journal's Empowered Women's Forum, where a panel on workplace wellness spent a good chunk of time on self-care and how there can actually be pressure around self-care. Self-care comes up in my coaching work more than almost anything else; leaders who can’t step back have a hell of a time moving forward.
I am not above a Sephora sample haul or a spa day! But somewhere along the way, those things stopped being a nice extra and became the definition of self-care, which means if that's not what restoration looks like for you, you're either doing it wrong or you're not doing it at all.
Self-Care May Not be Instagrammable
We’re looking at it all wrong, focusing on a version with a capital S and capital C, “Self Care.” Under-eye masks. Healing crystals. Little treats. It has aesthetics and rituals and is less about what the words actually mean.
To truly care for yourself may not be photogenic at all. It’s about paying your bills to keep your anxiety levels low and the lights on. It’s about taking a long shower with nowhere to be after. It’s about leaving your phone in the living room while you eat in the kitchen. It's whatever makes you feel, even briefly, safe and grounded and like yourself again. That's the whole criteria.
What makes this version harder, and this is the part we aren’t digging into enough, if at all, is that we as women don’t spend time asking ourselves how we can make ourselves feel cared for. Because performing self-care instead of caring for yourself is actively draining, and the opposite of what you need.
Care for your unique self
So what does care for you actually look and feel like? Not in theory. Not what you think it should look like. What actually leaves you feeling more like yourself?
A lot of the women I work with can't answer that right away. Not because they're not self-aware — they are, often remarkably so — but because they've spent so long taking care of everything and everyone else that the question feels almost foreign. This is usually where I start with clients. Not with a wellness plan or a list of practices, but with that question. What actually works for you? What fills your cup versus what just looks like it should?
If you've been running on empty and wondering why the self-care advice isn't helping, it might be worth asking whether you've been chasing the capital S, capital C version of something that was always meant to be lowercase.