At this point in the post-pandemic era, we have probably all heard a lot about “self-care”. Whether it’s your company or supervisor telling you how important self-care is to combat burnout or your friends posting about their latest manicures or shopping splurges with the caption: “doing some self-care,” we have all heard about it. 

As the name implies, self-care includes the things you do to take care of yourself or activities/practices you engage in that provide joy and relaxation and bring a sense of fulfillment to body, mind, or spirit. It gets used a lot and you can almost label anything as “self-care”. We keep repeating this word over and over again, prescribing it as a remedy for burnout or stress and yet for a lot of us, it has lost its impact whenever we hear it. Do we ever interrogate whether the activities we choose for self-care are really helping us to feel more relaxed, joyful, and connected to ourselves?

Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of self-care and I believe that this shift of focus on taking care of ourselves is extremely valid and important to our overall well-being. I just think there is a more helpful approach to this purpose that requires us to look at self-care differently.

And it starts with a simple language shift. Instead of doing self-care … engage in the practice of caring for yourself. Read that again, CARING FOR YOURSELF. What do I mean by that?

Well ask yourself, what does it look like for me to care for myself and take care of myself?

You might notice that it could be challenging to answer that question. I get it! There is no right/wrong answer to this, there is only your answer! What might look like caring for yourself for one person might look different for another person. Here is one example, (not meant to be the standard way of doing this), but one way to guide an understanding to this practice.

Imagine you are stressed and overwhelmed at work. Things are getting done but only because you keep “sucking it up”, pushing through and maybe even staying after hours to get it done. But you are exhausted. Now you might think “well I definitely need to do some self-care” and decide to book a massage for the weekend and go out with some friends. But you are back to the grind Monday morning and once again feeling the stress and overwhelm of your position. This time, you ask yourself a different question: “I’m really overwhelmed right now, what would it look like for me to take care of myself and care about myself at this moment?”

If no answers come to mind immediately, you might try to visualize a child (yes a child) going through the same situation and in your shoes, How would you take care of them?

• You might make sure they eat their meals on time or drink lots of water.
• You might also make sure they are getting up every now and then to stretch or move around.
• Maybe you might make sure that they take breaks or even tell them to slow down!
• Tell them to take it slow and to end work when their usual shift is over.
• You might even encourage them to set boundaries.
• You might praise them and compliment them for all the things that they are doing right.
• You might even remind them not to run themselves into the ground with work, but that they also can enjoy some play and relaxation.

You get where I’m going with this. These end up being all the things we can do for ourselves that would be engaging in the practice of taking care of ourselves. And you can see it is similar to and yet different from “self-care”. Because we are giving intention and meaning to the things we are doing by labeling it as “this is how I care for myself and how I take care of myself”.

Another way of understanding this practice is that taking care of yourself might be more so in connection with others, your community, or family. You can ask yourself this question in a similar way, How have my people/my ancestors/my community taken care of themselves? This might lead you to answering this question with practicing traditions, rituals, or tools that focuses on ancestral knowledge, familial or community wisdom.

So try swapping out “self-care” with the: practice of caring for yourself, because this practice becomes something we can do at any single moment. It becomes something always available to us. So ask yourself, what does it look like if you were to care for yourself and take care of yourself (how have your people taken care of themselves) when you are: feeling stressed, angry, overwhelmed, frustrated, or burned out?