A term being thrown around a lot lately is “self-care”. I don’t have much of an issue with the term itself—the issue lies in the way in which the term is used.
Dictionary.com defines self-care as the following:
- the act of attending to ones physical or mental health, generally without medical or other professional consultation
- the products or practices used to comfort or soothe oneself
So what do people mean when they say something like “self-care is important”?
The most common activities I see in conjunction with the term are buying unnecessary stuff and laying in bed all day. While the immediate gratification of buying some new garbage is great, anyone who has done it knows that the positive feeling doesn’t last long at all—and the hit to your bank account will probably cause future stress. Maybe it’s my naturally high conscientiousness, but any time I am in bed for more than 20 minutes after waking up, I feel like a complete piece of shit.
The connotation for “self-care” is any short term gratification that will make you temporarily forget about your problems. The way the term is used, you could logically categorize heroin as self-care.
The problem with these short term gratification activities is that they don’t actually address physical or mental health issues. Instead they are actually counterproductive. They make you weaker and less likely to actually respect yourself (we will get to self-esteem later).
True self-care would be finding something meaningful and long-term to do. Something soul-filling. Something difficult. Self-care isn’t comfort and ease. Self-care is becoming strong enough to handle life.
Let’s take mental health for example. If you look at something like anxiety you might think the best cure is to avoid things that make you anxious right? It isn’t. If you avoid the things you are afraid of they will grow.
The kid who thinks there is a monster in the closet and hides under his covers will stay afraid, despite the comfort of his blanket. The kid who confronts the closet despite her fear of a possible monster, and sees herself acting brave, realizes there is no monster in the closet. She is no longer afraid of the closet. But more than that, she now knows she can overcome things that she fears. In psychology this is known as exposure therapy.
Exposure therapy is defined as any treatment that encourages the systematic confrontation of feared stimuli, which can be external (feared objects, activities, situations) or internal (feared thoughts, physical sensations). The aim of exposure therapy is to reduce the person’s fearful reaction to the stimulus.
Self-care isn’t doing comfortable things you want to do. Comfortable things will leave you empty. Self-care is doing uncomfortable things. The physical version of self care is working out. It sucks in the short-term but is beneficial over the course of a lifetime.
If you care about yourself then do something difficult. Bear a burden.
I said I would get to “self-esteem”.
Self-esteem has become one of the most twisted terms used today. The dictionary defines it as “confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self respect”. However, it is used in a bastardized way now. When most people talk about self-esteem, what they mean is “you are perfect the way you are, flaws and all”.
There is something deeply wrong with that viewpoint. First of all, you aren’t perfect the way you are and you know it. If you were perfect you wouldn’t ever feel existential dread in the middle of the night, you wouldn’t be subject to fits of rage, and you wouldn’t feel like there’s something more to life that you are missing. You aren’t perfect. You know it. The people around you know it. But also you know the people around you aren’t perfect either. They are all as flawed as you.
When you tell people they are perfect the way they are, what happens is they will think “I’m suffering like crazy, this is perfect? It doesn’t get any better than this?”. You have taken away anything for them to aim at and strive for. Without something to strive towards, man is as good as dead.
Instead, self-esteem should go back to its original definition, confidence in one’s own worth or abilities. A 17 year old shouldn’t be told that she is perfect the way she is. Instead she should be told that she has an infinite ability to improve. She may be struggling, but tell her in five years life can be a lot better because she can become a lot better. Things are tough in life but she is more than capable of handling it. There might even be monsters in the closet, but she can become the sort of woman who can confront the monsters and slay them, and she will gain true self-esteem when she sees herself battling monsters instead of hiding under the blanket.
“For when all combine in every way to make everything easier and easier, the remains only one possible danger, namely, that the easiness might become so great that it would be too great; then only one want is left, though not yet a felt want – that people will want difficulty.” –Søren Kierkegaard
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