Self-Care Isn’t Always the Answer

I don’t know about you, but since the beginning of the pandemic and ongoing, I’ve had an explosion of articles about self-care come across my feeds. All of them pretty much suggest we do the same things: get a good night’s sleep, exercise, meditate, eat healthy, go outside, etc. Sound familiar to you too? At some point over the last year I felt like if I clicked on one more article that told me I just needed to do deep breathing and everything would be fine I thought I just might toss my phone out the window in frustration.

Wait, WHAT?! Aren’t therapists supposed to be all about the self-care? Absolutely yes, AND here’s why all those suggestions can be a double-edged sword:

1. It’s not the end all, be all that it’s been made out to be. Especially when dealing with chronic, toxic stress and burnout

2. It places the responsibility for managing things that are out of our control on us.

Read on to find out why self-care isn’t always the answer, and what is missing from all those posts touting its benefits.

Problem 1: Self-care isn’t the end all, be all- especially when dealing with burnout:

Burnout is so real, and so many of us are feeling it right now. According to the American Psychological Association, parental burnout is at an all time high following COVID. Check this out from the APA to learn more about parental burnout.

The takeaway is that if you weren’t dealing with chronic stress before COVID you’ve probably had a chance to feel it now, and bouncing back takes more than just good self-care. Don’t get me wrong, self-care does have an important role to play in a balanced, healthy life. I’ve long been an advocate of self-care; people would regularly comment on how well I handle stress, admire how I prioritize wellness and express appreciation for how I remind them to take care of their own needs first. Even as a full-time working mom I found ways to prioritize eating healthy, get as much sleep as possible, exercise and maintain a mindfulness practice. I knew it was key to being a present mom and an effective therapist.

Then COVID hit. Though I worked to maintain my self-care it was suddenly not enough. I was a ball of stress, screaming into the wind as I tried to navigate the world of remote learning, maintain my work as a manager for a mental health organization all while figuring out how to keep my family safe and healthy. No amount of self-care would have made this okay. Did it make it better? Probably, but this massive, chronic stress was still there, and like so many of you I struggled. My self-care routines took the edge off and got me through the day, but it certainly did not solve the problem of being completely overwhelmed every day for the full year that schools went completely virtual in our school district.

Problem 2: The conversation about self-care places the responsibility for managing things that are out of our control on us:

Had I believed that self-care was the only answer like all those articles I clicked through told me, I would have started to blame myself for not handling my stress better. I would have thought that I was struggling because I just wasn’t self-caring hard enough, increasing my burden that much more because now we have shame and blame in the mix on top of everything else.

As self-care has become a bigger part of the conversation it can be used against us. When many struggling folks seek support from supervisors on burnout, a common response is to say that they need to improve their self-care. This can be helpful advice and if someone needs support in creating a self-care plan, how amazing that they can get that help at work. However, this can also be a way of deflecting the problem from being the responsibility of the workplace (or the home, or society) onto the individual. Sometimes the situation just needs to change and no amount of yoga classes can make it better. The worst of the pandemic is behind us, but so many other sources of toxic stress are not. As we face the realities of social injustices, our current youth mental health crisis, the impacts of a warming planet, plus the griefs and losses that come with life, there is still so much contributing to an atmosphere of burnout. Yes, do your self-care things, they are vital, and know that its not your fault if it doesn’t help 100%

What is missing from the conversation about self-care

What these articles on self-care fail to point out is that we are not designed to manage stressful experiences alone. I’m a giant nerd for understanding why we are the way we are through the lens of what conditions were like for humans during the first several thousand years of our existence; before there were cities, grocery stores or social media. Back in those days when something stressful happened- say a bear mauls a village, the whole village’s stress level rises. Then some of the villagers go out and hunt the bear down and kill it, followed by a giant feast where people sing songs together, dance ceremonial dances together and swap stories together about how the bear’s actions impacted them. They heal, they move on, they tell the story of what happened rather than keeping it to themselves not wanting to bother others or deal with the messy emotions like so many of us in modern cultures do. Self-care has so much to offer, but because it places all the responsibility for stress management on the individual it fails to recognize that we are designed to heal within safe, trusting relationships. We need supportive people to share our story with.

The other missing piece from the self-care conversation is rest. We are a busy culture that values productivity over the gift of doing nothing. Just like healing from a broken bone takes time and rest, so does recovering from chronic stress. Many self-care suggestions would have you add one more thing to your already busy schedule (um, isn’t that why we’re already overwhelmed?) Sometimes what we need most is to figure out how to let ourselves off the hook and take something off our plate- or maybe even all the things off all our plates, even just for an afternoon. Times of stillness allow us to process what we’ve been through and allow us the space to find creative solutions and solve the problems that we can control.

So next time you realize you’re burnt out or overwhelmed by stress ask yourself have I given myself permission to share my story with someone I can trust and am I allowing myself to rest and recover? These could be the keys to your resiliency.