Self-care is more than just a hashtag

A 43-year-old female client said in one of our sessions: “Social media is filled with ads, women at spas seeking beauty treatment—all tagged self-care. I wonder if we have oversimplified the meaning to self-care.”

This is a concern I share too. The way self-care has been talked about over the last few years is doing more disservice than good. Self-care has become a hashtag and marketing bait, and this affects how it is understood. It is now used largely to describe acts that don’t necessarily add to our well-being.

Historically “self-care” was a term used by medical professionals and doctors to help patients invest in their own health.

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In the 1970s, the term was popularised in the US by the Black Panther Party, a political organisation that protested against injustice to the Black community. They expanded the lens of self-care to mean that caring for oneself and community resilience went hand in hand. Their work included starting free health clinics, breakfast programmes for children and physical movement lessons to take care of one’s emotional and physical well-being.

As the women’s movement also started to emerge in the US around the same time—in the late 1960s, gaining momentum in the 1970s—self-care became a tool to address the discrimination, exclusion and injustice that women faced.

Given how the term has evolved, self-care is not just an act of individual choice, but requires an ecosystem that can support its very existence.

Very often people tell me that prioritising themselves is not something they are used to and that they feel guilt for it. We need to expand the idea of self-care to mean that the responsibility for it extends to our policies, organisations, schools and individuals. The idea of care where one can be gentle and kind towards oneself and yet pause and choose to invest in one’s own well-being needs to be nourished.

Self-care needs to be practised by all genders because our biased understanding of gender roles doesn’t allow everyone to take care of themselves in emotional and holistic ways. I hear male clients say that during difficult life events, they struggle to be vulnerable as they feel shame. Often, women say that they address their children’s or parents’ needs during weekends and feel guilty if they need to schedule alone time or meet friends.

Our definition of self-care needs to answer important questions about what we can do to stay centered. Self-care includes spending time to understand what calms us and evokes meaning, and keeps us aligned with our values.

In a world where loneliness is a huge concern, social soothing, learning to co-regulate our emotions and working on social fitness are integral to experiencing belonging and connection. Our definition of self-care needs to include what it means to develop guardrails at work and within families. We also need to create boundaries for our availability through phones and technology.

Our schools, colleges and communities need to become a place where we can talk about self-care without feeling guilt. At work, we need policies that allow grief leave or time off when family or pets are unwell. An understanding of compassion fatigue and clear well-defined frameworks that allow for family resilience are other ways in which organisations can contribute to promoting self-care.

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The responsibility of reclaiming self-care for the very purpose the term evolved belongs to each one of us. If we want the world to feel like a safe space, we need to build and invest in collective self-care.

Sonali Gupta is a Mumbai-based psychotherapist. She is the author of the book You Will be Alright : A Guide to Navigating Grief and has a YouTube channel, Mental Health with Sonali.