Lots of people hate the phrase “self-care.”

If you are one of them, I get it. We’re going to blame capitalism and hustle culture for that, okay? I’m going to explain how capitalism ruined the phrase self-care, how to really define self-care, and why I still use the label.

“Self-care” is a term that was first developed in the medical system. It was used as a label to describe the behaviors that patients needed to do to manage their chronic medical conditions. Think, take insulin to manage diabetes, change your diet post-op for cardiac issues, etc.

Eventually, self-care evolved to describe the activities that helping and health professionals could do to look after themselves. This accompanied a growing recognition that the work of health and helping professionals – because they are the “machinery” in their jobs – was stressful.

But, somewhere around 2017-ish, self-care entered the mainstream – pulled in along with wellness culture (and diet culture). Capitalism noticed. Suddenly self-care is everywhere, everyone is expected to do it, and it has been seriously monetized.

Recent research in my lab (under review) on how self-care is portrayed on social media revealed that self-care has been attached to unattainable expectations of privilege (e.g., expensive spa habits) and co-opted by the (bullshit) diet industrial complex.

Capitalism has also co-opted self-care in our workplaces and reduced it to top-down (i.e., from your employer), mostly meaningless gestures (that none of us trust), like pizza days and tone-deaf emails. These are rarely accompanied by the kind of changes we actually need in our workplaces to prioritize self-care, like hiring enough people to do the actual work, sufficient time off, or paid sick days.

Let’s reclaim self-care, and capitalism can shove it.

Self-care is anything that you do to replenish your personal and professional selves (recognizing those are the same person). It does not have to cost money, it encompasses lots of things you already do (like brushing your teeth), and it’s not all about us – sometimes self-care is about our relationships with others and our care for them. Self-care can be anything you want it to be. This is why we continue to use the phrase at Teach Me Self Care.

It does not have to involve bubble baths or spas and most certainly, absolutely, DEFINITELY does not include subscribing to the diet industry’s claims that happiness is only attained via weight loss (again, another post for another day).

In self-care solidarity,