Self-Care Slump
5 minute read
I haven’t done yoga in a month. My work hours changed and the 30 minutes I had carved out for myself a few mornings a week got eaten up by daily zoom meetings and deadlines.
I could have done it at the weekend but then the guilt about not spending enough time with my kids kicked in and disappearing off to stretch and fold my body seemed selfish.
I have a long list of podcasts saved on an app on my phone and look at it every so often when I’m not feeling guilty enough. I found my kindle under a pile of washing the other day, uncharged and unused.
Like so many women, I’m busy, too busy for self-care, and my guilt about not having enough time for it is making me stressed.
We’re inundated with messages about looking after ourselves. We should be meditating and manifesting. Exercising and exorcising the stress from our bones. We need to joyfully journal, be giddily grateful and drink matcha or cacao or the tears from a virgin unicorn in a moonlit ceremony.
I am not doing these things. I am collapsing onto a sofa at about 9pm, watching two hours of Netflix and rolling into bed.
My brain screams at me – two hours of Netflix you lazy cow. Go for a walk or do an online yoga class, read three chapters of one of the books you downloaded to your Kindle in a fit of enthusiasm months ago. Do something other than just lying there.
But it’s the one time of the day where no one is asking anything of me. I’ve worked since breakfast, fed my children, washed them (occasionally), put them to bed, eaten my own dinner, logged back onto work and have finally found my way into the woman-shaped imprint on the couch.
I am allowed to do this. This is self-care. I am relaxing, in my own way.
The trouble with self-care is that it has become an industry and like any profit-based business it’s important that their marketing gets to you. Wellness has jumped the shark and is now a billion-dollar enterprise and it needs us to survive.
The way to a woman’s heart, and wallet, is through social media and so we watch our favourite women on Instagram sell us their lives full of self-care secrets, without a pile of washing or a crying child to be seen. But I have had enough, I have self-care fatigue.
Self-care has become an instagrammable keystone, it is fetishised and sold to us like the holy grail. We no longer go to mass, instead, we charge crystals. We don’t say our prayers at night, we write down six things we’re grateful for in a notebook that says Gratitude on the front in a pretty font and cost us €30.
In the depths of new baby exhaustion, I tried to journal my gratitude in the hopes that it would pull me from my teary sleep-deprived state. One day all I could be grateful for was Infacol and Dairy Milk. I wasn’t reaching a higher plane and I binned the journal and deleted the apps on my phone.
The diet industry has long taken advantage of our insecurities. They grab hold of you at your most vulnerable and lean insidiously into those fears until you buy their diuretic teas and supplements and shakes. Wellness is doing the same thing. Stress is killing you, they say, or ageing you, or making you a bad friend or partner or employee. Multinational corporations are giving extra days annual leave and calling them wellness days so that you forget about the emails at 7 am and 9 pm and reports that must be written at the weekend because there’s no time in your actual working week.
They are paying Wellness companies for self-care programmes that you can download on the company intranet that absolve them of all their sins. As if free lunch and access to Headspace will stop the cortisol racing through your body after yet another budget cut.
And all of this is predominantly aimed at women. Men* are not stressed about not managing to have a relaxing bath with a podcast and crystals. They are not freaking out at breaking their 20-day yoga streak or forgetting to be grateful.
They are relaxing by having a beer and watching a boxset. They are planning the return of their Fantasy Football league or organising a round of golf with the lads. They are not being bombarded with ads selling glass bottles that tell you how much water you’ve consumed or women claiming to have earned a million euro by manifesting who have launched a course to teach you how to do it.
They are relaxing in ways they find enjoyable and not letting an industry playing on their insecurities to add to their stress levels.
It goes without saying that it’s been a tough year and if gratitude, crystals and forest bathing are helping you survive it, that’s great. We all need to do whatever we can do to get us through. For me, it’s my spot on the couch and a gin on a Friday night. The kindest bit of self-care I can practice now is to remember that I don’t need to spend any more money on stationary or apps to help me to relax.
I’ll get back to my kindle and some yoga and the twice-yearly bath when work settles down and I have more time. For now, I refuse to be told how to relax, I have my spot on the couch, and for that I really am grateful.
Jennifer Stevens, August 2021
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