Why Self Care Feels So Hard (Even When You’re Doing It “Right”)

What Conditioning, Discernment, and Personal Context Have to Do With Sustainable Self Care

As a person living in the 21st century, self care isn't a new idea. You see it everywhere!

If you go to the doctor showing up stressed or anxious, you might be told to focus on self care. Maybe your kids are more able to take care of themselves, and you're entering your self care era. Or you might be burned out and want to practice self care to get better and prevent it from happening again.

Self care even shows up for babies in the form of a Fisher-Price self care kit complete with jade roller (rattle) and gua sha (teether).

With so much knowledge and resources available, you'd think self-care would be easier.

But it's not.

If you've Googled "self care not working" or "self care still stressed" or anything along those lines, you're not alone. Many people experience the frustration, confusion, and shame of a self care practice that doesn't work. And there's not just 1 reason for that... there's many.

But before I get to why your practice isn't working, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing when we say self care.

What is Self Care?

Self care is the act of caring for yourself so you have the energy to interact with all the beings and organizations that matter to you. It’s not something that stops with you, it’s something that starts with you.

This care covers multiple aspects of yourself. According to the yogic text of the Upanishads, we are made up of five sheaths (Koshas). Utilizing this framework means supporting the following aspects of yourself

• Physical Body - Anamaya Kosha. Think of the body you can touch, move, see with an x-ray or microscope, etc.

• Energetic Body - Pranamaya Kosha. This includes your life force energy.

• Mental/Emotional Body - Manomaya Kosha. In yoga, your thoughts, emotions, and senses are all considered part of your mind

• Wisdom Body - Vijnanamaya Kosha. This is your discernment, logic, and knowledge.

• Bliss Body - Anandamaya Kosha. This is your true Self.

While these koshas appear separate, they actually interact with and affect each other. You’ve probably experienced this when you’re stressed (a disturbance in your mental/emotional body), and your shoulders get tight (an impact on your physical body).

Because of these different aspects of self and the interconnectedness of it all, it’s no wonder that finding self care that works for you is more complex than taking a bubble bath and calling it a day.

Why is self care so hard?

Self Care is Treated as a Luxury

So much of the self care industry is wrapped up in consumerism. Have a spa day. Do your nails. Get a massage. 

So many examples of self care are things you have to buy. The more expensive the product, the more beneficial it’s supposed to be. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin calls this faux self care, and real self care is essentially making changes to the system or circumstances that are not in alignment with your values. This can be something like setting boundaries around your work schedule – no calls during dinner, and you’ll reply the next business day – because you value time with family.

Of course, if you’re receiving a massage or reiki, that’s not inherently bad. However, there is a problem when something that should be accessible (self care) is seen as a treat. 

People think they have to earn a rest, which is just not true. Tricia Hersey writes about how one form of self care, rest, is our inherent right.

However, when there’s a gap between the expectation of how our work is supposed to go and what actually happens, the last thing we do is rest. Instead, most people would double down on the amount of work they do.

In Tara McMullin’s essay around the Validation Spiral, she reminds us that when you encounter low performance, it’s a signal to assess what’s going wrong and regroup. Regrouping doesn’t necessarily mean doing more. It could mean doing less and caring for yourself.

Shift: You do not need to earn self care or rest.

It’s easy to set your care aside when you’re caring for people and causes you love

You might have someone (or a lot of someones) in your life that you care for: an aging parent, children, an injured neighbor. Maybe you have other responsibilities like volunteering at the food bank or raising money for Alzheimer’s research. Whatever it is, you care about the world and the people in it, and sometimes you end up putting yourself last because of the important work you’re doing. You might even receive praise for how selfless you are. 

But all work and no self care is not sustainable.

Taking care of yourself doesn’t diminish the work you do. It enhances it.

Part of the work I do when working with people one-on-one is helping them find the balance between their self care and their other responsibilities and activities. The impact you have in your community is important. And so are you. Sustainable self care honors both.

Shift: Caring for yourself creates capacity for you to care for the beings and organizations you care about.

You started at a deficit

Burnout, illness, injury, or a change in life events – job loss, divorce, move, more/less caregiving responsibilities – brings many people to a self care practice. Whatever the reason, most people show up with an energetic deficit. This makes starting a self care practice hard because learning and doing new things requires energy.

Long term stressors, like the ones mentioned above, keep your body in fight or flight and decrease your immune system response. According to Cheryl Conrad, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who researches chronic stress, stress can change the structure of your brain. This can lead to difficulties in learning, memory and emotional regulation: things you need while starting a new habit.

My private yoga work includes investigating the support structures in my clients’ lives so that they have the capacity to implement the change required to build a self care practice. Willpower can only get you so far, especially if you have less energy.

Shift: Be honest about your capacity. Are you trying to do something that requires more time or energy than you have? What support structures can you utilize to build capacity?

Change is hard

After living so many years on this earth, you’ve developed habits and ways of doing things. As you add in a self care practice, these changes can affect your habits and routines. And that change brings resistance and/or discomfort, even if this is a change you want to make.

Think of it like pushing a wheel. You’ve been going in one direction for a while, but now you want to move in a new direction. That means having to stop the momentum of the wheel, change direction, giving the wheel an extra little push to get it going again, and then gaining momentum to continue in your new direction. In other words, the bigger the difference between your previous action and the one you want to take, the harder it’ll be.

Shift: Acknowledge that change requires effort and takes time. You might be further along than you thought.

You weren’t taught or encouraged

In our formative years, we learn from our care givers, the school system, the community around us, and what we pick up from society at large. 

While everyone’s family is different, you most likely weren’t taught self care growing up. In fact, most of the people I work with and interact with have had messaging (explicit or implied) that goes like this.

• Keep going no matter what.

• Maintain the status quo.

• If you need support then you’re entitled or excluded.

• If you work hard, you’ll get what you want.

• We want you to be happy and do your best… only your best is all A’s and nothing less.

• Being like everyone else keeps you safe (even if it doesn’t work for you).

If someone from your family was part of the Civil Rights Movement or the Women’s Movement, you might have learned self care as a way of caring for yourself so you have the capacity to organize and create change. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela says self care was “a claiming [of] autonomy over the body as a political act against institutional, technocratic, very racist, and sexist medicine.”

In the public school system, we're not taught how to care for ourselves or take rest. Instead, we’re taught how to sit still, take tests, and recall the prescribed answers. 

The cultural thought pool that we’re swimming in says that our productivity is valued over our care. There was a shift in 2016 when the self care industry boomed. But, in the hands of the wellness industrial complex, this thing that is supposed to give us more energy and refill our cup morphed into another thing on the to-do list or another thing to buy.

Shift: Examine your beliefs around self care. Notice where you have cognitive dissonance around doing things to care for yourself.

Your self care is productivity in disguise

This is tricky because it looks like you’re doing all the right things. You set some time aside for a massage, you meditate every morning, you go to the gym every evening. You’ve got a pretty good schedule going, but you still don’t feel good. 

You might start adding more and more things to your schedule. Because more is better right?

Wrong.

There’s a point where your self care becomes another quantitative metric – do more – instead of a qualitative assessment – does this feel like it’s working? The care part comes out of the equation and you’re trying to check as many things off the list as you can. You get the dopamine hit of completion, but not the nourishment of feeling cared for or energized.

Shift: Focus on doing the self care that grounds and energizes you, and let the rest go.

You’re using your healing practice as another way to fix yourself

Imagine you have achy joints, you’re having trouble sleeping, and your energy is low. You go to a yoga class to help with your body and try to relax so you can get better sleep. You also get your hormones checked out to see if there are any underlying causes.

These are all great things to do… and what is the relationship you have with yourself in the process?

Are you looking at all these self care activities as experiments and information, or are you looking at them as something that’s going to fix you?

There's a point when healing becomes “fixing”, and it can actually feel even worse than the symptom itself. Because, at that point, the problem isn’t a symptom anymore. Subconsciously, the problem is you. And the truth is, you are not a problem. You are a multifaceted human being. You have value and worth no matter what.

Something interesting happens when you cross into the energy of fixing yourself instead of the symptom or cause. You get stuck! Are there scientific studies to prove this? No, but think about it like this. What would happen if you tried to fix something that wasn’t broken? You would either get nowhere or end up worse than you started.

Shift: As you move through whatever self care or healing journey you’re on, remember to honor that you’re already whole in the process.

Your Practice Isn’t Designed to Care for the Part of You That’s Suffering

Different practices are more suited to care for the different aspects of yourself. For example, if you’re experiencing physical pain, asana (yoga poses) or another physical practice would probably be more effective than meditation.

However, as stated above, since the different Koshas affect each other, it is possible to find relief from seemingly unrelated practices. For example, a meditative practice that focuses on sending unconditional love to the part of your body in pain might create pain relief.

So how do you know which practice is aligned for you?

Part of it is having a baseline knowledge of things that generally work. Part of it is trial and error. And another part is based on personal preferences and circumstances. You can shorten the trial and error period by working with a provider that’s used to working with the problem you’re wanting to address.

Shift: Choose the right practice for the situation.

Where to go from here

Self care that works for you is something we need to learn at the pace of nature. Typing “make a self care plan” into ChatGPT isn’t going to work.

How you care for yourself is deeply personal and based on your preferences and the current context of your life. 

Investigate the shifts in each section of this post to see if they resonate with you. Be honest with yourself about thought processes, behaviors and capacities. You might need the insight of someone else: whether it’s a close friend who knows you well or an impartial third party who can see things with fresh eyes. Be with people who hold you accountable to the change you’re looking to create.

Once you’ve uncovered your thoughts, behaviors, and capacities; the next question is:

“How do I move forward in a way that actually works for me?”

The first thing most people do is set goals and make a plan, but those aren’t straightforward either. I’ll identify the pitfalls and how to navigate them in the next post.