You hear about the importance of self-care everywhere you go. Your friends want to plan a spa night after a long week, you see social media posts encouraging minds to destress, or you are justifying your night of binge-watching Netflix instead of doing work so you can “take care of yourself.”
But I believe we have the idea of self-care all wrong. The world sees self-care as breaks and self-indulgence, as something to get away from the realities and responsibilities of your job or academics. We’ve overblown the idea of self-care, focusing more on the rest and relaxation than the real purpose behind it, which is to be able to take care of ourselves so we can be functioning at our best.
Everyone knows that you can’t be working all the time and that you need to stop and slow down at some point. But we’re forgetting that the entire reason for us to stop and slow down is so that we can fulfill your responsibilities more productively True self-care is doing whatever you need in order to be successful and to accomplish whatever it is you need to accomplish.
Maybe you’re stressed out because you have too many assignments this week, or because you’re dealing with a high stakes situation at work. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is take time to finish what you need to. If that 5-page essay is constantly in your mind, maybe knocking out a page or two will help you more than watching an episode of your favorite show will.
When you’re stressed about your responsibilities, the best thing to help you is to reduce your to-do list and try to finish an assignment, or at least start it halfway. If you’re one of those people that thrives in a fast-paced environment and likes finishing your work as early as possible, self-care in the traditional sense may not make things better for you.
Self-care can mean getting down to the grind just as much as it can mean unplugging from your world. It is just as necessary to relax and take time away from your realities, but we often discredit the good that a couple hours of hard work can do for us. The things that stress us are not going anywhere, and the best way to stop stressing is to eliminate it at its source. Sometimes you can’t get rid of your stressors, like difficult co-workers or impossible classes, but other times you can solve it by switching off your phone, removing yourself from distractions, and getting your work done.
We’ve coddled ourselves and misrepresented “self-care” as “self-pampering,” sometimes failing to acknowledge that what we really need to do is face our responsibilities head-on.
Self-care isn’t always face masks, candles, and bubble baths. Self-care can also be writing 5 pages, reading a chapter of your textbook, or figuring out that math problem you just can’t get. Life has got to be about balance between hard work and play, but it’s time we started balancing it and not ignoring the value and importance of hard work in lieu of self-pampering.