Title: What Is Self-Care?
Headings: Why You Don’t Need a Lot of Time or Money to Make Self-Care a Priority
Health News
Why You Don’t Need a Lot of Time or Money to Make Self-Care a Priority
Medical barriers to self-care
Personal barriers to self-care
How to incorporate self-care habits
Care for your body
Care for your inner self
Care for your community

Content: “Self-improvement comes from a perfectionist mind-set, where we think there is something we need to fix about ourselves — that we’re lazy or procrastinators — all the stories we tell ourselves when we have a goal for our well-being and we don’t achieve those, so we go into a shame spiral and we tell ourselves we’re not good enough in some way,” Obuchowicz said. She says the aspects of the self-improvement industry, such as diet and weight loss, send the message that if people work harder and find their discipline, they’ll be able to fix what feels defective, and only then will they be worthy of self-care. “But self-care is different because it’s about allowing yourself to have a nurturing experience of life right now as opposed to when you work harder in the future,” Obuchowicz said. She also says numbing behaviors, like drinking, eating, or surfing social media in excess, are often mistaken as self-care. “When a lot of people think about self-care, they think about how they can feel better, and numbing in the short term makes you feel better, but self-care is a more proactive response that requires you process what is causing you to numb,” she said. Because it can be hard to distinguish between the two, she advises people think of it in another way. “Self-care is something that when you do it, you wake up the next morning feeling better, while numbing is something that when you wake up the next day, you think, ‘Maybe I didn’t need that extra glass of wine or dessert.'” Medical barriers to self-care
Dr. Wayne Jonas, an integrative health expert and family physician at Samueli Integrative Health Programs, says that within the context of health, people understand that self-care involves a healthy diet, exercise, sleep, and maintaining work-life balance. “Research shows that the core aspects of self-care contribute to 60 to 70 percent of the chronic diseases we know in this world,” Jonas told Healthline. “ Most people understand what the basics are that they need to do in order to be healthy, or in some cases even reverse illness, and they also understand it’s not easy to do, so they need help in that area.”