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: Incorporating healthy self-care practices into daily life can have lasting benefits. These don’t need to be expensive or time-consuming to be effective. Self-care is a term thrown around a lot, but experts say it’s often misunderstood. “Most people approach self-care from the thought, ‘I’m going to make myself better,’ and that doesn’t work,” Gracy Obuchowicz, self-care coach, told Healthline. She says self-improvement is often mistaken for self-care, though they’re subtly different. “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.