Treat Yourself: The Commodification and Misuse of Self-Care

[lb_lee]

Treat Yourself: The Commodification and Misuse of Self-Care
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Notes: This essay won the reader poll this month and was sponsored by the Patreon crew! And just so y’all know, I am not going to be discussing any modern self-care products in this essay. This is not the place to take potshots at jade rollers.

Last year, I found myself on a panel at Arisia called "Internalizing Creative Suppression" about impostor syndrome, self-sabotage, and how to deal with or overcome it. It was a great panel, and towards the end, when we were taking questions, a hand went up. When called on, the person said that they had the problem of, they were dealing with depression, and sometimes, they'd wake up and decide that self-care was staying in bed all day and watching Netflix. How, they asked, could they tell whether this was legit self-care or just depression?

We asked whether staying in bed all day and watching Netflix made them feel any less depressed, and they said no. Which triggered a lively discussion about what self-care is and isn't, and how to tell the difference. But I think this question shows a few fairly common question: what exactly is self-care, how can you differentiate it from other things, and how does the reality differ from the product?

What IS Self-Care, Anyway?

Self-care is treating yourself the way you would anyone else you care about or respect—not better, not worse. It is knowing your limits and accepting when you need help, rest, or reward; it is recognizing when things (or YOU) need to change.

Would you make your dear old granny go to work when she’s sick, and berate her for not wanting to? Would you tell your best friend he’s a selfish attention whore for coming out? Are you willing to treat yourself that way? Do you think it’s acceptable to treat anyone that way?

It seems simple enough, stated like that, but it’s harder than it looks. Let’s get into why.

Aside: Self-Care As A Beating Stick

This is not an essay about how self-care can be twisted and torqued to justify acts of cruelty and appalling selfishness, but it needs to be mentioned. There are some people who could pamper themselves within an inch of their lives and still resent their starving baby for needing milk. They could talk a big game about how good and necessary it was for them to spend their kid’s college fund on a yacht, how they needed to learn to care for themselves. These people are jerks.

That is why for this essay, I am defining self-care as treating yourself as equal to your loved ones. And if you find yourself responding with, “but my loved ones don’t deserve to be treated comparably to me, I’m so much better/worse,” then you have deeper problems than self-care, problems beyond the scope of this particular essay.

But fear not, regardless of whether it’s the self or others being devalued, the rules are the same. In either situation, it’s misrepresenting someone’s worst treatment as self-care. But how do we differentiate the two?

Worst Impulses and the Devil’s Boat

Part of the confusion is, self-care is contextual and relative. Your strapping Marine friend might see a daily three-mile run as perfectly reasonable self-care; your century-old great-grandma with a broken hip will not. But some things are clearly not self-care, regardless of who it is doing it.

For instance, up until my mid-twenties, I obeyed my eating disorder. I didn’t know the term “self-care” back then, but even if I had, I probably would’ve considered my eating disorder legitimate self-care, because it always couched itself as a friendly, helpful voice. Eat right and exercise! What could be healthier and more loving than that?

But then it started systematically removing nearly every food group from my diet, all for various “kind and healthy” reasons. It never said, “stop eating that because you’re disgusting;” it was always, “that isn’t necessary, every American eats WAY too much of that, this will make you healthier.” My exercise routine got higher and higher, even as my fuel got lower and lower.

Needless to say, this was not health, nor was it self-care. And it was visibly obvious; I was sick all the time, and I turned yellow. But if you’d asked me, I would’ve insisted that I was taking better care of myself through these routines, which were in fact slowly killing me. Self-care might be contextual and relative, but by all standards, mine failed.

But how could I tell? It seems so obvious from the outside, but in the thick of it, things seem so muddled. So, if you have your own behavior that you’re wondering about, here are some quick things to reality-check it.

First, is whatever-it-is actually making concrete positive change in your life? As I mentioned, under the kindly tutelage of my eating disorder, I looked bad and I felt bad. But it also felt good in a scratching-till-I-bleed way, while teaching myself to eat was stressful and challenging. So if you’re having trouble gauging whether it’s helping or hurting, turn to someone you trust, respect, and feel safe with, and ask whether THEY think whatever-it-is brings good things in your life. If nobody fits the bill, imagine your fictional role model and pretend you’re asking them. Don’t feel stupid; if you feel Superman would give you good life advice, then by all means, ask Superman. (And whatever you do, don’t turn to someone doing what you’re doing—your drinking buddy doesn’t get to weigh in on your drinking habits.)

Second, imagine someone you respect, someone you want the best for—your child, your lover, your best friend, Superman, whoever. What would you think if they were doing whatever-it-is, instead of you? Would you go, “wait, no, buddy, that’s a bad idea”? Would you be worried for them, horrified, or saddened? I would’ve thought it crazy to enforce my routine on someone I loved, but I didn’t love myself. I was convinced that I was a special kind of bad, that I DESERVED to suffer. Fail.

Third: is whatever-it-is you’re doing something that will eventually be satisfied, or does it just demand more and more from you? Worst impulses are greedy. My eating disorder never said, “hooray, health achieved!” When I gave up one thing, it demanded another, and another, and still more. And the more I gave, the more unreasonable it got, not less. Is your whatever-it-is doing that? Then it’s worth looking askance.

If you’ve gone through the first three criteria and flunked all three (and only under that condition), it’s time to bust out number four. Imagine your whatever-it-is as an entity separate to you, preferably something neutral, with its own voice. Now: how does it react when you try to slow down on it (or stop, if it’s a thing you can quit safely)? Does it respond reasonably, or freak out like Norman Bates? When I pushed back against my eating disorder and started feeding myself right, it wigged out. It told me that I would die alone and unloved and useless, that everything would be ruined forever. That’s when I realized I had a major problem on my hands.

It’s easy to go along with something and think it’s in your best interest if you never push. But worst impulses show their true colors pretty fast when you confront them. When I started actually pushing my eating disorder, and it couldn’t get me back in line with its threats, it said, “okay, fine, I am killing you, but you know what, I’ll kill you slower.”

This is the sign of the worst impulse, the Devil’s boat: “I am bad, but less bad than any of your other options, now climb aboard.” And sometimes, we have to… but we should never mistake the Devil’s boat for a life raft, and we should never get on without a plan to get off ASAP. Our worst impulses never have our best interests at heart in the long-term. At best, they serve present needs at the cost of the future.

(There’s a whole other essay to be written about why we sometimes have to take the Devil’s boat, and what purposes these worst impulses truly serve. But that will have to be another time.)

So think of what you’re doing for self-care. Is it doing good? Would you think it reasonable for someone else? Is there an end? If you push back against it, does it flip out and stop sounding helpful or nice? Is it something that your mother, best friend, or fictional hero would approve of? Is it the devil’s boat, and is it time to get out?

This is worth writing down. Find yourself a pen and paper and make a column for what you’re doing, what you’re getting, and what you’d rather get. What things are doing good, and what things could use some changes? Here’s some of my own examples, but add/edit your own as needed:

Thing	Getting	Want
Sleep	10-11 hrs.	9.5 hrs.
Meals	3	3
Episodes	7/month	LESS
Socializing	1-2/week	2-3/week

Self-Care as a Brand

If you don’t know your own self-care needs, you don’t just risk blundering into the Devil’s boat. You also might end up buying a lot of snake oil. Self-care has become a business, and there's an economic incentive to equate taking care of yourself with spending money, lots of it. You’ve seen these ads before; they boil down to, "buy this snake oil... because you deserve it."

This is an argument that can be made about nearly anything. Buy that pencil cup... because you're worth it. Buy that compass... for YOU! But many, MOST goods don't make that argument. Why not?

Because they don’t have to. Taking my medication is vital self-care, but the pharmacy knows full well that their pills help keep me alive. They don’t need to tell me, “take your antidepressants... because you're worth it.” To do so would be to devalue their product. Things with clear and proven health benefits don't need to justify themselves with appeals to self-care.

So what does? Things that aren’t obviously useful, don’t have proven health benefits, aren’t intrinsically enriching or entertaining. In a way, to sell something on a basis of self-care is to imply it has nothing better to advertise. I’ve mostly seen it with luxury goods, bath and beauty stuff.

While making this essay, I received a copy of People magazine which just so happened to have a page of labeled “Stars’ Self-Care Secrets,” made specifically to advertise and sell such products: “how these celebs chill out in between all those parties, premieres and awards shows.” In this framing, self-care is a luxury product, selling an idealized self of professional and social success, affordable by the rich. Celebrity allure is People’s whole brand, but I’ve seen it elsewhere too, that focus on beauty, luxury, and sensual comfort. Health benefits might be invoked, but they’re rarely proven.

The message might seem to be, “self-care like a rock star!” but the undertone is, “only rock stars can afford self-care.”

This is false. Many forms of self-care can not be bought—a good night’s sleep, for instance, or good friends. Other forms may cost very little—my favorite shirt was secondhand, cheap as dirt, and it makes me feel better every time I put it on. It’s true, I’ve spent a lot of money on some things for the sake of treating myself well… but it wasn’t necessarily the stuff that was branded as self-care. The product is not the reality.

There's a place for those products, for indulgence, luxury, and comfort, but they should never be the end-all be-all of self-care. That self-comfort can be hollow, a pretty distraction from the deeper changes that need to be made, and it can lead to dark places.

The Self-Help One-Pager Workshop

A few years back, I ended up at a mental health convention in Seattle. I got in by throwing a self-help one-page zine workshop—you know, like Feeling Worthless? or the Bad Day Book. From years of selling my one-pagers, I knew other people found such things helpful, and sure enough, a decent number of folks showed up. My goal was to help guide folks fill their tiny booklets with concrete coping skills and useful things that needed to be remembered during a mental health crisis.

But it didn't work out that way. Maybe I didn't express myself well, but the attendees didn't seem to get it. They mostly filled out their one-pagers with affirmations or reassurances, rather than specific coping skills (“keep to the meal plan” or “call so-and-so”) or prohibitions ("DON'T KILL YOURSELF").

It’d be one thing if such affirmations were hugely useful… but I haven’t seen much proof they work. They’re mostly useless for me, if not counterproductive; when I am deep in crazy, I can neither understand an affirmation nor care. The only things that have any chance of keeping me from doing something disastrous are distracting me from the impulse, and in short, clear sentences, telling me what needs to be done. ("Call your shrink. RIGHT NOW.")

The only thing I can imagine affirmations being useful for is maybe raising self-esteem… but believing “I am a good and capable person” is meaningless if you are neither. And I couldn’t help this uneasy sense that this vacuous fluffiness was exactly what the con encouraged. The place was filled with stuffed animals, coloring books, a fetishization of childhood, and some of my fellow congoers seemed to have been floundering for years, even decades, making no progress and learning no skills. They could reassure and comfort themselves… but not change or build. And on some level, I suspected that maybe they knew that; why else would they need such massive doses of comfort at all times, unless that comfort was hollow?

It reminded me of the soft, bubble-wrap feeling of being deep in dissociative madness. On the surface, it is comforting and reassuring… but it doesn’t allow for truly changing a terrible situation, only becoming inured to it, and it is no more a stable foundation to build a life on than a pile of blankets.

The Most Uncomfortable Self-Care

Proper self-care is more than the lollipop after the doctor; it is also the agonizing physical therapy to recover from an injury, the changing of posture and activity to try and prevent further damage, possibly even leaving the unsafe environment where such injuries are inevitable.

For instance, one of the most self-caring things I ever did for myself was become homeless. It was awful, but that rock bottom turned into my solid foundation. It taught me that my life had to change, I had to change, and forced me to reassess everything. What were my skills and abilities, truly? What needed to change, and how could I go about it with the scarce resources at my disposal? How could I survive and improve?

It was an ordeal, but when I emerged, I had become someone that I respected. All my life, I’d felt out-of-joint, like some vital limb was dislocated and causing me continual pain; now everything was pulled straight. I had built myself a life that was no longer at odds with my root needs. I can’t say I’m grateful for the experience, exactly… but it was a powerful, transformative, necessary one.

That too is self-care. Compared to the hot-baths-and-expensive-soap self-care of the magazines, it might be the ugly stepsister, but it is the stronger sister. A hot bath makes me feel good for a day, but the Homeless Year ripped my life up by the roots and laid it on a better, more sustainable track. One is a treat; the other is an investment. Only a fool confuses the two.

Treat Yourself Right

It's easy to be judgmental and mean-spirited about how other people spend their money or efforts, easy to be defensive about our own. I know, because I've been that person. I’ve seen and been that guilty person, agonizing how buying that $2 used book is proof of everything wrong with our society. It's easy to feel guilty when we have debts to pay, angry or self-martyring at people who do the self-care that we secretly wish we could or would. It’s easy to feel self-righteous and offset our needs onto others, demanding that they do the work for us, and the reasons always seem so compelling.

We humans do not live in a vacuum. How we care for ourselves affects how we care for each other. We should not have to bleed ourselves or each other dry. We are not castaways on a desert island, biting and clawing for the most rudimentary survival. We are people together, and we can make our lives better, together.

It’s good to be gentle with ourselves and each other. And it’s good to know when that gentleness needs to be put aside. It’s good to recognize that businesses have spent an immense amount of money in branding self-care, and it’s useful to everyone to be able to learn to recognize that brand, and tell the difference between it and the reality.

Self-care is a complicated, multifaceted thing. It can be treats or investments, a cup of hot tea after a long day or thankless, painful labor for the future. Different people need different forms of self-care in different circumstances. At its best, self-care brings us into a better world, allowing us to build better lives and have more reasonable expectations of ourselves and each other. At its worst, it can be used to justify the most appalling acts of cruelty and selfishness.

We all have a lot to learn, and probably always will. But I hope we can all learn the difference between our worst impulses and our best, the product and the reality. I hope we can all discover what self-care truly is for ourselves, and find a way to achieve it without hurting others. Because it’s not a matter of treating yourself; it’s a matter of treating yourself RIGHT.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Thank you for this! It's really insightful!

You have a really good point about self-care as a brand. A lot of the branding seems to be about the idea that, if you're successful enough, you can excuse doing nice things for yourself as taking care of your health and providing self-care. When doing nice and enjoyable things is inherently good (although it's sometimes necessary to prioritize other things), and how well you take care of yourself doesn't correlate with how much money you spend.

And I've seen environments like you described at the convention. A strong emphasis on soothing, borrowing heavily from childhood, and not a lot on how to balance that with other equally necessary things, such as facing a situation honestly, setting challenging goals, or doing something uncomfortable that will leave you better off in the long run. It's like how distraction can be a healthy coping skill, but overdoing it creates avoidance, which prevents forward progress. Gentle soothing and doing something nice for yourself can be good an important, but if that's the only skill that's being presented and taught, you go nowhere.

[wolffyluna]

This is really interesting!

I have a lot of... feelings about how beautification is often considered self care, in the same way I have a lot of feelings about how often beautification is considered hygiene. (Mostly from treating beautification as somewhere between necessary and virtuous, but there's some other, less articulable, causes of The Feelings.)

Part of me wonders if some of the reason that conversations about self care get so messy isn't just because different people need different things (as is often suggested as a cause), but because self care is a broad umbrella term containing a lot of different things. Like, 'human maintenance' (eg getting enough sleep, eating food) is a type of self care, 'soothing' is a type of self care, 'keeping your shit/life together' is a type of self care, there's probably some others I'm not thinking of-- And a deficiency in any is bad, but it's often hard to point out that there is a deficiency when the only words you have is 'self care'. And for example, 'soothing' self care is an important kind, but if that's the only kind you know how to do and you don't know to do 'post-crisis management' or 'keeping your life together' self care, you are going to have problems.

[lb_lee]

Oh man, that's a great point, I'd never considered how self-care is such a vague umbrella term. It could really use a disambiguation or something, kinda like how DBT has different modalities and skills to teach!

--Rogan

[jadislefeu]

I feel like at some point the 'self-care' meme and the 'treat yo self' meme merged, and that's where some of the commodification came from.

[dreamer_marie]

That was incredibly wise. I struggle every day with the self-care/indulgence/worst impulse problem, and I don't always identify which of these voices is telling me to do stuff at any given moment. But it's good to see them laid out like that and what kind of dialogue you can have with them to identify each one of them. Thanks!

[lb_lee]

No prob, Marie! I think I remember you mentioning that, and I think a lot of folks have similar trouble. I know I do!

[lithophiles]

Thanks for writing this. One of the reasons we listened to a "voice of advice" (not an actual system member, just what felt like "our judgement" at the time) was because we had always been told to "listen to the little voice inside" and "if you feel bad, it's because you know deep down what you did is wrong." (Coming from someone who never showed any remorse about any of the terrible things they did to anybody...)

Anyway, we mistook that criticizing impulse, that insisted if we didn't listen to it we'd be shattered by the harsh reality of the Real World, for "what we knew was true, but couldn't admit." It was more like what we feared was true, and were too afraid to do anything but prepare for the worst-case scenario. And it would flip out and start raging at us and shaming us if we didn't go along with what it wanted for us, even though there was no end to its demands either-- or, rather, when we found ourselves in situations where it was pleased with us, at least for the time being, we felt like crap. For instance, it wanted us to try to gain favor with nasty, snarky people by helping them put down others, and throw "the bad kinds of multiples/soulbonders/etc" under the bus.

he place was filled with stuffed animals, coloring books, a fetishization of childhood, and some of my fellow congoers seemed to have been floundering for years, even decades, making no progress and learning no skills. They could reassure and comfort themselves… but not change or build.

Our ex& tended to present themselves as the antithesis of that kind of thing, while actually doing it in their own way. We didn't realize for a long time that they were staying stuck in affirmations and the fetishization of childhood too, because their idea of "people doing it wrong" was defined by very specific actions, and it took us a while to realize that you don't have to take those specific actions to stay stuck, unhealthy, and not making the changes you need.

-Riel

[lb_lee]

Yeah, I characterize THAT nasty mean-spirited voice as Edward Cullen; Cheri Huber calls it self-hate or the illusion of separateness. It is a sad, scared thing, and while it can be worthwhile to listen to it, it should never be believed or given power over anyone's life. Huber argues that it serves the purpose of keeping us separate, but then, she's a Buddhist. For me, I see it as a misguided protector that is retired.

[chanter1944]

Do you mind if I link to this, DW-side and/or twitter, with proper credit to you? If twitter would happen, I'd credit you as LB-Lee on DW, for the record.

[lb_lee]

Sure, go for it!

[stealthsystem]

THAT was an amazing essay and very very true.

[yvannairie]

Good stuff. I live in a non-anglophone country and "self-care" has definitely become a word for... a kind of Americanised consumer retail therapy? We don't really put a lot of stock on the idea that happiness and contentment are requirements for a good life, a "treat yourself" mentality is seen as wholly frivolous nonsense and anything relating to self-care has been rolled up into it.

The closest native term we have for self-care translates more accurately to "worrying about yourself", which actually ends up working just fine in a culture where pleasure is kind of a dirty word and wellbeing and life aren't seen as wholly connected. Caring for yourself is mostly constructed to be something hard, unpleasant, but necessary, and pleasure-seeking self-care is... Maybe not discouraged? But you're not supposed to really accept that it can have tangible positive effects on mental health and is necessary.

[lb_lee]

Americanised consumer retail therapy

That is a very good way of putting it. Apparently the term was coined in the late 80s by Audre Lord (or so I've heard), mostly to describe surviving as an activist without burning out or martyring herself to death, and I imagine she would not be pleased to see how that's been turned into just another product to sell.

Thanks much for your input! I admit that I was mostly thinking of it from a US context and having a different cultural framework is really super. And it's interesting too, since I see pleasure as... part of it, but not the majority or all of self-care. (For instance, go figure, eating food I actually found tasty made beating my ED easier! Though it took me ages to get over my fear of eating meat again.)

[feotakahari]

In relation to the “beating stick”: I don’t have it on hand now, but I remember a Tumblr post about black women who go to the hospital and get “prescribed” self-care because the doctor thinks they aren’t really sick.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, that's the banality of evil for you.

My personal example is, one of my relatives, when both their kids were homeless, thought it appropriate to send said kids photos of their overseas vacation and discuss how in this trying time, what said relative really needed was to take care of THEMSELVES.

Some folks could take a mug of warm milk and turn it into poison.

[lithophiles]

That example kind of reminds me of families with autistic kids where the parents are told they need self-care and treating themselves and indulgence because having an autistic child is just so trying, while the kids get... nothing. They're assumed to either be selfishly happy, or to have so little of a mental state, if they're nonverbal, that they can't even understand the concept of having a good life vs. a bad life, let alone understand anyone else having one. Then if one of the parents kills the kid, fellow "autism parents" shower love and praise on them, saying they don't need punishment because having an autistic child is so trying that no one can be expected to do anything but murder them, or... something?

-Riel