I recorded this week’s episode in the middle of a road trip, and I’ll be honest with you, driving is about as far from my idea of self-care as you can get. Somewhere along the highway I discovered that I can operate both the brake and the gas from the passenger seat, and that a firm grip on the dashboard tells the person driving quite a lot. But I made the trip anyway, because there are friends and family at the other end of that road who matter to me. Relationships need more from us than good intentions and the occasional phone call. Every once in a while they need us to get in the car and show up.
And somewhere between the tailgaters and the heartburn from the snacks we packed, I started wondering when we decided that self-care only counts if it feels good in the moment.
Care and comfort are not always the same thing
I love a good bubble bath, and I’m a big believer in protecting an afternoon when no one needs anything from you. That matters a great deal. But listen to when we usually start talking about self-care. It tends to come up after someone is already burned out, depleted, or struggling, and by then we’re asking it to rescue us from months or years of neglect.
What if we thought about self-care as something preventative instead? When life gets hard, we lean on our ability to regulate our emotions, make decisions, and ask for help. Those capacities are very difficult to build for the first time in the middle of a crisis. They get built long before we need them, in how we care for ourselves and for the relationships that hold us together.
“I’m fine” often means “I’m still functioning”
So many of us have become remarkably good at overriding what our bodies are telling us. We add caffeine when we’re tired. We tell ourselves we’ll make the appointment after this project, after the holidays, after everyone else is taken care of. Some of us have lived with exhaustion for so long that we’ve started calling it our personality.
You can be working, answering every message, and keeping track of who needs to be where on Tuesday, and still not be well. For women especially, I want to say this clearly. When someone attributes what you’re feeling to stress or hormones, that should be the beginning of a thoughtful assessment. It should never be a convenient way to end the conversation. If you’ve ever been told your labs look normal when you know you don’t feel like yourself, my conversation with Ann Konkoly on hormone replacement therapy and perimenopause is worth your time, and so is my solo episode on brain health for women, which looks at what we can do now to protect ourselves later.
Sometimes the story that helped us survive keeps us from receiving care
Ten years ago, when I wrote Put On Your Big Girl Shoes, I was fascinated by the private conversations women have with themselves when they’re afraid. I still believe that inner conversation matters, but I understand the strong woman differently now. If you’ve always been the strong one or the responsible one, can you say out loud that you’re scared? Can you let yourself need someone?
Her strength was never meant to be measured by how little she needs. And those big girl shoes were never supposed to become one more thing she can never take off. If you want to go deeper into where those inner messages come from, go back and listen to The Voices in Your Head: Whose Are They Really?
We were never meant to carry it alone
Before any of us learned to calm ourselves, someone else did it for us. Another person held us and helped our nervous system settle, and we never fully outgrew that need. In the episode I share a brain imaging study that shows just how much the presence of someone we trust changes how we experience a threat.
For many women, and especially for caregivers, receiving help is so much harder than giving it. Someone brings dinner, and before we’ve taken the first bite we’re already planning how to pay them back. Care was never meant to be a ledger. Across a lifetime of relationships, it moves back and forth. I talked about this in The People Saving You Without You Knowing It, and if you’re carrying a caregiving load that no one else seems to see, What If I Don’t Want to Be the Caregiver? may help you feel less alone. And if saying yes has become your automatic answer, my episode on people pleasing looks at why that happens and what it costs.
Our silence shapes us, too
There’s one more part of ourselves that rarely comes up in conversations about self-care, and it’s the part of us that has to live with our choices. Every time we see something that conflicts with what we value and decide it’s easier to stay quiet, something shifts inside us. I’m not talking about confronting every person in every situation, because safety and power are real. But avoiding discomfort and protecting our well-being are not always the same thing, and in the episode I talk about what it might look like to care for that part of ourselves as well.
A different question to ask this week
Instead of grading yourself on how well you’re doing self-care, I’d love for you to ask something gentler and more honest. What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy to hear? And which relationships in your life need your attention now, before anyone is in crisis?
If what you need most right now is something lighter, The Power of Play for Adults is a good place to start. That counts too.
Thank you for riding along with me. I’d love to continue this conversation with you at The REAL Conversation, my free monthly live gathering for women who want honest talk about life, identity, and what it means to live more truthfully.
