How To Escape The “Faux Self-Care” Cycle
Men and women alike are duped by grifters who sell pointless baubles and trinkets. Here’s how to break out of it.
Behind the self-help industry rests a wide variety of cults. You have hustle bros who show off rented Lamborghinis to make you work hard. There’s also a subsection of that culture that believes misogyny is a perfectly normal thing to express. And then you have the big-name self-help gurus who have formed cults out of their base while doing nothing to solve cultural issues.
For decades, the industry has been run by grifters rather than people who are looking out for others and wanting to help. And another example to add to that pile is the obsession with material things and calling it self-care.
I will admit I’m calling the kettle black in this instance, as I do run a dropshipping store and the merchandise is advertised as self-care. On the surface, that’s definitely the case, however, there are some distinct differences.
Grifters in the faux self-care will focus more on the mystical and consumable aspects. They’ll sell crystals, cleanses, and bubble bombs. They’ll tell you that the crystals all have meanings, have spiritual connections, and provide help in particular instances.
They’ll tell you the cleanses and bubble bombs all have particular aromas that will make you feel like you're floating on clouds. That all of these things will help with burnout, depression, and maybe even physical illnesses.
I’m just selling some t-shirts with some dope designs.
But that’s what "faux self-care" is all about. Offering a simple experience and weaving it in as an actual remedy to whatever it is that you’re dealing with. These products fill in the gaps where access to health care and proper therapy would normally cover them.
And they provide a pretty convincing pitch:
If you do more of this one particular thing, eventually things will start to turn around. You’ll start to feel better.
The reality is clearly not the case. It’s just a pitch to get you to buy one more juice cleanse package or one more massage. As if the next one is going to be the one that lets you see significant results.
It’s the same idea as finding the solution to weight loss at the bottom of an extra-large chip bag.
There’s no quick solution other than introspection and rethinking how to take care of yourself and transform your quality of life. And maybe buying a t-shirt or two.
True self-care is finding more practical solutions, like building connections and meaningful relationships, taking parental leave, or demanding flexible work hours. Mark Manson once tweeted that eating a salad is self-care, and I agree with him.
There’s a lot more to self-care than buying those immediate consumable items. But it starts with getting a better idea of what that looks like and breaking free of what faux self-care has been selling. Here is how you can chip away at it.
If It Feels Good, Do It
Going on a juice cleanse, taking massages, buying crystals, and all of those other things are fine decisions in my book. However, there is a significant asterisk associated with those methods.
Do them only if you feel good about them.
I bought a few crystals years ago because, as a kid, I liked how they looked. I didn’t particularly care about their meaning; that much was made clear when I got an amythest, a crystal that supposedly remedies a hangover, even though I've never gotten drunk in my life.
The key to self-care is to not use the methods as a crutch to fix whatever you’re dealing with. Rather, it’s an activity that should add meaning to your life.
If you want to do yoga as a form of self-care, go for it. Just don’t use it as a means of posting selfies and pretending you’re having a good time. Do some yoga if you genuinely want to be doing it and recognize the additional benefits that come with it, such as greater flexibility and mobility.
Another way to look at it is that when you make self-care a goal, you start to get numb to the effects of it, and it doesn’t provide much help. But things begin to change when you consider self-care as a means of satisfying your personal values and decisions.
With that in mind…
Figure Out Your Values
This is the tough part. On top of the various goals and tasks you have to do and people to look after, you need to set aside some time to consider what you value. It’s arriving at this particular state where faux self-care grips people because they provide the easier solutions.
Instead of thinking deeply about the root cause of an emotional problem, it’s easier to think you just need a massage or a little pick-me-up.
But soon enough, you’ll find yourself back in this situation with no real solution. That is, until you stop yourself and begin to reflect.
Here’s a thought experiment:
Imagine yourself throwing a nice dinner party and having a budget of a few hundred dollars to work with. From there, go into extensive detail about everything.
Would you want this to be a potluck? What kind of food would you generally expect there?
Are you planning any themes or costumes that you’d want people to wear?
Would you want guests to play icebreaker games? Or maybe keep people in particular bubbles, encouraging them to have deeper conversations with those at their assigned table?
How you respond to those questions—and any others you can think of—says a lot about you as a person, specifically what you value. For example, if you want guests to play icebreaker games, this could be a sign that you’re looking to make meaningful connections with friends. For the deeper conversations, it would be focusing on key people in your life.
All in all, the thought experiment is to find out what you value and then structure your life in a way where you’re able to do that. This helps with filtering activities and other pulls as well.
Change How You Approach Boundaries
This tip is bound to show up in self-care articles here and there, but people tend to misuse this tactic. Either the boundaries aren’t good enough or they’re too rigid. You see examples of this in various ways:
- You have a “don’t bring work into the house” policy, but if you get a call from your boss, that policy becomes flexible.
- If you expect someone you don’t like to be at an event, you turn down the invite without thinking it might be enjoyable with other people around.
- You have strict timing for certain activities and you lose all desire to follow through with it after that time has passed.
In the end, all of these are knee-jerk reactions and it’s easy to succumb to those. That is unless you change how you behave about boundaries.
One consideration is to simply pause for a moment and really consider three potential responses: yes, no, or a compromise.
The idea here is to not think of boundaries as lines in the sand or brick walls. Rather, treat them as very flexible depending on the situation. To be clear, there are ups and downs to saying yes or no, but you might miss out on something more if you can negotiate.
For example, I’ve struggled with getting to the gym, and I’m finding that setting a specific time to do an exercise leads me to skip it and not do much exercising at all. What I want to get myself into doing is that if I skip a workout, I at least get myself to go out for walks and to do stretches, or to notice the times where I’m idle and either do work or move my body.
Getting into this frame of mind is difficult for a lot of people. Self-care is all about being selfish, and either people take that too seriously and develop narcissistic tendencies, or they put others priorities over their own lives out of fear of being labelled. There is a healthy medium, and that is learning it’s okay to be selfish while also keeping in mind there are other people in the world.
What this trick ultimately does is give you time to make decisions that align with what you value.
Feeling Less Guilty About The Decisions You Make
Looking at social norms and cultural expectations, you’ll find them unusual and contradictory. With the planet warming up, a good idea would be to start biking more. But a grown man on a bike looks silly. They should be driving cars.
The list goes on, but the fact remains that there is a certain level of guilt that comes along with prioritizing one thing over another. I’m not contributing as much to the warming of the planet, but chances are I’ll be sweaty if you want me to go someplace in town that I could bike to.
It’s impossible to shut off guilt entirely, which is why I encourage you to feel less guilty about the decisions that you make. In economics, I was taught about opportunity costs, and those costs are literally everywhere.
Working on my business means growing it and making more money, but it also impacts my health and further reinforces my sedentary lifestyle. I have to live with that decision, and this final step is all about recognizing that while also dialling down the emotional guilt that comes from that decision.
Even if I skip the gym, I can still make an effort to eat healthy foods, drink lots of water, and go for walks. That fact allows me to focus more on my work and other important parts of my life.
Feeling guilty by prioritizing one thing over another is natural. We wish we could do it all, but we lack the time and energy to do so. What matters in the end is do what you think is the best decision at the time. Self-care is about what makes you feel good after all.
Self-care is far more nuanced than it appears on the surface. We’re dealing with emotions, so it’s easy to be manipulated into thinking you need those crystals, massages, or cleanses to feel whole. But the reality is that we need more introspection and to figure out whether those remedies are actual solutions to the problems that we have.
There’s nothing wrong with a little self-indulgence in these areas. Crystals are nice to look at, and a monthly massage could help make your yoga or workout sessions more tolerable. And having a new shirt might be fun to wear if you’re tired of wearing the same coloured shirt all the time.
What matters is that those things don’t become crutches or are perceived as some absolute remedy to help us overcome deep emotions, trauma, stress, anxiety, or whatever else we’re dealing with.
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