Ep5 - Self-Care
Welcome to the Rebrand Revolution. From humble beginnings in healthcare, to an act of revolution in the civil right's era, to an $11 billion dollar industry. Self-Care has been on one hell of a journey since it first appeared in use in the early 20th Century. In this episode Sidonie Henbest explores the roots of self-care and the emergence of its evil twin the self-care industry, tracing its part in our past, present, and future. Ultimately reminding us that we can only be of benefit to others if we first take care of the self.
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In this episode, I reference the following:
Harvard Business Review
link to "How Self-Care Became So Much Work" -
This podcast is recorded on Kaurna Country. We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Kaurna people as the traditional owners and custodians of this land.
You are listening to Rebrand Revolution, the podcast where we take today's pop culture cliche and turn it into tomorrow's empowered call to action. My name is Sidonie Henbest, and thank you for joining me.
Each episode of Rebrand Revolution will pick one term or word that makes up part of the lexicon of pop psychology, self development, self improvement, leadership, the language that inundates us every day at work and in play and makes us feel less like ourselves, even though, for all intents and purposes, it's about making us better. Then we'll look at the good, the bad and the ugly of it, how it started out, where it's got to now, and I'll propose a rebrand or reframe to help us find our way back to these words. I like to think of it as a makeover for our heads, not our faces. All right, all right. It is time to slip into a bubble bath, sip on some Chardonnay, slap on that face mask and chill out. That's right. This week's episode of Rebrand Revolution is all about self care. Hang on a second Sidonie, that sounds like a pretty nice collection of things there. Don't you use this podcast to flip scripts and turn things on their heads and offer a different perspective on buzzwords? Kind of blow them up from the inside. But I like massages and I really like candles and wine. We all do. In fact, we like it so much that in 2018 the Harvard Business Review estimated that the self care industry globally was worth a staggering $11 billion. That is enough to make you choke on your Chardonnay.
What used to be about looking over the neighbor's fence at their life, their car, their kids or their lawn, is now about looking at perfect lives, perfect bodies and smoothie bowls of millions of influences all over the world. Our perspective on what we have or don't have is now global. If you're feeling good, you know, it'll only take a second for you to be reminded that someone you know or aspire to be has something better feeling bad about yourself. Well, good news. Let's see how we can make you feel worse. It's pretty dire, isn't it. Before despair sets in, however, and you need to enact your own emergency self care protocols, let's get down to business. I've picked us a couple of definitions of self care for this week, just to make sure we understand and are on the same page about what it means. It's described in the OED as a noun, "the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one's own health". An example in sentence, "autonomy in self care and insulin administration". And a second definition, "the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress". Example, in sentence, "expressing oneself is an essential form of self care". I went a bit further with this one, and I actually found the current working definition from the World Health Organization as well. And W.H.O. has a working definition of self care that is as follows - "the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health and cope with illness and disability, with or without the support of a healthcare provider". So whether or not we take the dictionary definition or a working definition of it, self care, I think we can agree is the practice of individuals looking after their own health and well being, using the knowledge and information that's available to them. You may have already noticed that neither the World Health Organization nor the Oxford English Dictionary include any references to the industry of self care as part of their definition. There are no bubble baths. There are no digital detoxes. There are no weekends away in Aspen. There are no massages and pedicures and girls' nights out. In fact, they are noticeably absent from the definition, and that is going to turn out to be a very interesting. Line of inquiry. Indeed. So without further ado,
Like all of the words and phrases here at Rebrand Revolution, we're discovering that self care entered the lexicon with the full force of good. In fact, self care first appears in the early 20th century in a medical context. At that time, self care was predominantly used by doctors in reference to patients with chronic or long term illness, and in this sense, self care was about the ability to take small, regular, consistent actions every day that may include everything from injecting your own insulin to taking a breath of fresh air outside, it gave people the opportunity to have a part to play in their own care. As the 20th century wears on, we start to see radical global shifts in awareness and politics and self care reappears in a more academic context as part of the process of recognizing the the long term medical effects of warfare, specifically things like post traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The next evolution in the idea of self care comes as part of the civil and women's rights movements, when we see some really extraordinary work come out of the civil rights movement of the United States, acknowledging the interconnectedness between personal well being and societal change and also the role of self care in the female identity, it is a remarkable history for such a young word. What I really notice, though, is that both the medical roots and the later social evolution of the idea place the emphasis on care and attention to self as an active agency. Taking care of oneself is a way of having some control in otherwise powerless world, and that is better than good. That is powerful.
With such hallowed beginnings in the early 20th century, it seemed that self care was on a path for really good things. But at some point, and I've actually been trying to work out exactly when I think this happened, but it seems that self care skied right off-piste in the 21st century. Perhaps this was off the back of the 1980s and 1990s when fiercely and aggressively trying to acquire everything in sight, we started to realize that we really weren't that happy. We didn't feel that okay at all, as it turned out. And perhaps and rather shockingly, having everything might not equate to being happy, or, in fact, mean anything at all. Like I said, I don't know if there is actually a signpost in history that points to the exact spot, but I do know that it is marked by mass gross consumption. And this is consumption of anything you can name, food, booze, pills, cigarettes, fashion, TV, holidays, sex, choose your poison. Choose a couple of poisons. So at the beginning of the 21st century, we are at an all time consumer high. It's important to talk to this because the consumption is a side effect of a lack of well being, and that lack of well being is because we are ignoring what's going on for suddenly there is a genuine health crisis, and very shortly after that, there is a very real and very scary mental health crisis that is being exacerbated by a new and even more sinister creature on the scene social media. The arrival of social media networks provide a vanity mirror the size and the scope of which we are only now coming to realize about a decade later.
Sometimes I wonder how they'll describe this time to generations to come, if we are, in fact, lucky enough on this planet to have generations to come, plural. And I thought it might be a little bit like this. It was as if we had all found ourselves in possession of our very own magic mirror mirror on the wall, only this one was in the palm of our hand, and we could ask it, who is the fairest of them all, as often as we liked. And it's in my version of the story that this is where it went, really ugly. You see, if at this point, the idea of self care had re emerged via the networks of social and health professionals who were interfacing the crisis on the ground, we may well have found ourselves back at square one, where doctors were recommending small daily acts of care for the body and the mind, and women especially, were taking back the idea of self care as a vital first step in care for not only themselves, but their families, their loved ones and their communities around them. I think we could have seen something quite extraordinary happen. We would have healed ourselves. Instead, what happened was the commercial potential for misery was just too great to pass up on. And the self care industry, where you must buy your happiness, emotional regulation or sense of purpose from somebody else, was born. That magic mirror that I referred to, facilitated by the speed and availability of information anywhere across the globe, meant that messaging about our lack of beauty, thinness, lifestyle, fashion, not to mention calm, success or feelings of worthiness, beamed to us cleverly and constantly, so that no human in the civilized world was exempt. And that, to me, is the killer in all of this.
The self care industry relies upon the answers, being with them, not within us. No power for the people, no power for the individual, no ability to heal thyself. What if I told you that I think we've been tricked? We've been tricked into taking our eyes off what matters, tricked into being distracted by working and then numbing our feelings of emptiness and unconnectedness through consumption, so that we're good for nothing else. We're certainly not in a state to ask questions or demand answers or even to hold our leaders accountable. No, we are way too busy believing that the only source of salvation lies outside of us, in the hands of other people, in the pockets of other people, and that our main job in life is to shift cellulite from our thighs and make sure we have the latest athletic wear to wear. This is not caring for ourselves, is it? I mean, you hear it and you're like, Wow, that sounds pretty ridiculous. Actually sounds a little bit like self harm, really. It's certainly not self care.
Self Care arose as a method of reconnection in its earliest days. It was an invitation from healthcare professionals to those who were chronically ill. It was a call to action by civil rights activists and women to reconnect to themselves and their communities. And then, even when it went completely off piste and took us all nearly to hell in a handbasket, it was still somehow leveraging the need for connection, perhaps therefore part of the answer is just to acknowledge we know that the current way isn't working. They say, with all addictions, step number one is to admit you have a problem. And maybe we all need to take a moment to say, look, it's not that I don't enjoy these acts. It's not that I don't enjoy these lovely diversions, these things that I can do to amuse myself. But that's not the same as taking care of myself, almost without fail. Acts of self care will, in fact, involve nothing external. They're likely to involve a great deal of listening and just being because the truth is, what we most likely need is to be heard by ourselves. The reason I put forward self care is, of course, because, with an industry of that size, a mammoth empire on the back of it, it deserves to be unpacked and scrutinized. But it's more than that. It's about the possibilities. You see, people who are connected to themselves and living with the deepest respect for self are, by their nature, alive, awake and quite capable of revolutions. I think we deserve a different future. I think we deserve a better now. And so I'm going to leave you with this quote from Audre Lorde. "Caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare".
As always, I hope that this week's episode has given you pause for thought, and that that pause for thought might turn into the start of a conversation with friends, with loved ones, with strangers. It's my privilege to be here to be able to talk to you, and I'm grateful for the time that you give me. My name is Sidonie, Henbest, and until next time, stay curious.
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