When you're drowning, you just want that life raft, right? You just want the thing that's just gonna make you feel better immediately, and that's what faux self-care is. ![]() Why do you think faux self-care is so appealing? And then I stopped doing them, because I realized I was so mean to myself during the classes that I thought it was making me better, but it was also just making me feel really bad about myself. You just reminded me there were a few years where I was obsessed with spin classes. It's not that escape is bad, but it's an escape so that you can get away from all of the terribleness that's going on, or sometimes it can end up being something that actually gets turned into an achievement metric. And it usually maintains the status quo in your relationships or in your family life or in your workplace, and it doesn't actually do anything to change any of these larger systems.Īnd usually, especially for women and for people of color, it's an escape. It's something to buy or something to do. It's usually a noun, so it's usually describing some sort of activity or a product. It's always gonna be something that's prescribed from the outside. So I'm curious how you would define "faux" self-care? So the meditation apps, the bubble baths, the sensory deprivation tanks – all that stuff is sold to us as the solution, but it doesn't actually fix any of the real external problems that have caused us to feel so terrible to begin with, whether we're talking about white supremacy, whether we're talking about, you know, toxic capitalism, patriarchy, right? Or the fact that if you're a Black woman, you have to work for 19 months to make the same amount of money that a White man will make in 12 months. Buying a new day planner and signing up for a meditation class isn't gonna change the fact that 30 million Americans are uninsured and that a quarter of American workers don't have paid sick days. ![]() In your book, you're making the argument that none of that is actually self-care? But nothing was working and I was still really stressed. I have a section on my phone that's called "Calm Down Sis," and it includes all of the calming apps. So I tried everything: meditating, breath work, edibles. I was stressed with work, with the news, with life, and a lot of people told me I needed to prioritize self-care. Parker: So, in 2020-2021, I – like the rest of the world – was going through a rough patch. Lakshmin: What is "real" self-care? What is "faux" self-care? And why are those distinctions especially important for women of color?ī.A. ![]() On the latest episode of Code Switch, I ask Dr. But the definitions of self-care they had been sold weren't real solutions to their problems because, as she told me, "You can't meditate your way out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare, without health insurance, without access to actual, real, systemic support that is going to take care of the fact that our world is pretty much constantly on fire." In her practice, she says, her patients bring up the idea of self-care a lot. Lakshmin is a psychiatrist who specializes in women's mental health. That was before reading Real Self-Care: Bubble Baths, Cleanses and Crystals Not Included. In other words, it's my form of self-care. It's not just about getting my "energy cleansed." It's also about ignoring my neighbor's toddler stomping on the floor above me, or the police sirens outside my window, or the back-to-back meetings I sometimes have for hours on end. But with all of the madness in the world, that half-hour virtual session feels nice.
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