When Self-Care Becomes Another Thing to Fail At

There's a version of self-care that lives on my to-do list. It sits right between "respond to emails" and "catch up on this week's documentation." It has a checkbox next to it. And some weeks, I check it. And some weeks, I don't...and then I feel guilty about that too.

If you've ever found yourself lying awake thinking I really need to take better care of myself while simultaneously feeling exhausted by the idea of it, this post is for you.

The Pressure to Self-Care "Correctly"

Somewhere along the way, self-care stopped being a gentle invitation and became a performance. It looks like a morning routine that starts at 5 AM, includes journaling, a green smoothie, and thirty minutes of meditation...all before anyone else wakes up. It looks like massages and bubble baths and saying no to things with confidence and ease.

For a lot of my clients (especially those in healthcare, caregiving, or high-pressure professional roles), this version of self-care just creates more pressure. They're already giving everything they have to others. Now they're supposed to have the bandwidth to build a wellness routine too?

When self-care becomes one more place to fall short, it stops being care at all.

"Care Tasks Are Morally Neutral"

One of the most freeing frameworks I've encountered in recent years comes from KC Davis's book How to Keep House While Drowning. While the title indicates household management, the book contains some of the most grounded, compassionate thinking I've come across on the subject of self-care and functioning under stress.

Davis's central idea is this: care tasks are morally neutral. Doing them doesn't make you a good person. Not doing them doesn't make you a bad one. They're simply things that need doing. The how, when, and whether you do them should be based on what you're actually capable of in a given season of your life.

She also introduces the idea of functional self-care, the simple, unglamorous things that actually keep us afloat. Eating something. Drinking water. Sleeping. Changing your clothes. These aren't achievements to be proud of or failures to be ashamed of. They're just maintenance. And on hard weeks, maintenance is enough.

I come back to this framework often, both in my own life and in sessions with clients.

If you're interested in exploring more of her work, KC Davis offers a free collection of resources at strugglecare.com/resources.

When Therapy Itself Becomes the To-Do

I want to name something I hear from clients, but that doesn't get talked about much: sometimes therapy becomes another thing to fail at.

Clients cancel because they haven't done the homework they assigned themselves since the last session. They feel like they should be further along by now. They feel guilty that it's been three weeks and they haven't practiced the grounding technique we talked about. They wonder if they're "doing therapy wrong."

I understand this more than they might expect.

When you're someone who holds a lot of responsibility (for patients, for a team, for a household), there's an internalized standard of performance that follows you everywhere. It doesn't clock out when your shift ends, and it certainly doesn't leave you alone when you sit down for your therapy session.

But therapy isn't a performance. It isn't something you can do wrong by showing up imperfectly. Showing up is the work, most of the time. The rest unfolds from there.

What I Actually Tell My Clients (and Myself)

When the all-or-nothing voice kicks in, the one that says if I can't do it right, why bother, here's the reframe I reach for:

• Good enough care is still care. A ten-minute walk is not a failure to exercise. Heating up a frozen meal is not a failure to nourish yourself. Going to therapy once a month (instead of every week) is not falling behind. These are accommodations, not compromises.

• Function before consistency. Borrow from KC Davis here: before you optimize your wellness, you have to be able to function. If you're in survival mode, the goal isn't a morning routine. The goal is to get through the day with some sense of yourself intact. Consistency matters, but it can only follow function.

• Rest is not a reward. This one is especially hard for high-achievers and healthcare workers. Rest tends to feel like something you have to earn, after you've done enough, helped enough, produced enough. But the nervous system doesn't run on merit badges. It needs rest regardless of whether you've checked everything off the list.

A Gentler Invitation

If self-care has started to feel like one more thing you're failing at, I want to offer a different framing: What if self-care wasn't about doing more, but about doing less harm to yourself?

What if it wasn't about achieving wellness, but about staying in enough contact with your own needs that you can hear them?

That might look like therapy. It might look like a nap. It might look like canceling plans you didn't want to attend, or finally eating lunch at a reasonable hour, or texting a friend back even though it's been three weeks.

It doesn't have to look like anything in particular. It just has to be yours.