Why Does Self-Care Feel Selfish?

The first time I heard the phrase “self-care,” I was in graduate school.

It was the beginning of the fall semester. During student introductions, professor after professor asked, “What do you do for self-care?”

As I prepared to introduce myself during my first class, I stared at the question prompt and immediately felt stuck. Admittedly, I didn’t really know what self-care was. On some level, I knew taking care of yourself—meeting your basic needs like getting enough sleep, eating a somewhat healthy diet and exercising—was important, but I couldn’t think of anything I did that would classify as “intentional self-care.” I ended up stealing a mix of my classmates’ answers and sat in discomfort as I started to realize intentionally caring for yourself is not a luxury but a necessity.

Self-care can seem foreign if we’ve grown up in environments where we’re taught our needs aren’t a priority. As an athlete, you’re often implicitly encouraged to ignore immediate needs to achieve your training goals. When you’re feeling tired, emotionally spent or in pain during a practice session, you learn to “suck it up” to finish the day’s job. Needs become inconvenient, and stopping to care for those needs—to care for yourself as a human, not just an athlete—is often incompatible with the athletic mindset many of us have adopted.

Paired with this, many of us who grew up in subjective sports can develop people-pleasing tendencies because our success was, in many ways, dependent on pleasing a panel of judges. In our relationships, we become adept at reading other people, knowing what they need and how to care for them. Others’ needs can start to override our own. Intentionally caring for ourselves? That starts to feel wrong. It’s unnecessary. It’s just not for us.

It can feel selfish.

But is it?

When we’re being selfish, we are putting our needs first—without considering others’ needs. Our needs are the only needs that matter. We adopt a black-and-white mindset, a mindset where the spotlight stays on us and no one else.

An example I like to use with clients involves the mints in my office. Let’s say there is one mint left, and we both want it. I just had a huge lunch, and I’m not at all hungry; I just want the mint. You tell me you haven’t had time to eat all day and are starving. If I take that mint just because I want it without considering you might need it a little more than I do, that is selfish. In this example, I’m not considering your needs at all; grabbing the mint is only about my desire.

Self-care, on the other hand, is not black-and-white. When we’re engaging in self-care, we are considering our needs and the needs of those around us. We are aware of how our behavior may impact others, but we’re not automatically treating someone else's needs as more important than our own.

Even if we understand this, self-care can still feel uncomfortable if we aren’t sure what behaviors qualify as true self-care. Is self-care what we often see on social media: champagne pedicures, shopping sprees at HomeGoods and hours-long bubble baths?

It can be. But it’s also helpful to identify how we know when we’re engaging in self-care. If part of the criteria for self-care is that we aren’t harming another person through our care of ourselves, we also want to make sure we aren’t harming ourselves through that care. To do this, we want to assess how our current self-care behaviors will impact our future self.

This means if we drink champagne while getting a pedicure but know we always get a headache after drinking alcohol, that’s likely not great self-care. Or, if our HomeGoods shopping spree means credit card debt, the shopping spree is going to be harmful to our future self.

This criterion can also help us expand our definition of self-care to less talked about arenas like advocating for our boundaries and responding to strong emotions.

For example, if we have dinner plans with a loved one, but we’ve had a long week and need rest, it can sometimes be challenging to know the best path forward. We might feel guilty canceling dinner to stay home, as all the reasons canceling dinner is “wrong” might swirl through our heads. Because self-care isn’t black-and-white—in this example, our loved one has a need to see us, and we have a need for rest—it can be helpful to look for the middle ground in situations where guilt presents. Can we find a compromise where we cancel dinner but make plans for lunch the next day? Here, we balance our need with consideration for our loved one’s need. And, if we can’t find a middle ground, sometimes self-care is sitting in the discomfort of someone else’s disappointment.

Self-care is also choosing to get in the car, showing up for work and giving the presentation we’ve been stressing about all week despite intense anxiety telling us to bail on the day. It’s sitting with our grief after a loss. It’s nurturing ourselves, meeting ourselves with compassion and, most important, listening to ourselves.

Each time we check in with ourselves and become curious about our feelings and needs, we are engaging in an act of self-care. It isn’t always comfortable or about choosing what feels good in the moment, but it is about bringing us closer to ourselves and creating a more satisfying and meaningful life—a life that balances our needs and the needs of those we care about.

The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.