Self-Care: Separating the ‘func’ from the Function.
Musings from a Clinical Psychologist

A lot has been written through the decades about the cluster of ideas, intentions, and concomitant behaviours that cohere around the now highly augmented term ‘self-care’. Having clung to the coattails of its more scientifically rigorous cousin ‘Mindfulness’, the term has come to represent an all-encompassing catchphrase for those positively-intended, self-directed behaviours (or thoughts) that we should all, according to self-care at least, be aspiring towards.

We are urged today to celebrate our self-care acts, to announce them proudly at our monthly book club meetings when one declares how long and satisfying one’s candlelit bath was. Or at the halfway house, when, after one’s inhibitions are suitably curtailed after a few beers, it is made known to all that they finally found it within themselves to treat themselves to that Weber they’ve always wanted.

To perhaps the surprise of many, this is not as self-care had intended itself to be when the concept was first formulated back in the 1950s. Yet, despite the position it has attained in the real estate of our collective 21st century consciences, self-care has, for many, failed to provide a useful care guide to revive those exhausted, burnt-out parts of ourselves. It has, at least in my opinion, failed to justify its renown. Moreover, as a clinical psychologist I have found that many of my patients, given the phrase’s rather lofty (at times, narcissistic) heights, feel the compounded (negative) interest of shame and guilt for failing at their self-care obligations.

I hope that the irony here is as apparent to you as it is to me. That the things we are supposed to be doing to help ourselves tick over in the direction of sanity – those gentle, kind, quiet, private moments – have, in fact, become anything but caring and instead present themselves as another KPI that I am held to account for. What is going on here?

With this three-part article I hope to dispel some of the frenetic ‘loopiness’ that has crept its way into this otherwise well-intentioned, important, utilitarian term. The goal of this article, then, is to restore in the reader’s mind the inherent value of the term so that self-care can continue to be drawn upon reliably – albeit imperfectly – by its purveyors as an adjunct to their overall wellbeing, including their mental health. In part three of this piece, I will try to orientate the reader back to a logical starting point, which I feel is the most important self-care act that one can engage in and monitor during their lifetime. So important is this one thing, in fact, that many of the other self-care acts that one might hope to actualize indeed rest upon the consolidation of this act first, given its unique capacity to set up and/or prime the brain’s neurochemistry for optimal functioning. Can you guess what it is?

Before we get there though, we need to understand why self-care today is so hard to achieve and sustain. To explore this question, we need to look to our evolutionary biology for clues as to its origins and imagine for a moment how our ancestors – both distant and proximal – might have contended with its conceptualization at different periods in time.

Beginning with the brains of one of our most distant ancestors – the nematode (roughly 550 million years ago) – it would be impossible to locate the use the term ‘self-care’ in their actions and behaviours in any such manner as it is today recognised. Why? Because they were too busy learning the fundamentals of how to survive, grappling with non-trivial things like; where is it safe enough to digest the food I recently consumed, or how can I avoid getting eaten at every turn.

In other words, their biological imperatives were supremely basic, as were the brains that were employed in their survival (they had about eight hundred neurons in total, compared to the almost ninety billion you and I have today). There was, at a maximum, investment only in some rough-and-ready reflexes, generalized stereotypic movements that were aimed solely at optimizing their chances of survival by seeking out states that were ‘good’, and, by equivalence to its opposite, moving away from or avoiding those states that were ‘bad’ for survival.

To our most distant relatives, titivations of self-care would have amounted to wasted time and resources (energy) that they never had to begin with. In those early primordial soups, self-preservation (staying alive!) was the only order of the hour (if not the minute). Learning how just to survive versus learning how to pass one’s time effectively through the window of one’s mind’s eye – with one’s best interests at heart – are two perspectives that are eons apart in terms of their respective survival mandates. Self-care then, if anything, would have certainly increased the likelihood of imminent death (an otherwise ‘bad’ outcome) for the nematode.

The simplicity of the imperatives that imbued their early sensoria might be aptly captured by conjuring up the memory of a simple childhood game you might recall, namely “hot” or “cold”. In the game one person attempts, often with eyes tightly shut, to take his cues from the other person’s verbal suggestions as to whether or not he is moving closer (i.e., getting ‘hotter’) to a reward (perhaps a chocolate hidden in the room), or further away from it (i.e., getting ‘colder’). Although far more primitive still, this scenario is a playful representative of the simplicity of our early ancestors’ plight. Whereas moving towards or away from a chocolate might elicit mutual giggles between two people, and certainly joy from the chocolate’s eventual discoverer, to our ancient ancestor’s movement to and fro was not a game at all – it was the very substrate of survival itself. Our ability today to even contemplate the inherent meaning of self-care, as we are here so doing, is an ode to their profound ability at having first survived, and then, subsequently, mastered, these humble and most treacherous beginnings.

Let us now fast forward many hundreds of millions of years to about seven million or so years ago to an era when our closer relatives, the chimpanzee, was a flourishing species. Is it possible here to conceive of their having, given their far greater complexity of being (relative to our shared nematoid ancestors), a concept of self-care? Could they, for example, take a restful pause whilst getting some much-needed vitamin D after the satiety of a good meal? Or might they have sought out the company of others, a grooming partner, perhaps, to bond with and share primitive communication? Did they spend time with others intentionally, gregariously, and with themselves deliberately, or suffer the emotional consequences in each case when they did not? Almost certainly, yes. Indeed, it is possible here to conceive of the beginnings of an emergent version of self-care via these primate rituals and behaviours. But, even so, one might still be hard pressed to consider these behaviours as self-care as they are conceptualized today, which entails a far greater elaboration of self-directed thoughtfulness. It seems that their (the Chimpanzee’s) lack of sophisticated use and understanding of the central tenets of selfhood (something that, admittedly, we are still grappling with in the 21st century), although clearly emergent, may have precluded a fuller extension of the domain self-care. But, here too, much like the nematode before them, the reasons for this delayed acquisition of selfhood and thus, self-care, are biologically and historically relevant. You see, whilst a chimpanzee might’ve been able to bask in the sun after a well-deserved meal, both the prevailing environment and the imperatives that ordained their individual and collective (the troop’s) survival, were still relatively ‘simple’ (and structured): stick together, don’t stray too far, fend off rival groups, mate when you can, protect the troop, groom one another (bond), play, eat, sleep, and mate some more (if I’m lucky). It’s almost as if our, that is – homo sapiens’ – growing appreciation of, and understanding in, the concept of “self” (which represents 50% of the semantic meaning of the term self-care), has ushered in a complexity which has, somewhat ironically, made accessing its very namesake frustratingly out of reach, at least in modern times.

Bryn O’Reilly is a South African-born clinical psychologist living in the Central Algarve, Portugal. It is from there that he runs his private practice, offering both in-person and online services. Should you wish to contact Bryn, please click here