Is it selfish to take care of yourself? What do you think? Here are my thoughts.

I think, in order to do this important topic justice--and since we have lots of people on Hive who speak English as a second (or third, or fourth!) language--I might start with some definitions.

self-care

"the practice of activities that are necessary to sustain life and health, normally initiated and carried out by the individual for him- or herself." ~ Oxford Reference

Or to simplify, you could say:

Self-care is "doing things to take care of yourself".

Most of us do things to take care of ourselves as a matter of routine. We eat, we sleep and we do enough work to maintain a roof over our head. Most people I know brush their teeth every day, do some kind of daily exercise and maintain at least one relationship where they can talk about how they feel.

These are all examples of "self-care".

But, of course, most of us can be taking better care of ourselves.

We could eat better than we do. We could sleep more or take actions to improve the quality of our sleep. We could do work that more nourishing to our soul than many people's jobs are.

We could brush our teeth after every meal, do exercise that brings us more joy and maintain a range of relationships where we feel safe to express how we're feeling.

But most of us don't. Sometimes we don't do these "extra" things because we believe we're "too busy" or because we think we're "too lazy" or that the changes we seek would be "too hard".

But often we don't prioritise doing "the things that are necessary to sustain life and health" because we fear that to take such good care of ourselves would be selfish.

selfish

"lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure" ~ Oxford Languages

To simplify this, you could say:

Being selfish means "looking after your own needs and wants ahead of others'.

Interesting! They kind of sound the same, right? Self-care and selfish?

But here's the thing: the word "selfish" has all sorts of negative connotations as if it's bad to "take care of yourself."

However, if you're an able-bodied human anywhere between about 15 and 95 years old then who is going to take care of your day-to-day needs if you don't?

We all need to be responsible for taking care of ourselves first.

There are exceptions, of course: a parent of a baby or young child may need to put their child's needs ahead of their own sometimes. And an able adult might need to take care of a slowly, dying family member or a relative with a severe disability in such a way that sometimes the carer's needs have to be put aside for a short period of time.

But none of these roles work if the parent or carer doesn't get to mostly prioritise taking care of themselves.

Is it selfish to take care of yourself?

Maybe. Maybe by the very definition of the word it is selfish. However, I think we need to recognise that it is not bad to take care of ourselves. In fact--if we want to care for anyone else or do anything meaningful in the world--I think we have to.

{All photos taken by me on my trusty Google Pixel 2XL phone.}