How much do I love myself? According to my bank statements, it’s quite a lot (but not as much as a few years ago). I’m working out how much I’ve spent in the last 12 months on self-care to make myself feel better and to self-improve. It’s often an uphill struggle to feel I’m doing the job properly; either I feel I can’t afford the luxury of pampering and healing myself, or I just don’t have the time anymore. Then I forget what self-care really is. Isn’t it about personal growth, boundaries, connection, compassion, self-acceptance, and even helping others? If I did that more, wouldn’t I feel a million dollars?
At times, though, self-care feels as simple as a good night’s sleep. But even that comes at a cost. Magnesium bath salts and supplements cost me £150 a year. Then there were the organic candles (£32 each), the six months on Ozempic (£169 per month), and the psychic (£200). I ditched the weekly massages (that would add on another £4,160 a year), despite at one point feeling like I couldn’t live without them due to the stress I held in my body. I’ve long given up the gym membership, which was £65 a month. It feels impossible to factor it into my life, as a single working mum juggling two young children. I can’t afford a nanny, and my kids are too old to sit in a gym creche.
I’ve swapped lots of this out for free activities, such as power walking the dog and breathing deeply. I’m not sure if this is even self-love, or a basic human function and my responsibility as a pet owner. I am not over-indulgent: no manicures, pedicures, Korean glass facials, spa trips, or wardrobe consultants. It’s pretty basic.
But after totting it all up to include things like the hairdresser (£720), a quick dose of the injectable Profhilo for facial hydration (£250), dynamic reformer pilates (£480), week-long juice cleanses (£600), top-notch vitamins (£240), one-off Botox (£250), an excellent skincare trio with cleanser, day cream and night cream with a serum (£600), electrolyte sachets (£144), teeth whitening (£395), and a few self-help books (£50), among other things, such as Morpheus8 skin rejuvenation follow-up (£1250), and that vegan blue face paint peel (£149) that I swear by – as well as acupuncture (£400) and a meditation app (£49.99) – I’m looking at around £8,000 minimum annually (while holding back considerably).
I’ve always opted for quality over quantity during times of financial restraint, so in an ideal world, the list would be a lot longer. I’d get in that energy healer to clear my flat, see a nutritionist for gut health, buy the next-generation probiotics, and go to a couple of five-star wellness retreats per year. It’s often not until I stop that I realise how mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausted I am. Could I even cope on a silent retreat? I might not be ready to unleash the grief of losing my late father yet. Would I have grief counselling? Not really. The truth is that the private gong bath (£28) is keeping a lid on it all.
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the US is the largest wellness economy, with Americans spending more than $6,000 (£4,500) per person a year on wellness, compared to $3,342 per person in the UK. But in a climate of wellness overload, where we are inundated with self-care options, has it become a costly activity that keeps us striving for perfection and stuck in a mode of compare and despair?
Rina Raphael, journalist and author of 2022’s The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care, tells me that the wellness industry has, over the last decade of its heyday, commodified self-care with products and services promising instant happiness and relief from stress. But that can lead to a cycle of consumerism and potentially a neglect of deeper systemic issues.
“It’s not self-care itself that is the issue, but the way we’re being sold it,” says Raphael. “It’s been more synonymous with ‘treat yourself culture’, often self-soothing activities symbolic of a very aspirational lifestyle.” She says that many types of self-care are “dependent on a purchase”, something which has, she claims, “handed the problem back to the sufferer repackaged”. The problem, she says, is that it places the onus on the individual to fix themselves, with anything from “CBD toilet rolls” to “Sephora face masks”, without addressing the root causes of our problems – the social systems that leave us feeling tired and stressed in the first place.
“It’s about telling people they’re stressed because they didn’t prioritise taking enough bubble baths,” she says, “rather than a lack of childcare resources, paltry communal or government support for parents, dissatisfaction with the medical establishment – be it gaslit or ignored by practitioner or that certain women’s conditions are under-researched or underfunded.” It’s starting to change now, however, with the emergence of a much wiser consumer. “It’s no longer the Goop era,” she says. “People have got really sick of feeling like if you didn’t reach this glorified marketed zen, that it is somehow your fault. So you are seeing them reject this oversimplified interpretation of wellness and they are stopping the self-blame.” Actual progress, she says, only comes from engaging in whatever was responsible for the stress in the first place – “escapism and consumption do not promise real change”. And she believes the era of “polished, girlboss, millennial-pink wellness” is over. “People think it’s clownish.”
People have got really sick of feeling like if you didn’t reach this glorified marketed zen, that it is somehow your fault … they are stopping the self-blame
Rina Raphael, journalist and author
Dr Colleen Derkatch, author of Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture, agrees. “Self-care is often framed as a form of empowerment, a way for people to take control over their health and wellbeing by prioritising rest and repair,” she tells me. “But at the same time, current approaches to self-care tend to individualise problems that may be better understood and addressed as collective or social problems.”
She consistently found in her research that people engage in self-care activities at least partly to offset chronic illness, inadequate healthcare, insecure income or housing, long working hours, poor working conditions, as well as to address concerns about environmental contamination and pharmaceutical safety. “One interesting finding was that even when people doubt the effectiveness of their self-care practices, they value the comfort and symbolism those practices provide,” she says. “Self-care is also increasingly framed as a form of self-optimisation, and an individual moral duty so we can become our best selves.”
The challenge of self-care is that there is “no ceiling”: there is always something more we could and should be doing to fulfil our duty of taking care of ourselves. “There is always a new diet or beauty routine to follow, a new supplement to take, or a new practitioner to see,” she says. “And if we fail to become ‘well’ despite our efforts, we simply need to try harder or try something else.”
Clearly, many of us have got self-care wrong. Merely booking into a facial or a massage – and the endless grooming women put themselves through to appear beautiful by patriarchal standards – is not real self-love. It all stacks up towards making us feel better, but it’s a quick fix. A 2022 report showed that 34 per cent of Gen Z regularly practice mindfulness to handle stress and boost mental wellbeing. They also prioritise financial wellness as part of their broader self-care routines. I certainly know first-hand how much better I feel when I help another person and escape my own self-centred thinking.
Many studies have also found a link between being kind and altruistic with increased self-esteem, higher overall life satisfaction and reduced risk of depression. A recent meta-analysis published in 2020 that investigated the health benefits of volunteering for people aged 65 and older reportedly found evidence that the average volunteer has a 57 per cent chance of outliving the average person who does not volunteer.
A large investigation led by Professor Arjen de Wit, a sociologist at VU Amsterdam, covering data from a quarter of a million European participants and published in the European Journal of Ageing in 2022, suggests the benefits from volunteering may be cumulative. “In our study, volunteers have a 1 per cent slower decline in health than non-volunteers from year to year,” he tells me. “This is a small difference, but can add up if you continue volunteering when you age.”
I know that when I practice real self-care, my outsides match my insides and I feel a sense of peace. I can quieten the negative self-talk and parent myself through a hard moment in life. Half the time, it’s an impossible balance. I often reach for a self-care product or a wellness service. Like so many others, I too have defined my self-worth through external validation. It’s easy to spend on candles, massages and collagen powder in the name of self-love, but it takes time to accept oneself. Real self-care is about prioritising internal growth – not ticking something off a to-do list.
