Last Tuesday, after finishing a long day of work, I had every intention of going for a walk. The weather was perfect, my sneakers were by the door, and I had already imagined how thirty minutes of fresh air and perspective would leave me calmer, clearer, and pleased with myself.
Instead, I drove to the pizza shop near my house and ordered a large vanilla milkshake, which I drank in my car while listening to a murder mystery audiobook.
I should probably mention that I have lactose sensitivity. Not severely, but enough that the digestive consequences of a large milkshake cannot be blamed on ignorance. I knew exactly what I was doing and did it anyway.
There is a version of self-care that looks beautiful from the outside, with its morning routines, gratitude journals, green smoothies, and nervous systems that remain regulated even when someone sends an email marked urgent at 4:47 on a Friday afternoon. According to this version, we care for ourselves by thoughtfully saying no to what depletes us, yes to what nourishes us, all while beginning the day with lemon water before anyone else wakes up.
I believe in many of those practices. I teach some of them and, on particularly organized days, even manage to follow them myself.
There are other days, however, when adulthood requires more than I seem to have available, and the most honest form of self-care is admitting that I am depleted rather than pretending a brisk walk and a few deep breaths will restore me. Sometimes meditation is exactly what I need; at other times, the more merciful choice is a milkshake in a parking lot while a narrator calmly reconstructs a cold case from 1987.
We do not talk about this version of self-care very often, perhaps because it is difficult to package as aspirational content. A parking-lot milkshake lacks the visual appeal of sunrise yoga, and no one is likely to build a wellness brand around knowingly consuming something their digestive system has repeatedly advised against. Still, these less polished moments may deserve more credit than we give them.
When Self-Care Becomes Self-Improvement
Somewhere along the way, self-care became entangled with self-improvement, until nearly every choice began to carry the expectation that it should move us toward a healthier, more optimized version of ourselves. Rest became worthwhile because it promised greater productivity later. Hobbies became vehicles for growth, and any feelings of joy began to seem as though they required a justification.
Once self-care is framed this way, it becomes one more arena in which we can perform, compare ourselves, and keep score. In this narrative, when we skip the walk, order the dessert, or stay up later than intended watching a familiar show, we then add self-criticism to whatever exhaustion or disappointment led us there.
Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion offers a useful alternative narrative. Her work suggests that how we respond to ourselves when we fall short may matter more than the fact that we fell short. People who meet their own imperfections with kindness tend to be more resilient and may also be more likely to make healthier choices over time because they are not expending so much energy punishing themselves for yesterday’s decisions.
In other words, berating yourself for drinking the milkshake does not make tomorrow’s walk more likely; it simply ensures that the milkshake comes with shame.
Wellness culture can also make us suspicious of comfort, especially when that comfort involves food, television, canceled plans, or anything resembling temporary escape. Yet research on emotion regulation suggests that people rely on many different strategies to manage difficult feelings, and whether a particular approach helps depends on the circumstances. Sometimes we need to turn toward an emotion and understand it. Other times, distraction or comfort may be exactly what enables us to keep going, particularly when we are depleted or cannot immediately change the source of our stress.
The milkshake does not have to solve the problem to serve a purpose. Sometimes it is simply a bridge between an afternoon that has taken too much out of you and an evening that will still require your presence.
Good Enough Self-Care
Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea of the “good enough mother” to describe parenting that did not need to be flawless to support healthy development. Children, he argued, do not require perfect responsiveness at every moment; they need care that is reliable enough over time.
I have been wondering whether the same principle applies to how we care for ourselves.
Perhaps we do not need a flawless self-care practice or a morning routine so consistent that it could be laminated. Perhaps we need good enough self-care, responsive to the life we are actually living. On some mornings, that may look like a run, a nutritious breakfast, and a thoughtful plan for the hours ahead. On others, it may involve canceling plans, changing into stretchy clothes, and watching a familiar show because familiarity asks so little of us.
Occasionally, it may look like a milkshake in a parking lot.
The larger goal may have less to do with optimizing every decision than with remaining in a caring relationship with ourselves, one in which we continue to notice what we need and answer honestly, even when the answer is not especially impressive. Lately, I have been trying to hold self-care choices more loosely by resisting the urge to rank every coping strategy according to its moral worth. A walk can be restorative, and so can ten quiet minutes alone with something cold and sweet. They serve different purposes and can both belong within a life that is healthy enough.
I am also trying to ask what I need before asking what I should do, because “should” often carries the accumulated voices of experts, expectations, social media, and the imaginary person who always remembers to stretch, hydrate, and always remember to bring a reusable grocery bag. “Need” tends to speak more quietly, which may be why it is so easy to ignore.
What we need and what we think we should do are not always the same, and perhaps the harder practice is trusting that difference without first building a case for why we deserve comfort. Some days that means taking the walk; on others, it means drinking a vanilla milkshake in the car while listening to someone explain blood-spatter analysis, then heading home slightly more able to meet the rest of your life.
I still regret nothing about that milkshake.
