It was Socrates who essentially said: Put your own mask on first.
“Epimeleia heautou” or “care of the self” was central to his discourses on ways to tackle life’s challenges, including parenting. A 4th-century-BCE book by his pupil, Plato, describes how two Athenian fathers sought Socrates out, looking for advice on how to best educate their sons.
Socrates redirected the conversation, Plato notes, to the critical philosophical question: How can we truly care for others without caring first for ourselves?
It seems like a simple enough idea. Yet, particularly given how it can intersect with aspects such as feminism, motherhood and race, the idea of self-care has always been a political one.
As recently as the 1960s, mothers who left children in a playgroup or made time for a yoga class were seen to be rebelling (and violating the idea of the mother as a selfless being), historian Lynn Abrams notes, in her book Feminist Lives (2023).
The idea took on radical, anti-capitalist tones amid the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the US. The Black Panther Party advocated taking charge of one’s wellbeing as a means of rebellion against a system that sought to dehumanise and invisibilise the Black person in all contexts except those of service and utility.
As part of this effort, the party organised free health clinics and mental-health programmes. Activists such as Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins championed yoga and meditation, including while in prison, and later promoted mindfulness practices at recreational centres in Black neighbourhoods.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” activist and writer Audre Lorde wrote, in an essay in 1988.
Self-care, in the Black context, extended to caring for one’s marginalised community, says Karla Scott, a professor of communication at Saint Louis University in Missouri and author of The Language of Strong Black Womanhood (2017).
And it extended to finding ways to cope with systemic injustice. “Practiced faithfully, radical self-care involves owning and directing our lives and choosing with whom, how and how often we engage in our nested, interconnected worlds such that we can be unapologetically ourselves in the face of unrelenting pressure and expectations to be otherwise,” as academicians Donna J Nicol and Jennifer A Yee put it, in their essay Reclaiming Our Time (2017).
Healing without help
By the 1980s, two new movements were gaining momentum that would serve as a boost to the idea of self-care as an essential component of modern living. The ideas were work-life balance and wellness.
While Halbert L Dunn, head of the US National Office of Vital Statistics, published a book titled High Level Wellness in 1961, the movement caught on from 1979 onwards, when journalist Dan Rather began to promote it on his news programme 60 Minutes. “Wellness is really the ultimate in something called ‘self-care’,” Rather said.
This was already becoming an idea linked to capitalism. With the right self-care, it was said, one could be more productive, realise one’s “full potential”, even fend off illness, stress and anxiety before they began to impact one’s day-to-day.
Products were soon folded into the format, with magazines and journals offering advice on everything from the right kind of running shoes to the newest superfoods.
The growing commercialisation of self-care does come with a silver lining, says historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation (2022). It is now almost a cliché to talk about the emotional, cognitive and social benefits of mindfulness and relaxation, while just a few decades ago such ideas were seen as fringe and even subversive.
Another defining characteristic of the rise of self-care has been the centrality and agency of the individual, she points out.
This has been both empowering and troubling. On the one hand, it has allowed people a more active role in their own well-being. The flipside, of course, is that staying well has become understood as the responsibility of the individual, even in a world of great inequality.
Policy, and experts, have a vital role to play. We mustn’t forget that, Petrzela says.
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