What is self-care? What’s the difference between taking care of self and being selfish?

You have to take into consideration how it affects everyone around you.

In what way?

So it’s balanced.

In what way? Give me an example.

If it causes neglect on others, you need to find a way where it’s balanced for everybody.

Do you? Well …

Amanda?

Yeah, to me, self-care is taking responsibility for myself and my energy, and making sure that I’m looking after myself, cause if I don’t do that, I can’t do anything for anyone else, even though a lot of the time, I’ll do stuff for other people first before me, but I’m learning. Whereas selfishness is something that I’m, to me that’s like if I’m taking things from other people, then my energy’s affecting other people because I’m putting myself before others.

Don’t we do that when we have self-care?

I feel like selfishness is taking stuff from other people and just making it only about me.

Yeah, I think that’s true. But I think there’s confusion around how far we’re allowed to care for ourselves. What do you want to say, Haresh?

I was going to say that in self-care, I feel the difference between the two is the cost. So in selfishness, there’s always a cost. In sacrifice, there’s always a cost. But in self-care, there’s no cost. It’s inclusive because there’s a balance there. That’s how I see the primary difference.

So how does Olive’s statement that self care is to make sure everybody else is ok too, fit?

It’s like where do you set the boundary, to what degree am I responsible for someone else? Right? Then it becomes carrying and if you’re carrying people you’re again sacrificing. So you have to set that boundary of where you’re not carrying someone else, but it’s like you know that expression about teaching someone to fish and giving them the fish in hand. And if you’re constantly giving them the fish instead of teaching them how to fish, first of all, you’ll never get to practice self care and then you’re making someone else needy and dependant on you which is harmful as well.

What if you take care of yourself and you then look to take care of other people after? Because that’s what I think Olive meant. How does that work? How far does that helping other people go before it has an impact of your self-care? I think that’s where people get stuck in then starting to feel guilty or starting to feel selfish. At what point do you say – look, I’m prepared to go this far but you have to do the next bit?