Re-imagining self-care: what it really means for university students
Self-care has long been a culprit of capitalist ploys. But it’s time we reinvent self-care by embracing personalized practices.
Imagine this: your phone alarm goes off like a gunshot, and you go back to burning holes in your laptop screen. It’s 3 A.M., and sleep seems like it’s out of the cards tonight, just like most other nights this week. Just one more module. I can’t help it, it’s hell week!, you think to yourself. But the reality is, when you’re a university student, especially at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), every other week is an uphill battle. Juggling school, work, extracurriculars, and somewhat of a social life is hard, and figuring out a balance can take years. Just when you think you’re getting a hang of things, you’re dealt a curveball, and you’re back at the bottom of the ocean.
If we students don’t intentionally make it a point to take care of our physical and mental wellbeing, burnout is almost guaranteed. According to the Canadian Student Wellbeing Survey, around 53 per cent of post-secondary students have experienced burnout, which results from prolonged stress culminating in emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion. In other words, it’s when our bodies and minds simply run out fuel to keep the machine running. I am one of those 53 per cent of students who has experienced burnout. Going into my third year at UTM, I expected to be better at this by now. Little did I know, life was going to hit me like a bus.
The appeal of commercial self-care
Right now, we are knee-deep in midterm season, with exam season whispering our names from behind the gym. Coupled with the god-awful snowstorms we’ve been dealt with in the past couple of weeks, it is so easy for anything other than studying to take a backseat. And I get it, piles of coursework, a barren cold landscape, plus caffeine addiction equates to a university student with eternal bags under their eyes. Anything that doesn’t contribute to us acing our final is unworthy of our attention. But this mindset is not healthy; we know better, and we owe it to ourselves to make ourselves a priority.
This is where self-care comes in. We all know what self-care looks like, right? Or at least the glamourized, TikTok-versions of it. Cue the “showertok” videos with countless bubble bath products, a weekend in the Cayman Islands, or a high-pitched voice reminding you that “You totally need this new journal that is no different than the other journals you have rotting at home, except for the fact that it is ‘espresso brown’, the colour of the season! Never mind that you keep buying journals under the guise of self-care, when you hate journaling, you think it’s boring and a fad, and you’re never going to be consistent with it! It’s on sale!”
Sure, self-care is no longer a foreign concept due to its popularity on social media, but is this version of self-care actually helping us? Are we actually practicing self-care? The cookie-cutter, whitewashed, and algorithm-boosting drive of social media, and by extension, big brands, have devoid self-care of its true meaning and intention, rendering it to yet another capitalist ploy to feed big corporations. The commercialization of self-care reduces investing in our health to a trend that you can latch onto if you buy just the right products to fit a narrow and planned obsolescence-driven idea of “self-care.” If elaborate bathing techniques, pretentious journaling, or fancy ginger shots packaged in health buzzwords doesn’t suffice, we are left feeling guilty after investing money, time, and energy into ourselves. After all, isn’t that what self-care is about?
And so, we get caught in this cycle of overconsumption, unable to break free. One of the biggest perpetrators of this cycle is social media. How many times have you come across an influencer starting off a video with the phrase, “TikTok made me buy it” or “This is the one thing you need”. You interact with one post like that, and soon enough, your entire feed is just an echo chamber of stuff to buy so you become “that girl”.
A brief history of self-care
Self-care started within the medical community in the early 1950s, referring to practices that helped individuals prevent or manage health conditions through proper nutrition and exercise. However, it didn’t receive mainstream attention until civil rights activists in the 1960s, particularly the Black Panther Party, embraced it as a method to combat activist burnout.
Black Panther leaders Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins reported turning to mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation while wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of an FBI informant. Upon their release, they began advocating for the importance of nutrition, physical activity, and strong interpersonal connections as essential tools for navigating an hostile society.
This led to the incorporation of self-care into the Black Panther Party’s broader mission, pushing for the holistic well-being of the Black community amid racial oppression and sociopolitical reinvention. Their efforts went beyond personal health, encompassing medical services, food access, childcare, and community banking. By establishing these alternative support systems, they created of care beyond institutions tailored to the success of white Americans. The roots of self-care lie in marginalized communities’ efforts to sustain themselves within a system that systematically oppresses them. Yet, today’s representation of self-care couldn’t be more astray.
Social media portrays self-care as an all-or-nothing concept, where the idealized self is achieved by checking boxes off of a curated list of what others have deemed “healthy.” What gets lost in translation is that self-care is supposed to be personal. It’s literally about yourself. As broke university students, we can never reach the social-media-hyped standards of modern self-care. Sure, some people do get up at 5 A.M., have an elaborate workout and skincare routine, eat their greens, hang out with their friends, get a 4.0 GPA, and still remain mentally sane. But for the vast majority of us, that is not the case. Even getting out of bed at 7 A.M. for our early morning class takes a lot of willpower. But in my opinion, if we go to the early class and pay attention, we are actually practicing self-care.
Reimagining self-care for yourself, and not for the gaze of others
Self-care does not need to be an aesthetically pleasing picture curated for Instagram or for the gaze of invisible onlookers we have internalized through doomscrolling. It can be messy and plain, like watching your favourite TV show after you finished the assignment that gave you nightmares. Maybe we take an extra-long shower or read that book we’ve been eyeing: any leisure activity that isn’t directly related to our professional gain is self-care. We don’t need to be running at full speed all the time. Self-care can be going out with friends, even if it involves spending money, to reward yourself for making it through the week, the month, or the semester, even if you didn’t have the smoothest time. Proper self-care starts with detaching our self-worth from achievements, showing ourselves the grace we would our friends, and pursuing reasonable rewards not only when we’ve succeeded, but as a practice of self-love.
And how do we find the time for this self-care? This may be contradictory, but what works for me is scheduling it into my calendar. Yeah, it’s kind of sad that I am in a state where a lunch with a friend is an Outlook notification, but hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? Life gets hectic, and so anything that isn’t planned doesn’t happen. The truth is, unlearning the “trendification” of what self-care looks like is a work-in-progress. What works for me might not work for you; but I think that, especially as students, we need to take the time to learn what self-love means to us. Our academic success and emotional lives literally depend on it.
Things happen, life sucks sometimes. All we can do is try our hardest to remember that it’s our life. If we don’t have the time to do the little things that bring us joy, we aren’t really living, are we?
