I grew up with two immigrant parents who seemed to live to work. I can’t speak to who they could have been if they hadn’t immigrated to the United States and specifically to West Los Angeles, where they were surrounded by wealth and always trying to keep up. But I can share that my father was often up before 5 am to head to the dry cleaners he co-owned, and that I often wouldn’t see him until late, late into the night, even on Saturdays. My mom, who worked in banks when I was young, had more typical office hours, but she was still working until 6pm or later. As a family, we subsisted on takeout and leftover pizza. I bolstered this diet with cereal and milk… and lots of sweets. My diet was a joke to my friends when I was a teen and even into my adulthood. But when I got older… became a parent, it just wasn’t as funny. My breakfast of sour patch kids or dinner of ice cream. But this is what I ate growing up, what gave me comfort, what I have always craved.
Given my parents’ endless work hours, exercise or fitness weren’t really part of the equation. Yes, my mother would go on crash diets that she would quit after a few weeks. And she had a treadmill in her bedroom for a bit, often telling me that she was going to be thin whenever she finished using it. Her goal never seemed to be her health, mental or physical, but how she would look at the next party. My parents didn’t have time to take me to soccer practice or to sign me up for basketball, and just like I can’t tell you who they would have been if they hadn’t been driven to work tirelessly, I also can’t tell you who I would have been if I had parents who valued physical health, or who encouraged me to.
And given their late work hours and their desire to socialize during their little time off, sleep wasn’t a priority the way parents treat it now. On the weekends, my parents would often go to loud parties with their friends (something I still love about them, even now), but that meant I would be dragged along and we sometimes wouldn’t get home until 2 or 3am. If I was tired, they would tell me to find a place to sleep, so I would pull some chairs together and try to lay down, or find a corner that seemed quiet and post up with a book. On the nights when they weren’t out, my mom loved to read and my father enjoyed television shows, staying up late into the night and somehow still getting themselves up in time for work the next morning.
I learned a lot from my parents that still serves me. I have a strong work ethic, and I don’t give up easily. I care about social connections and time with loved ones. And I want to make sure that my children have what they need and are never left wanting, which I imagine is what drove my parents, too. I became very good at taking care of things. What I didn’t learn was how to take care of myself. I am someone who overfunctions. I take care of my family and show up for my community. While I went to community college, I eventually attended a university they were proud of and even earned a graduate degree. But the simple things, like getting myself to bed, eating food that nourishes me, caring for my body, these forms of self-care still evade me. These are the things I have had to learn from scratch, and in my work with clients, I find that many of them, high-achieving individuals, often struggle with these too. They will lead teams and help their companies grow, all while getting little sleep, living on snacks, pushing their bodies beyond what is sustainable. When they exercise, it’s often because they want to look good, not because they’ve learned to listen to what their body actually needs. That gap, between achieving and tending, is what this article is about.
What Does Basic Self-Care Actually Mean?
Over time, self-care has become a stand-in to justify our spending and consumerism. Shopping has become self-care. Buying expensive beauty products or grooming products has become self-care. A bubble bath, a long vacation, whatever. The term has expanded so much that it can now refer to nearly anything we do for comfort or pleasure.
I recently received an email from Esther Perel’s marketing team, and she advocates for eroticism being part of your self-care plan. And while I so value eroticism and honoring our sexual needs and desires, for individuals who are skipping meals or even denying their bodies’ need to use the restroom, thinking about eroticism may be premature.
Maslow’s hierarchy refers to our needs and how our most basic needs must be met before we can attend to other needs. Our foundational needs include air, water, food, and shelter. We need to address these before moving on to safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and finally, self-actualization. While I can argue that our need for safety, love, and belonging is also essential, and that we can feel immensely threatened when we do not have connection, I also think it is important to consider the basic needs many of us have learned to ignore.
The World Health Organization’s definition of self-care includes the everyday actions people take to maintain their health and well-being. For the purpose of this article, self-care is about taking care of our bodies and minds by listening to our bodies, getting rest, eating when we are hungry and stopping when we are full, responding to cues that we need to relieve ourselves, and moving our bodies as a way to care for them. These actions form the physical foundation that allows us to attend to the rest of our lives.
How Do Early Experiences and Social Conditioning Shape Self-Care Habits?
Even before we have the language to explain that we are hungry, tired, afraid, or uncomfortable, the people caring for us begin to show us how those needs will be received. They may respond with comfort and attention, or they may ask us to wait. We might also be met with dismissal or treated as though our needs are inconvenient.
These early caregiving experiences can shape how we relate to our own bodies and emotions later in life. Research on attachment, self-esteem, and emotional regulation suggests they can influence how much we trust what we feel, how comfortable we are expressing our needs, and how readily we respond to them.
Some of this is learned directly, and some of it is absorbed by watching the people around us. A child may be told to stop crying, finish everything on their plate, hold their bladder, or keep going when they are tired. How many of us were told we couldn’t leave the table until we finished our dinner? At the same time, children notice whether the adults in their lives eat regular meals, rest when they are sick, ask for help, or continue pushing through discomfort. In fact, research has proven that children pick up eating and activity patterns by observing these everyday family behaviors.
These patterns can become even more complicated when childhood is shaped by stress, conflict, or instability. Researchers use the term adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, to describe experiences like abuse, neglect, violence in the home, substance use in the household, and other forms of instability. Growing up around these kinds of stressors can require a lot of energy just to get through the day. Research has found that women who had not experienced ACEs were more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, like eating well, staying active, and managing stress. If you grew up in survival mode, paying attention to your own needs may not have been something you learned to do, and it can still be difficult to navigate in adulthood.
What Shapes Our Relationship With Achievement, Productivity, and Rest?
By adulthood, many of us have gotten very good at being productive, even if we don’t feel like that’s true and continue to be hard on ourselves (think about a high-achieving person in your life; do they experience this type of self-criticism too?). We work through lunch, answer emails when we are technically off the clock, stay up later than intended in order to finish something, and feel guilt and anxiety when there is still something on our to-do list. We may even feel a little uncomfortable when there is nothing we are supposed to be doing.
Part of this comes from what we have learned to value. From a young age, we receive praise for accomplishing things, like getting good grades, being responsible, working hard, or being someone other people can depend on. Inevitably, achievement becomes wrapped up in how we feel about ourselves. For many, feeling valuable becomes closely tied to succeeding and meeting high standards.
Our culture reinforces this in its own ways. In the United States, busyness can actually be interpreted as a sign that someone is important and competent. I think most of us have encountered some version of this. We compare ourselves to the high achieving/constantly busy person because we use them as a measure of success.
It makes sense, then, that rest becomes complicated. If being productive helps us feel responsible, useful, or successful, stopping can bring up guilt or anxiety about what we could be accomplishing instead. Research on people who view leisure as wasteful found that this attitude was associated with less enjoyment of leisure and poorer mental health. You can have an afternoon with absolutely nothing you need to do and still spend half of it thinking about what you should be doing.
The environments we work in can reinforce these ideas, too. Many workplaces reward people for working harder, taking on more, and being highly available. In those settings, overworking can start to feel like part of being a good employee. Workplace expectations around overwork are very common and make it harder for people to recover during their time away from work. Our relationship with productivity and rest develops within these larger systems, where certain ways of working are continually rewarded, expected, and admired.
What Makes It Difficult to Respond to Our Basic Needs?
Some days, we can move from one thing to the next for hours before realizing we barely ate or have been putting off going to the bathroom. By the time we notice, our bodies may have been trying to get our attention for quite a while.
Our ability to notice what is happening inside our bodies is called interoception. It is part of how we recognize internal sensations and understand what they are telling us. We also don’t all notice these signals at the same point. Hunger, for example, may not be possible for one person to ignore, while someone else may not register it until they are already feeling shaky or depleted. The more we ignore our body’s signals, the less attuned we may become to noticing them.
Our attention can also become so occupied with what is happening around us that we barely notice what is happening in our bodies. Many of us can relate to having a stressful workday where all we can think about is what needs to happen next. Chronic stress requires us to continually adapt to what is being asked of us, and our basic needs can become easier to overlook when so much of our attention is directed elsewhere.
Even when we know exactly what we need, following through can still be difficult. You can be completely exhausted, know you should go to bed, and still decide to keep working because a project isn’t as far along as you wanted it to be. This disconnect is sometimes called the intention-behavior gap, a common experience of intending to do something and still struggling to follow through.
Even recognizing that we need rest can bring up frustration with ourselves. We might notice that we are exhausted and judge ourselves for not being able to keep going. When needing rest feels like falling behind or failing to keep up, it becomes that much easier to push past the need.
What Happens When We Repeatedly Override Our Body’s Needs?
When the check engine light of my car comes up, sometimes it can take me days or even weeks to schedule its maintenance. My car doesn’t change its approach. The light still goes on every time I start the engine, and I briefly take note before heading to my destination, ignoring the message once again. Eventually, if I wait long enough (which I used to do when I was younger), something would go wrong. My car would make a weird noise or a weird smell, and I would swear in my head and finally schedule an appointment with a mechanic, probably paying more than I would have if I had just taken my car when I first knew I needed to.
When we repeatedly override our body’s needs, however, our body may take it as long as it can, until it can’t, at which point the need may have become more dire. Researchers who study interoception have found that the less we respond to our body’s signals, the less attuned we become to noticing them all together. Instead of the signal remaining consistent, it actually becomes quieter as time goes by and we ignore it. And after some time, there is a concept in stress research called allostatic load that gets triggered. Allostatic load is the toll that chronic stress takes on the body, the cumulative cost of asking our body to keep going without allowing it to recover. Research on allostatic load connects it to health outcomes including cardiovascular problems and a weakened immune system, and even shorter lifespans. Similar to my car’s notification system, when we treat our body’s requests as inconvenient and ignore it often enough, something in the system can actually break down.
Consider the workers in one study who reported chronic pain. The researchers found that the workers who were least able to sense what was happening in their own bodies were the ones most likely to develop worse and more persistent pain over time. Ignoring their body’s messages let a problem get worse before the person experiencing the problem could even register what was happening.
It makes sense if we consider the experiences of those who have learned to just push through. The headache that gets ignored can become a migraine. The exhaustion that gets ignored turns into illness. The injury that gets ignored and eventually requires surgery. And the urge to cry that gets stuffed down until it comes out when you’re not even expecting it, in response to something that seems totally disconnected. Ignoring and overriding our needs does not make them go away, as much as we may wish that were the case. Our body will find a way to let us know it requires attention, but at a scream instead of a whisper.
How Can We Develop a More Sustainable Approach to Self-Care?
Given that many of us learn to ignore our needs due to shame and criticism, the answer to learning to care for ourselves likely can’t be found there. What helps is self-compassion.
Kristin Neff is a researcher who has studied this, and her research often feels at odds with what high achievers may believe at first. Self-compassion, not self-criticism are what help people change and help those changes stick. Research has found, and found again, that people who learned to develop self-compassion reported feeling less depressed, less anxious, and feeling more mentally healthy overall. And more generally, this allowed them to show up for and care for themselves. Self-compassion is not about letting everything slide. It is about considering your longer term well-being and making choices that actually take care of you. When we are offering ourselves self-compassion, we don’t believe that we need to earn rest, or food, or a chance to use the bathroom. We understand these are basic needs and that, ideally, we honor them when they arise.
What’s really tricky with the way that we are talking about self-care in this article is that it seemingly skates over the circumstances that have led many of us to neglect ourselves. And researchers who study self-care burnout point out that while self-care interventions focus on individual behavior, it’s structural conditions and the current iteration of capitalism that makes it difficult to take care of ourselves in the first place. For people who are struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs or serving as caregivers, self-compassion isn’t going to change the reality you’re in. Survival is the name of the game, and there is no easy answer to the equation.
But when we are honest about what is in our control without blaming ourselves for the systems that we did not create, we may find that self-compassion is what allows us to create a self-care plan that we can implement. This means starting small. Noticing your body’s hunger cues and tending to them instead of waiting for your stomach to growl loudly or feeling shaky. Resting when you’re tired instead of pushing yourself until you crash.
Part of starting small is getting curious about where your own patterns came from. Did you grow up watching a parent push through exhaustion because there was no other option? Did asking for help get met with dismissal, or with more responsibility instead of less? Tracing your patterns back tends to soften the judgment that shows up when you notice yourself falling into them again. It becomes less about willpower and more about recognizing something you learned a long time ago, something that made sense given what you were working with at the time.
It can also help to simply name what you notice, even quietly to yourself. “I am hungry.” “I am exhausted.” “I need to use the bathroom.” Researchers at UCLA have found that putting a feeling or sensation into words actually calms the brain’s alarm system, the amygdala, in a way that can be seen on a brain scan. Naming what we notice is often the first step toward actually responding to it, rather than waiting for the noticing to feel automatic or for the alarm to get louder.
And when you slip back into old patterns, which you will, that is not evidence that this isn’t working. Research on self-compassion has found that people who treat their own setbacks with compassion rather than criticism are actually more likely to improve afterward, not less, and are less afraid of failing in the first place.
Ultimately, all of this serves to rebuild a trusting relationship with your body. One where your body can gently tell you what it needs, and you listen.
Learning to listen, really listen to your body is not easy for many high achievers, especially if we have spent a lifetime ignoring our bodies and their cues. It took me years of my own therapy, questioning my patterns, looking inwards, and making purposeful changes, to create new patterns. To eat nourishing food instead of reaching for Sour Patch Kids when I’m hungry, and to rest instead of pushing through until I was delirious. If you are reading this and any of it sounds familiar, we hope you know that you don’t have to figure this out alone. We understand high achievers at Take Root Therapy and would be glad to support you in this work. We hope you reach out.