Save Your Self Care

If, like me, your journey towards good mental health has been rocky and eventful, you might have discovered that when it comes to the topic of mental illness and your wellbeing everyone seems to be under the impression that they’re some sort of doctor.

Happy friends are not quite sure what it feels like to be tear-jerkingly miserable, but they had a bad break-up once, so they assume they're qualified to dispense unsolicited advice, from anything such as which antidepressant might work for you, to whether or not you should be going to play badminton more with your friends.

Most of the time, the tips people chuck around are samey and uninspired, if not downright insulting or presumptuous. However, they are often delivered with a hubristic level of certainty; you’d think your friend really was the best thing for mental health since Prozac.

The same problem exists online; a simple search reveals thousands of listicles and blog posts suggesting the same tips for how to care for yourself, putting the onus on you to just cheer up with their simplistic advice. A lot of these Instagram-friendly tips and tricks are very expensive; there’s something worryingly neo-liberal and capitalistic about this trend of advising people to pay for swimming lessons or an eBay animal onesie in order to feel good. “Relax!” society screams, in a way that provokes more stress, as we frantically update our Amazon baskets.

As well as the obvious price-tag, though, there’s just a problem here with how we view mental illness. Very few people are willing to concede that mental health is not always a quick-fix, and a lot of this advice contradicts itself in the rush to try to perk someone up as fast as possible. We’re told to get our lives together, we’re told to focus on ourselves and abandon our responsibilities. We’re told to apply ourselves, we’re told to take some well-needed me-time.

Bearing this in mind, I thought I’d use the occasion of World Mental Health Day on 10 October to re-examine some of the internet’s best (and most contradictory) self care tips.

Spend more time in the gr8 outdoors! Or just skip today and hide in bed!

We’re told to go and rejoice in nature. Get some fresh air! Go for a nice long walk. But we’re also told it’s beneficial to unplug from the stresses of modern life, to curl up in bed in our cute unicorn onesie, and to gorge on snacks from the hidey-hole that is the bedroom, watching Netflix until our eyeballs can’t stay open.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with either of these things; nature is pretty and inspiring, and bed is safe and warm. However, finding oneself bombarded with the command to GO outside or GO to bed, it really seems like we’re being told to GO away. Or, to put it more politely, to take our problems where no one will hear us scream.

TREAT YOURSELF (but also watch that calorie intake, scum!)

If you’re sad, you might want something delicious to fill up this empty hole inside of you. Or, if you’re stressed, you might want to obsessively order what goes in and out of your body. Maybe your fridge is stocked with little tupperwares of lonely spinach. You might know that neither direction is healthy on its own, but it’s what you have to cling on to.

We’re encouraged to spoil ourselves and live our best lives. Does that mean we should abandon the junk food we’ve been told is the treat that will perk us up? Or should we stop obsessing over the diets we’ve been forced to go on? What the hell should we be eating?

Maybe, instead of curating diets for the mentally ill, you could take the time to actually eat with them. Talk to them. Make sure they’re eating something, rather than nothing. And maybe let them choose what takeaway you get.

Pump some iron and become queen of yoga! But also love yourself just as you are

Once, on a car journey, the topic of a mutual acquaintance’s death arose. I was told, passionately, that the sad friend’s life would have been infinitely better if he’d have just motivated himself to try tennis. Awful as that was, I found myself distracted by how refreshing it was to hear the word 'tennis' rather than yoga. I get told to try yoga so often that I now instinctively gag whenever I pass anyone in sweatpants.

The public loves telling people to get fit in order to cheer up. Apparently endorphins are more effective than any drug or therapy – at least, that’s what someone’s aunt read in Marie Claire once. What is troublesome about our fascination with fitness is that we’re also told constantly to adore ourselves as we are. This is particularly tricky for a depressive personality, for whom a big issue is, inherently, that loving themselves is proving difficult.

Of course, if you’re overweight or underweight, this problem is compounded. You’re encouraged to love some inner part of yourself, while also being told that your physical form is actually pretty gross at the moment. You have to go out and get sweaty in the name of self-improvement, but you also have to self-consciously whisper to yourself, and everyone around you, that you love yourself regardless, fitness or no fitness. You cannot win.

Take a thousand selfies! But, seriously, stop looking for validation online

This is an insidious little quirk of modernity that seems designed to plague the young and unhappy. We’ve been immersed in an online world for long enough that we’re now trained to only indulge in it with a certain level of chic or irony. Still, though, we’re encouraged to embrace selfie culture, to precariously balance our beauty online or in images, to base our self-worth on either the opinions of others or the apparent proof of a well-received photo we spent hours setting up.

Meanwhile, simultaneously, we’re constantly told as a generation that we’re narcissistic and shouldn’t care so much about how we look. And we're told that by the same people who leave the most embarrassingly sickly comments on our profile pictures.

So where does that leave us? It's obvious that we need to escape this hazardous culture of easy tips and quick fixes; mental illness can’t just be willed away. So many of the 'hacks' people offer essentially boil down to ‘shut up, buy stuff, feel better and let's talk about something else'. But when you’ve done away with the hacks, what more can you offer when your friend tearfully admits that they’re feeling terrible? My advice: instead of constantly telling unhappy people what to do or how to feel, try just listening to them instead.