I would love, and it's okay if this doesn't come off the top of your head, but if there's like a self-care scam. that you've seen recently or it doesn't even have to be like a scam it doesn't have to be like as devious as like these people are scamming me but like maybe just something that's kind of bullshitty is there something you've seen lately that like just you're like oh my god well you know I I'm 41. And so I'm in that like perimenopause space. So basically my entire algorithm is full of.
menopause perimenopause stuff and it's like all the things whether it's like the hormones or the eat protein like I feel like we're supposed to be eating like something like insane like 50 grams of protein like every morning or something I don't even know like I'm only supposed to be eating chicken
and cottage cheese those are the only things i'm supposed to put into my body basically um and all of that stuff and i know there's been a lot written about that recently it's it's like whenever the media and then whenever like the tech industry
gets a hold of a white space it's like it just gets so crowded so immediately it feels a little bit like the motherhood space felt maybe like six or seven years ago where all of a sudden it was sort of like oh yeah being a mom is hard and then there was just like everything was all about supporting moms, which is great. I'm a perinatal psychiatrist. That's my whole clinical practice. I am a mom. It's good. I'm not saying like...
that we don't need that. It's just so interesting to watch how these cycles go. And I think it does track with sort of like our generation of, you know, sort of geriatric millennial, maybe like young Gen X, where we have sort of decided that whatever works. going through we're gonna make it the thing yeah we are the center of the story no matter what we're the main characters
This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne-Hellen Peterson. And I am Dr. Pooja Lakshman. I am a board-certified psychiatrist and the author of the book and newsletter, Real Self-Care, Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included. I also think that if you even track like, oh, if we had motherhood at the center, like motherhood is hard at the center of the story six, seven years ago. Now.
Those moms are entering into the perimenopausal space and are like, why do I feel bad? Right. And like there are all these systemic reasons why we feel bad. But then there's also the like, oh, but we can explain it through like the fact that we're going through this period of health. And it's also something that has been largely under discussed. Yes, yes. And, you know, like that was the whole reason with my book, Real Self-Care, and like sort of the Chung and Cheek subtitle.
crystals cleanses and bubble baths not included which I had to fight hard to like get my publisher to be okay with how really I always think that they would love that oh yeah It's very much an academic title. Like the length of it is like. The length, yes. They were like, well, I don't know if it's going to fit on the cover. Anyway, but.
Right. Like this isn't just you can't meditate your way out of a 40 hour work week with no child care. Like that's not how real wellness works. And when we still don't have federally mandated paid parental leave, when we're seeing like the erosion of women's. reproductive health the list goes on and on but it's so easy to get stuck on whether it's hormones or whether it is like whatever sort of easy simple solution because
And that is something that you can like, it's like tangible. It's like something that you can immediately sink your teeth into and be like, okay, well, I'm going to change my diet or I'm going to go do this exercise. And you can cross it off the list and you can feel like you have a sense of control and agency. Which again, it's very human to want that. We live in this completely chaotic, fucked up world. Of course, we're trying to grasp for ways to make ourselves feel a sense of mastery.
you know, as we'll talk about today with real self-care, it's really about like finding the balance and the nuance and not going to the extremes. Yeah. And I think that a lot of people who would never consider themselves like obsessed with optimization have still negotiated adulthood. against a backdrop of obsession with optimization so there is this tendency i think to be like oh i can just find this one hack that will fix perimenopause
If I can just take hormones now, even though my mom couldn't because, you know, there was this whole generation of women. And a lot of us had moms who went through the same like their doctors really strongly recommended against it. Like if I can just find the doctor who.
give me the hormones and none of this will happen to me like i will fix this problem or if i eat 40 grams however many grams i don't even know how many grams it is many grams of protein a day and get really into like heavy weight lifting then i will have none of those problems and that's you know we don't operate in like our bodies don't operate in vacuums that way exactly the context is so important and
Unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, we are all multifactorial. We live in this world with so many different inputs. Sometimes when I talk about this, people are like, but there is evidence for.
eating more protein and like working on your bold health and you know etc etc and so it's kind of like it's like yeah it's not that that's bad no like it's good it's just so when you become obsessed with it and fixated on it and when you think that's the fantasy thing that's going to fix your whole life
That's when you get into trouble. Yeah. If I can just do this thing, then all of my problems will be solved. Yeah. Yeah. And usually like you can't even do that one thing, but it's that grasping towards it. Yeah. Today we're going to like talk about practical stuff, philosophical stuff, like you are the perfect person to...
grapple with all of this stuff together. And you're also going to stick around to answer like a very straightforward but fascinating AAA question about how to celebrate personal achievements without alcohol. But let's start with a question from Jacqueline that is a bit of a table setter for us. I work at a nonprofit as a community advocate.
Self-care is a huge buzzword phrase internally at the agency and is also encouraged externally with clients. The more I think about the idea, the more that I think self-care is a privilege. something that people who have the money and time to practice get to benefit from. I think it is also a learned skill. If practicing wellness or setting boundaries is not demonstrated in someone's life, how would they be able to access the skill and privilege of practicing self-care?
I feel like there's two parts of this question, right? The first is how the concept of self-care has become so integrated into many workplace environments. And I know you speak at a lot of workplace environments from people who like, they're like, let's get a speaker on self-care.
And I wonder if you're like me, where sometimes you show up and tell them some things that they don't necessarily want to hear about what self-care actually is. Like just a more complex story than maybe they're anticipating. Yeah, I mean, you know, the whole crux of real self-care is that this work comes from... like Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks, Black queer thinkers who were talking about self-care as not only self-preservation, but also in the context of a society that is...
coming after you, is hostile to you. And it was interesting because when I was researching for the book, I also found that while the word self-care was being used in the civil rights movement it was also interestingly shockingly being used in psychiatry also psychiatrists were using the word self-care to refer to the very small mundane decisions that patients who are on locked in patient units could make about their life on the unit so like
what they were gonna eat for breakfast, picking out their clothes, you know, what exercise group they were gonna attend. So I thought that that was so fascinating because here is like, you know, when you think about rights being stripped away or autonomy. being stripped away, being hospitalized on a psych unit against your will is pretty much the epitome of that. And the word self-care then being used for whatever small choices you could make in that context, I thought was so fascinating.
Because it does track, too, with the situation that many folks in the civil rights movement and like, frankly, like right now in 2020. 2025 we're now in 2025 um you know feel currently yeah where it's like you have such a limited set of options so i guess going back to the original kind of question When I go into kind of corporate America and talk about real self-care, I think, you know, it's interesting because I think people are so burnt out.
And just kind of like so desperate for something that sometimes I think like the social justice aspect of this work almost like flies over people's heads. Yes. and I don't yeah but I thought that we could like have a wellness retreat and it'd be okay yeah yeah right right and and people really still want to come back to like the yoga or the meditation or like whatever the thing is. And I guess I've learned that, and maybe this is me being a psychiatrist, that it's never helpful to be.
banging people over the head with something that they can't quite hear yet so I kind of try and tuck it in to the stories and also really try and identify when I'm working with usually it's like a wellness it's like the ERG like or like the mental health ERG or like the folks who are kind of the leaders in
the company who are really trying to do this work and have some more kind of deeper conversations with them you know i and i do think i like i want to say like i think corporate america gets really like demonized a lot and you know, rightly so I understand. And like when I work with organizations, like all the people that I work with seem like really like good people. Like they want to do the right thing, you know, like they're really wanting to try and make it better. Yeah.
And they're hemmed in by some structural things that make it really difficult. Yes. I went to speak to a gathering of emergency physicians and they have just incredible burnout rates and like fewer people going into the specialty because. It's a burnout machine. And like the attrition amongst women in particular is like they're dropping the percentage of people within the field significantly over the course of the last 20 years.
There are people who are trying so hard to think about these solutions. And sometimes it's like, well, how do we address these twin forces of private equity? buying up our practices and also just the way that we've set up emergency medicine as a field what if we have to reorganize that entirely like that is huge big work but how can we start to think about That is a possibility.
Like, how do you do that at a conference? Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's not right. It like it has to be really an ongoing conversation. And you do need those big events to sort of like get people's morale up and to feel like progress. is being made but it also needs to be happening really like on a week by week month by month basis um i've come to believe or see that the organizations that are small or medium-sized tend to have an advantage because they can be more agile.
And they're more responsive to their employees and people feel like they have a voice. But when the organizations get to be like super, super big, then it's a lot harder to make some of these changes. What do you think about the second part of this question about how practicing boundaries and other parts of self-care is something that like you need time. You need the privilege of time to practice. Or the privilege of like other people modeling it for you.
Because I think sometimes people are like, well, rich people can have self-care because they can go on vacations. But this is a different thing. I think this is about like the privilege of time and practice and models. Yes. Yes. It might be un-PC to say, but I know plenty of rich people that are absolutely miserable. and have terrible boundaries. 100%. But I love this question because it's something that I actually think about and grapple with all the time of is real self-care a privilege?
Or is it a skill or is it both? And I think it is both because real self-care, like the four skills, the four principles, boundaries, compassion, values, and power. Those are psychological concepts that if you had... a healthy childhood and you were raised by parents who were generally healthy psychologically and physically and you had enough resources and you were generally you know I'm using a lot of like kind of generalizations here but like if you generally like were
growing up in a regulated environment, you would have learned some of those skills. And that is a privilege because that does give you a leg up in life. It's basically like you had Psych 101.
growing up yeah but many of us were not fortunate enough to be born into a family like that and plus or minus whether you know there was money or other types of resources, you could still grow up in a family environment where emotionally and psychologically it was quite impoverished, but there might have been access to other resources. However, if you did not learn these skills, then you will not be able to make use of those other external resources in a way that is actually generative. Yeah.
What I've been doing with my patients for, I guess, probably a decade, more than a decade now in therapy. it works like change is possible and essentially what real self-care is is like you're learning these set of principles you're learning to build these new muscles where you learn how to tolerate guilt, where you learn how to regulate your emotions, where you learn that you can make decisions on behalf of your own well-being, even when people are annoyed with you or pissed at you.
And you can move forward with a deeper understanding of what you really want in your life. The thing is that it takes time. And it takes practice. And it takes messing up a zillion times and coming back. It's interesting, Anne, how you started off by asking, you said, is the time the privilege piece of it? And I think that is the second privilege piece of it. So the first privilege is if you were born into a family where you already got a head start. Right.
The second is if you because of the way that your life is set up, you have the time to dedicate to whether it's going to therapy, whether it is working. through your own research and through your own reading and like working on these different habits for myself I will say like I didn't have children until I was later in life so I had my son when I was 38 and a half and I so basically I had Whole 30s essentially to...
go to therapy for a whole decade. I was in psychoanalysis, which was like three times a week. And I was a doctor, like I had the financial resources too, to be able to, and I also had good insurance that helped me pay for it. So I took that time, but...
There are plenty of people in my life who are like, Pooja, you're totally wasting your time and you're wasting your money. You should be saving that money. That should be in your 401k, right? Why are you spending all this time doing this? And I felt like, no, this is actually really important for me to sort out what I want.
in my life especially since I had been through like a traumatic 20s and a divorce and all sorts of life stuff but a lot of I think especially for women and like women that I see in my practice like that idea that like you're allowed to take a risk You're allowed to do something that feels selfish or feels impractical or feels silly just because you want to. You want to see where it goes. I think.
There's something about that, like having that boldness that enables people, like if you're able to give that to yourself, then you can kind of get yourself on this trajectory to finding the time. Yeah, no, I think too about like working through like issues in my relationship, for example. I feel like I have a tremendous privilege of time in that.
My partner and I spend a lot of time talking to one another when like an issue comes up. So like if something happens, like we go on a lot like an hour, two hour long walk and we'll just talk about it. And that privilege of time allows us to like continually process this and like hear each other and voice things and like go through all sorts of different reactions instead of feeling like, well, there's no time to talk about this right now or we'll talk about this later.
I've never really thought about how like that has allowed this relationship to really feel like no matter what happens. we can work through it because of that privilege of time and not everyone you know if you're working all the time if you are constantly on demand to provide care for someone else whether it's a kid or an elder or someone else in your family like there are just so many reasons that make it difficult to to have that sort of time and it makes sense that that like
No one would think of time to argue with your partner as a form of self-care, but I think it is. Yeah, because you're allowing yourself the space for the repair. Yeah. I think like there's a way that we have, you know, because caregiving in America is so difficult because of the lack of support that we have, we've kind of like done away with.
the space for being able to grapple in our relationships and that's like intimate relationships with partners and also even friendships like the number of patients that I have that are like literally like I don't have any close friends because I don't have time I spend all my time either working dealing with kids or parents that I'm taking care of, and then I'm just dead tired. And like we've sort of constructed that as like that's normal. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I mean, I encounter this all the time, especially with the research on my new book is like, yes, yes. I had friends, but now I only text with them. And like the idea of. going on a walk with someone or a dinner date or just going to hang out and fold laundry together, that that is also a form of self-care.
Also, because of the way self-care has been set up in this commodified fashion, it doesn't figure in as much. I want to go to our next question now, which is about some of this branding that we see around different modes of self-care. This is from Natalie. Why are we seeing typical or common sense approaches in areas like personal hygiene careers, friendships, become codified with pithy names in the recent social landscape? Where do things like quiet quitting and skin cycling converge?
And why does it feel like Gen Z is always at the forefront of this, needing scripts or labels for things? Hmm. I mean, the one I would add to the example that comes to my mind is... What is it? The total shower? Melody, is that right? Do you know about this? A full body shower? No, it's like, there's like a name. Oh, everything shower. Everything shower. Yeah. Is that when you wash your hair too? It's when you wash your hair and your body and you shave your legs.
Whereas just doing like one of any of those things. Got it. Which like. I understand. I mean, I used to when I was a teenager, I didn't everything shower every single day. But that's because the time I was so bored. I had nothing else to do. Shave my legs every day. But.
I would also say that I don't think Gen Z is any more inclined to come up with names for things. Oftentimes with something like Quiet Quitting, like... an editor at a magazine who wants to write a piece, we'll see one TikTok where someone calls it that and then be like, all of Gen Z is talking about quiet quitting. And it's like, there were like 10 TikToks total about this. Like you're making a trend out of something that is more like, I think, often a feeling.
Right. So like quiet quitting is not hustling all the time. Right. Or like not feeling like you have to go above and beyond and instead like treating your job like a job job, which is not a new sentiment. Right. It's just. Now we are trying to grapple with how a new generation is confronting that sentiment. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I can see this on both sides. And on one hand, like I think.
Our media environment, and you know this better than I do, but like just the way that it has become so cannibalized and how everything is like so noisy. There's just so much stimulation coming in. So it's like you need to have a specific name for something to break through. Like I think to your point of that some of this is editors, knowing that when you have something catchy that is a few syllables, then.
People will glom onto it and it's a way for it to actually get attention and traction. That's human nature. Like when we have a name for something, then we know how to talk about it. We know how to connect with other people around it. I think there's something to, like this feels a little bit adjacent to just how deeply personal and popular.
how memes can be and sharing memes and how sharing memes has become its own form of like a version of friendship like you're basically sharing a feeling back and forth it's like yeah yeah yeah you get this feeling and then you put it out there and then your friend gets this same feeling and you're both just like oh my gosh like you know and you have a little chuckle it's that same sort of thing I think with these phrases and so I think I also feel
you know empathetic and compassionate for gen z i feel like they get dumped on so much but like they're growing up in this like media hellscape and so they have done what they need to do survive and part of that is to parse things down and and name things in this way and it's bleak out there in terms of you know their financial prospects and their job prospects and like all of these institutions that
people in our generation at least for an early part of our lives i think we still sort of believed in and held on a pedestal um i don't think the same is true now but but gen z like they grew up with this feeling of like well, I don't know, you know, I guess we'll figure it out. And so I think partly it's artificial and partly it's like survival. Yeah.
Yeah, I think your reaction is so right that like, if we can look at it with curiosity instead of condemnation, like, what is the use of this? How does this feel useful? to people who are doing this and also understand that it's not the entire generation it's like some people who are doing it yes yes and it's it can be super niche and i think it also gives the people who are using these terms Like it.
in its own way it like gives them a sense of community because you know so much of gen z is like organized around the internet and and what spaces they hang out on the internet and who they hang out with on the internet and you know and we know the ways in which that becomes like weaponized and dangerous but also some of it is actual real connection and community i will say one other thing about this is you know as i've been kind of
doing more on media and like growing, growing into my new identity as an author and kind of all these things as I've spoken with different consultants or advisors and things like that. what people will tell you is that you're supposed to like create new words you're supposed to like make up these new things and like say it's a thing right like yeah I find that funny, too, because it's like it works to some extent. And you have these people who are also like.
trying to make certain things happen, trying to make fetch happen. It doesn't always happen. When it does actually happen, that means it's really hit. a nerve and it's actually a feeling. It's hit a feeling. Yes, totally. Okay. Our next question is from Madeline and it's about a specific corner of self-care. I'm so excited for this one. I am super interested in the overlap between self-care and embracing hobbies.
often touted as a way to improve mood and mental health. I feel like so many of my peers, millennial women, are embracing it. It can also feel a bit performative when people share about it on social media. Have you noticed this? What's up with that? Is this a new thing related to social media or has this always been the case? Okay, I have theories about this, but I want to hear from you first.
So I'll tell a story. The first time that I went to therapy, I was a medical student and my like chief complaint, quote unquote, when I went to see the therapist was that. I didn't know what to do if I wasn't studying. And I needed to get hobbies. And I did not know how to have hobbies.
And granted, like I could have had many other chief complaints, like the fact that I was like having panic attacks when I drove over a bridge or like there was many other things that were definitely more pressing. I need hobbies. I'm now 41 and I still am terrible at hobbies. I guess I would say two things. I don't think this is new. I don't think this is new. I think we're just like it's being broadcast more now because of social media.
I think like with all of real self-care, like the best stuff lies in the middle and you get in trouble when you fall to the extremes. I'm on the one extreme, which is that I'm a workaholic. And it's really hard for me to have hobbies because whenever I get a hobby, I try to turn it into work. And now my entire career is something that was essentially a hobby, but now it's my job.
And that is its own interesting place to live. Then you have the other opposite extreme, which is the person who sticks with the hobbies and really enjoys the hobbies but also like becomes very very intense about them and is almost like a zealot yep
about said hobbies like they're not monetizing them or like making them their career or things like that but like they're whether they're in crossfit or whether they're a vegan or whatever the thing is that's like becomes their whole identity some of the most like well-adjusted people that I know are people that have hobbies and they are like quiet about them like yeah they don't broadcast them they they enjoy gardening they like to cook and it's just like something that they do
for themselves and they're you know enjoy doing it and it's not something that has to be done loudly So hobbies aren't bad. Hobbies aren't bad. Like hobbies are good. It's good to have hobbies. But it's all like the whole thing with real self care is that it's like none of these things are bad. It's just that you need to work through the principles of the boundaries, the compassion, the values, the power to.
Understand what is bringing you to the thing to make sure that you have the right reasons. And then you'll be able to have the hobby be something that's just generative and not something that is. that you need to showcase. Performative. Performative. Exactly. I think that a lot of people... have gone through burnout or experienced burnout or continuing to experience burnout over the last 10 years and have understood like, okay, I reached a breaking point. Something in my life needs to change.
And that also, for many, but not all, that corresponds with maybe having a little bit more stability, both in their jobs and in their income, in order to spend more time and resources on a hobby. and also like their kids getting a little bit older so that there's a little bit more time to allocate to that. And that also intersects with, especially for parents, like this place where you're like, who am I?
Who am I apart from being a parent? Like I want to rediscover some of those components. And if it's also not what I do for pay, like it's not my job, who am I? And how do you discover that? Other things in your life.
And we are at a point where fewer and fewer people... in their 30s and 40s are involved in religious communities so it's not i am a christian i am a muslim like that's still true for some people but it's not necessarily the case so where do you find that source of identity or like that's that wellspring of like who am i What do I actually like to do? A hobby.
but marathon running only has so much space for you, right? Like there's only so much like intensity and like identity formation that can be gleaned from that or from gardening or from knitting or whatever. thing is and so it has to you have to expand it you have to make it like I'm not just running a marathon I am super involved in the marathon community Yeah. Or I'm not just like growing a couple herbs on my windowsill. I am growing a thousand dahlias like me.
And then there's also that need, that incredible compulsive need, which true, I think, especially of millennials, but other generations as well that are raised in similar time span to like. okay, if I'm doing something, I have to be the best at it. Like I need to make it a really prominent line on my resume. And then you funnel all of this energy and the way that you justify that you are spending so much time on it.
is you have to like broadcast it and like how amazing it is right if you are just mediocre and you never posted on instagram like how is it worth all of this time that you're dedicating to it yeah Yeah, obviously, I think that is ridiculous. But at the same time, this is how my brain works. And this is how a lot of my people I know, this is how their brains work is like, how do I justify this thing that seems so selfish?
when really what it is is like exploring things that you actually like to do yeah does any of that make sense is there anything you want to push back against there no i think that's right i think like pinpointing how it's filling an identity need and if it needs to fill an identity need then it has to take up a lot of space and it has to be seen because our identities are formed in connection with other humans so therefore it has to be
performed whereas the healthier definition of a hobby should be more related to um There's this phrase that is used a lot in India and maybe in other parts of Asia, time pass. So just a way to pass the time. Yeah. Right. You know, just something to do that feels good. That's fun. That's not scrolling your phone. And so whether that is pickleball.
or whether that is going for a walk or trying a new recipe. It's like you're holding it more lightly. The people that I've seen that are the best at this are people that... are yeah not looking for external validation and have multiple small hobbies like it's not just like one hobby that takes up everything it's like they have three or four things that they enjoy yeah admittedly I'm not one of those people but um
I think it also maybe correlates to just like the commodification of time too and just how we have all become, because we live in the society that we live in, we feel like we need to justify. how we're spending our time and so it needs to feel productive and we need to feel like we're excelling at it when in fact I think we would all do it would be good for all of us to do some more things in a more mediocre way and just let it be that
This is a perfect tee up to our next question, which is about people like us. Let's hear from Caroline. I imagine that many Culture Studies subscribers are former or recovering perfectionists. Lately, I've seen and heard a lot about this concept of forgiving yourself more, like giving yourself a thousand breaks and then a thousand more. What content or guidance is out there on how recovering perfectionists actually do that? How do we actually be kinder to ourselves and rewire that programming?
Yeah, I agree that there are a lot of recovery imperfections in this subscriber base. And my struggle has always been with like, okay, that advice to like lower the bar and then lower it again. aren't I failing in some way? But who am I failing? The clumps of dog hair on the steps, like who is that failing? Just trying to think about like actually come up with the person that that would be failing.
And when I realized that it's absolutely no one, that frees me a little bit. But I would love to hear your advice here. Yeah. So when I think of perfectionism, I think of it. in relation to control um so when you're a perfectionist you really want to be able to predict and control an uncertain situation and an uncertain life and so perfectionism is your
measuring stick to feel like you have some semblance of agency in any different situation. The problem is that perfection, perfectionism limits your ability to genuinely connect.
with other people because you are too preoccupied in your own mind with the measuring stick and so you don't have enough space to actually be there in real time and be present and engaged and like alive essentially yeah yeah so it ends up being counter to your goals because you're constantly kind of like upping the ante in the control and perfectionism when what we all really want as humans is to
feel seen and loved and understood but if you're in your head with this measuring stick you're not gonna ever feel that way so it's like basically like a stairway to you know just misery so that's kind of like the context that I think about perfectionism with. And then in terms of like getting better at being mediocre, the way that it's worked for me in the past is that I, so each time you.
lower the bar you're taking a risk right because you're inner critic perfectionistic brain is going to be like oh my god but like what about that hair what about that dog hair right like yeah it's going to like kind of go off and so you have to take a leap of faith you have to take a risk and be like nope it's going to be okay It's going to be OK. And so for me, I've had to like literally just like.
make notes to myself like kind of keep a little journal I use the notes app on my phone for a lot of different things where you just kind of like write down different situations and you say like oh I took a risk and I you know I only wrote 200 words instead of 500 words in that newsletter or, you know, I sent this out a day late and then and then you follow up and you say like, hey, did the world fall apart? Did everybody say they were going to hate me? Like, did anything happen? No, actually.
like something good happened the next day that was like tangentially related and then you make space again coming back to time and space this you have to be intentional and actually make space for this like you actually go back and look at those notes yeah and remind yourself and the next time you have one of those little panic feelings about
letting somebody down or doing something imperfectly you come back to the note and you kind of review and you're like oh no I've done this before and it's okay it's going to be fine it's actually going to be better because I'm going to be more present and attentive and I'll be able to make better use of opportunities that come up as opposed to like being stuck in my hamster wheel. Yeah. I love that idea that like.
You actually have to make the note and you actually have to come back to it because I think something about perfectionists is we are often self-flagellating and like almost avoid going back to the note and being like, no, disaster didn't happen. Right. Like that feels too good to like confirm that it didn't happen. Okay. So final question before the AAA segment is about when self-care takes like, I don't know, like a little bit of a dark turn. Let's hear from Natalie again.
How have boundaries and ideas of self-care gravitated towards us really just acting poorly in our personal relationships, a la the recent online discussion around whether you would drive or pick up a friend at the airport?
And how is this contributing to further isolation and hyper-individualism in society, especially in younger generations? Okay, so I think what this question asker is referring to is the idea that like... my boundary is not driving you to the airport like you know what I mean like that like about using words like boundary therapy speak which we addressed in an episode a couple weeks ago to talk about
There's like just not doing things that like are kind of annoying. How do you think about this? Yeah. You know, so much of what we've been talking about today is finding the middle ground. We're never going to get where we want to go by living in the extremes. And so I think for sure there are plenty of ways in which therapy speak and things like boundaries have.
been used or misconstrued to give people the leeway to you know cut off friends who they had a minor disagreement with or to continue to be more solitary and like refuse to leave their couch and just doom scroll on all day like right we know we know that's the case and I guess if we step back, I see it as probably an overcorrection for a society that did not do a good job of allowing.
young adults and adults in like polite social situations to express their feelings and to express like what they were really thinking or what they were really feeling and so now we've kind of gone a little bit too far on the other side you know one of the examples that i use sometimes when i'm giving talks when i'm getting to the third principle of real self-care values which is like really understanding what's important to you and how you want to show up in the world and i'll say like
I see this all the time in like groups of women where people will say like, oh, well, what do you where do you want to eat for dinner? And like nobody will give an opinion and and you have to like pull teeth.
And then you'll talk to somebody and, you know, we'll be at Chinese food or something and they'll be like, yeah, actually, I really hate Chinese food, but I didn't want to say anything. You know, like you feel bad, like actually expressing what you want to eat and what type of food you like. Right. It's just food. It's just food.
Let alone like huge decisions like who you want to be your life partner and like what your career is. Like we're like in a situation where you can't even express like what type of food you want to eat and feel so. guilty like you need to appease everybody else that's around you so
Like that's the history that we're coming from. And now we have like a younger generation that is sort of like, no, like I'm not going to I'm not going to go that way. But I think there needs to be a little bit of course correction. That being said, I had a patient the other day who she's going to a...
I think it's like a baby shower, an out of town baby shower. And there's a bunch of women in her little town that are driving together. And she said to me, she was like, I'm so proud of myself. I set a boundary.
um because people were asking about carpooling and volunteering and i guess it's like the shower's like two hours away and she was like but i just really wanted a two-hour drive by myself or i could listen to whatever podcast i wanted to listen to and just be by myself and i didn't offer to car
pool and like normally I would have and that was like a huge boundary for her and she was so proud of herself and I was like that's great good for you I guess what I want to say is like I think it's really easy for us to knock some of these. boundary situations on the outside without knowing the personal perspective of the person who's doing the boundary setting and like what their family of origin is like and like what their relationship history is and like
what specific personal thing they're working on at that moment. For me, there's plenty of situations that I look back on now and I'm like, yeah, I totally went overboard with boundaries. or vice versa, but you don't really see it unless it's in hindsight. And you kind of have to learn those lessons for yourself, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And you have to get into this place where you can look back on it and be like, that felt... incredibly necessary in that moment yeah and so
what like spending more time thinking about like what feels necessary not because like someone's like these are the boundaries that every person should have in their lives right like what what matters to you what feels important to you yeah that's hard i think for us to accept because I think a lot of times we want to have like these larger societal norms about what you should and shouldn't do and how you should and shouldn't behave. And I think that that makes a lot of people unhappy.
So accounting for that and how norms do make people unhappy, like that's useful. Yeah. And giving people the space to wrestle with it. Like it's not going to help anybody. Like if you feel like someone is being. anti-social essentially in their boundaries you confronting them is not going to have them be more social right whereas you're giving them the space to
grapple with whatever they're grappling with, work out whatever they're working out, and then eventually kind of come back and have more space in their life for you. Like that's different, you know? Yeah. What about the last point about hyper-individualization though? That is something that I think about, like people being like, I'm setting a boundary around like hanging out after 6pm. And how like, we've just created these mechanisms that do facilitate.
Sometimes I do think that social decorum forces us into situations that once we're there for 10 minutes, we're like, yeah, I did want to do this. Yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think just overall, like we definitely are like the data sets proves this. Like we're lonely. Like we are not doing a good job of being with other people. And we've lost, whether it's the pandemic or social media or, you know, it's a lot of different things, the economic environment.
We have gotten ourselves into a situation where we are spending too much time alone. And so that's absolutely true. And I think that, again. I always try to avoid coming to a place from shame because I find that when you shame yourself into trying to do something that you know is good for you, you usually will fall off the wagon. Yeah, yeah.
So I'm just thinking of an example for my own life. I have an author friend here in Austin, and we've been planning to go out and get dinner one night. And it's been really cold here, like 40. This has been hard for me to leave my house. And so I was like, hey, how would you feel about coming over to my house? And I'll get us takeout.
and she was like oh yeah that's a great idea like i would love to do a house hang like we never do that anymore and that would be so fun and i was like yes like i can wear my sweatpants and like we can just hang out on the couch and that will be amazing so it's like I think like finding the ways that it works for you is really important. Yeah. No, I love that.
So now we're going to do the ask it anything question, which is from someone who wants suggestions on how to celebrate achievements when you don't drink. And you also work from home. So no one's going to magically bring you donuts to like their break room or whatever. If you're not a paid subscriber, though, this is where the episode ends. So if you want our ideas on inventive ways of celebrating, head over to Culture Study Pod. .substack.com
Pooja, this has been such a privilege. Seriously, you are on our list, our first list that Melody and I came up with of people that we really wanted to have on the show. And the only reason we didn't ask until recently is because we were accepting your boundary of not. doing media appearances as you were restoring yourself from your incredible book tour um where can people find you
if they want to hear more from you. Yes. Well, I am on Substack. I have a newsletter that's called Real Self-Care, and it is at pujalakshman.substack.com. You can also go to my website and find it there, pujalakshman, P-O-O-J-A. L-A-K-S-H-M-I-N. And I'm on Instagram. And yeah. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Anne.
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