I have a friend who struggles a lot with mental health issues. Recently, her therapist has mandated working on her sleep health (going to bed at a reasonable time, not using screens in bed, not sleeping during the day, etc). She was sort-of-pretend complaining on a Zoom call the other day about how she was “being mean to herself” by forcing herself to skip her typical three hour afternoon nap. I think she knew inside herself that it was necessary to skip afternoon naps in order to be able to get a full night’s sleep. But she still felt like not taking a nap was “mean.”
This conversation gets at the problem of the whole “self care” movement. The definition of caring for ourselves can mean different things to different people at different times. Sometimes a nap is self-care, sometimes it’s not. If you are occasionally exhausted, allowing yourself a break for a short nap is a kind and productive thing to do. But if you chronically stay up late and have trouble sleeping and end up crashing for three hours in the afternoon, then a nap becomes something unhealthy, a bad habit to break. How do we make sense of this?
Continue reading “Self Care and The Three Selves”