When the subject of self-care comes up in my work with clients, there’s a pattern I notice almost immediately. The moment I mention it, eyes glaze over, shoulders tense, and I can practically hear the internal monologue: now he wants me to find time for a yoga class on top of everything else.
It’s a completely understandable reaction. These are busy people. They’re already juggling more than feels manageable, and the idea of self-care lands as yet another demand on an already overstretched schedule. But this reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding of what self-care actually is – and more importantly, what it can look like in practice.
My working definition is simple: self-care is anything you do intentionally to improve your situation. Notice there’s nothing in that definition about adding things. And yet, most people’s mental image of self-care is relentlessly additive. New habits, new routines, new activities.
More.
I want to make the case for the opposite.
The power of less
When you’re feeling overwhelmed, when energy is low and the week feels impossible before it’s even started, the most impactful form of self-care is often subtraction. Removing things, rather than piling more on top. Here are a few areas worth examining.
1. The roles you’ve drifted into
Think about the number of different hats you wear. The roles and areas of ongoing responsibility in your life. Now ask yourself: how many of those did you pick up deliberately? And how many accumulated on autopilot, or because someone else assumed you’d be the one to handle it?
It can be worth periodically questioning which roles are genuinely serving you right now and which have simply become habit. Stepping back from an area of responsibility – even temporarily – isn’t a failure. If you explain to the people around you what you’re doing and why, most will understand. And for some roles, stepping back might not be temporary at all. If something is consistently draining you without offering much in return, it may simply be time to let it go.
2. The zombie tasks on your to-do list
Most task lists contain what I call zombie tasks – items that keep shambling back from the dead, week after week, without ever quite getting done. Sometimes they’re there because of procrastination. Sometimes they’re unclear and need breaking down. But sometimes they represent obligations that have quietly lost their relevance.
Rather than letting them haunt you indefinitely, consider moving them somewhere separate – a ‘maybe someday’ list, or nowhere at all. If a task isn’t genuinely necessary right now, removing it isn’t irresponsible. It’s clarifying. It frees your attention for the things that actually matter, and that in itself is a meaningful act of self-care.
3. Social commitments made by your more optimistic past self
Social connection is genuinely important for wellbeing – I’m not for a moment suggesting you retreat from your friendships. But there’s a particular phenomenon worth naming: the commitment made weeks in advance, when energy levels felt different, that has since transformed into something that feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure.
When that week arrives and what once seemed appealing now feels like one more difficult thing, it’s worth questioning. Rescheduling or occasionally stepping back from social commitments isn’t antisocial. It can be a reasonable response to limited reserves of time and energy.
The bigger pattern here is worth noticing: how much of your schedule was built by a version of you operating under optimism, obligation, or a strong sense of “I should do this”?
4. A word about ‘should’
Speaking of which – pay attention to how much ‘shoulding’ is going on in your self-talk. I should do this. I ought to be doing that. I should be further along. Should is a particularly unhelpful word because it almost exclusively draws attention to what isn’t happening, rather than what is. It’s an easy route to guilt and overwhelm.
When you catch yourself shoulding, it’s worth asking: is this genuinely necessary, or is this an obligation I’ve constructed around myself? What would I actually like to do here? What must be done, objectively, if I’m honest about my priorities?
5. Comparisons that don’t serve you
Finally, one more thing worth doing less of: comparing your internal experience with other people’s external presentation.
We’re wired to benchmark ourselves against others – it’s one of the ways we make sense of how we’re doing. But those comparisons are rarely objective. We’re measuring everything we know about our own lives – the full, messy, complicated interior reality – against the curated surface of someone else’s. That’s never going to feel fair, because it isn’t.
This is particularly worth bearing in mind when it comes to self-care specifically. Self-care is about what’s going to improve your situation, not someone else’s. There’s no standard to meet, no bar set by what the most health-conscious people in your social media feed appear to be doing. Your starting point is your own life, right now.
Where to start
None of the above are rules. They’re simply prompts – illustrations of what less can look like in practice. Effective self-care will always be rooted in your specific context and will require a degree of honesty with yourself about what actually matters to you.
But if there’s one thing I’d encourage you to try before you add anything new to your plate, it’s this: look at your task list and your schedule and ask whether there’s something there you could remove, reschedule, or simply let go of.
That breathing room you’d create? That counts.
