Self-Care Is Different Than Taking Care Of Yourself

I connected with an inspiring nonprofit leader named Vernon Shaw earlier this week, and he said something that really stood out to me. He’s the kind of person where you feel his presence any time he walks into a room. Everyone immediately acknowledges how abundant, driven, and pure-hearted he is, including myself. You figure someone like that has to be really intentional to carry that kind of energy everywhere they go.

Vernon said “Self-care is different than taking care of yourself.”

Sometimes we get caught up in checking the box - Getting your meditation and exercise in, completing your daily routine of gratitude journaling, taking a cold shower to kick off your metabolism for the day. While these activities themselves are very healthy and markers of a high-performing person, there’s one very important thing that is missing - Why?

We don’t do these things just to do them, we do them because they help us to be the most dynamic, grounded, and effective version of ourselves. Self-care is just a means to taking care of yourself.

But it doesn’t always perfectly translate over. There are times when self-care activities are not the things that take care of yourself. For example, I have a cold right now. I have certain goals for myself in terms of the amount I want to exercise, and a standard for myself to always take a cold shower if it’s before 8pm, but does following through on that serve me right now?

What serves me most, the way I can best take care of myself right now, is to rest - To not push myself through a workout and to not shock my system with cold water.

The difference between self-care and taking care of yourself reminds me of an improved way to relate with self-discipline. Self discipline is misunderstood to be a “do what you said you would do at all costs” kind of thing. And oftentimes, getting yourself to take action and ‘grind it out’ is the right expression of it. 

But true self-discipline is a matter of being aware of what choice most serves you right now, and faithfully following through on it despite the pressures and circumstances you’re in. To me, that’s living intentionally. It’s infusing everything with purpose. And when self-care has that level of intentionality built into it, then it functions to help you take care of yourself.