So do you do self-care? You need to do more self-care. What is self-care? It’s a word that’s been thrown around a lot lately, but when asked what it means, the definition is all over the place. It’s somebody’s hobby of collecting comics, it’s watching Netflix and eating ice-cream, and it’s sitting on the toilet and scrolling social media. It’s everything and anything that’s not work. But is it really self-care?

When it comes to self-care, the translation is quite literal: caring for the emotional self. Self-care is doing something that you benefit from, should put effort into, and at the end of the process, should feel good about. Applying these three things should give you a decent notion of what self-care looks like. So if you’re wondering if mindlessly scrolling the internet and eating that third slice of cake is self-care, just ask yourself: am I putting in any effort to do this? Am I going to regret this the next day?

At the end of the day, self-care is really what you make of it. Just like any new experience, take your time to learn. Start easy with what you know and build up from there. The more time and effort you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to simply do anything. Maybe that should be first on the list.