May 2024 | Why Having Healthy Boundaries is Self Care

April 27, 2024

The term “self care” has been thrown around a lot in the past decade. It’s often portrayed as bodily indulgence: a bath, a massage, expensive skincare products. Caring for oneself can certainly include special attention to our bodies, especially when we can be so hard on them. But at its core, self care is really about boundaries.

You probably know the airplane emergency guidance that you should put your own oxygen mask on before helping anyone else with theirs. It makes sense, in theory, that we can’t help others if it’s causing harm to ourselves, however we do this all the time. Sometimes it’s unavoidable: if you and your child are both sick and there’s no one that can come take care of your child, then you’ll have to push through your own illness because your child needs you. If you’re having a terrible day but your teammate is out of the office because they’re going through something worse, you’ll probably be covering for them despite how bad you feel. We often have to be flexible in the short term. The trouble is when the short term becomes the long term.

This can happen without us even realizing it: you start taking on someone else’s duties to help them out in a pinch and then somehow it becomes a part of your job; you loan a family member a little bit of money and then some more, and then some more, and after months have passed you realize that you’re helping to support them; you lend a sympathetic ear to a friend when no one else will and you turn into their therapist. It’s nice to help out our coworkers, our friends, our family and we should be as helpful as we can be to others, but when things slip beyond helpful and we take on roles that we are not equipped to play—if our workload is already full and extra tasks push us to a stressful state, if we don’t have wiggle room in our finances and supporting someone else is creating financial distress, if we don’t have any extra space in our emotions and taking on someone else’s troubles is leaving us mentally overdrawn—then we are no longer caring for ourselves. We’ve let our boundaries soften too much and a candlelit bath isn’t going to fix it.

When we reach this point, we do need to step back and adjust our own oxygen mask, or rather, reestablish (or establish for the first time) boundaries that will allow us to take care of ourselves so we can also help others. Setting boundaries or reaffirming them can be very hard which is why we so often allow them to diminish. It’s easier to give someone money—even if it hurts you financially—than it is to let someone else down. None of us wants to be seen as unsupportive. But we all have our limits, we can only do so much, and determining where those limits are and holding firm to them is truly caring for ourselves.