Embrace Boring: What Boring Self-Care Is & Why It Matters

The gist: Discover what boring self-care is, how it honors the history of self-care, and why it's so important for disabled, mentally ill, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people.

When most people talk about self-care, they talk about pretty intense or glamorous stuff.

Things like:

• Spa days
• Luxurious vacations
• Training for a marathon
• Wearing weird light face masks that make you look like Iron Man 😝

And while that stuff can be fun and help you feel good, it’s not the kind of self-care most of us should be focusing on.

Unfortunately, the most important self-care tasks are usually the most boring.

And the more glamorous stuff may complement boring self-care, it’s not a replacement for it.

There is a bright side, though:

While the boring stuff may be more…well…boring and less Instagrammable, it’s also more affordable and accessible, since the glamorous side of self-care has been so commoditized and so often involves buying things.

(Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, the author of past Clubhouse Book Club selection Real Self-Care, calls this the distinction between real self-care and faux self-care.)

So for the next few weeks, we’re going to be diving into the boring side of self-care.

What is boring self-care?

I think of boring self-care as the tasks required for things like routine health maintenance, managing the illnesses I already have, and preventing those I don’t.

Really, it’s just basic personal care.

Things like:

• Working on sleep hygiene
• Caring about hydration and nutrition
• Taking meds and doing treatments consistently
• Getting in gentle movement regularly
• Keeping up with doctor’s appointments
• Dealing with health symptoms and complications that come up

(See more in our Big List of Boring Self-Care Ideas)

These things might not be exciting, but they’re incredibly crucial for anyone, but especially those of us who are chronically ill, neurodivergent, disabled, or mentally ill.

In fact, this kind of self-care is actually what was meant by the original definition of self-care in the mid-20th century.

The term originated in discussions about how disabled and mentally ill people could care for themselves outside of professional care.

And those discussions were fundamental to the disability justice causes of the time.

Trusting disabled people to care for themselves outside of the constant supervision of medical care was required for things like the deinstitutionalization and independent living movements of the 50s and 60s.

The discussions then spread to other social justice movements, where inspired the ideologies of groups like the Black Panther Party, who famously created free health clinics among so many other needed social services.

So I like to think that focusing on the “boring” side of self-care is also a way to respect the history of self-care and its roots in disability and social justice.

And that definitely makes it seem less boring.

Why boring self-care is so important

Like I said before, while this side of self-care is important for everyone, it’s especially so for anyone with a chronic illness, mental illness, neurodivergence, or disability.

But why?

Of course, there’s the obvious: our bodies usually need more care.

But it goes deeper than that.

By prioritizing boring self-care, you can…

Maintain a higher health “baseline”

No, drinking more water or doing yoga won’t cure your chronic illness, no matter what the unsolicited advice of strangers would suggest. 🙄

But those kind of things can make chronic illness and other health conditions easier to deal with.

Here’s how I like to look at it:

Things like taking my meds when I’m supposed to, getting enough sleep, and drinking enough water may not cure any of my health conditions, they do improve how I feel and increase what I’m able to do while living with them.

While I can’t fully control my health or how often I get flare-ups, I can do the best I can to control what I can. And over time, I’ve realized that the effort is worth it if it means fewer flare-ups or bad days.

Prove your self-efficacy to yourself

Especially with neurodivergence or mental illness in the mix, it can be pretty common for us to fall into phases triggered by depression or rejection sensitivity, where you feel like a failure who can’t do anything.

But maintaining a few tiny, boring self-care habits (and I’m talking really tiny and really boring, like brushing your teeth or taking a single sip of water) when everything else is going wrong can be a much-needed of reminder that you can build habits and do things.

In fact, in my opinion, maintenance self-care habits are the best kind of starter habits to build. It’s a way to put in a small amount of practice building habits daily.

When most people, especially in the productivity space, talk about building habits, they usually talk about big, intense things like hour-long daily workouts or 2-hour deep work sessions.

But those are often too big, and therefore unattainable, for a lot of us.

We need to start somewhere smaller and easier, and boring self-care tasks are a great fit for that.

Build in buffers for bad days

Finally, in addition to reducing how often bad days or flare-ups happen, keeping up with basic self-care maintenance can make the bad days that do happen easier to deal with.

It goes back to the higher baseline mentioned above: when you raise your baseline, falling 50% below it for a few days still doesn’t put you as low as before, for whatever metric we’re talking about here.

For a tangible example, reminding myself of this is one of the ways I motivate myself to stay hydrated.

Because my stomach flare-ups severely dehydrate me, they can be so, so much worse (like, ER worse) if I’m already at all dehydrated when the flare-up starts. In terms of hydration, I’m going from bad to worse. But staying hydrated means when I do flare, that situation is only going from “good” or okay” to “bad.”

And that difference matters.

Embrace the boring

I hoped this helped you realize or remember how important basic or “boring” self-care is. But personally, once I realized all this that I shared with you today, it became hard not to get excited about.

This kind of self-care might not be exotic or super shareable on social media, but it’s the stuff that makes so many other things in our lives easier, if not what makes it possible at all.

And if you liked this post, you'll also love:

• Gentle Productivity: Because Hustle Culture & Brute-Force Productivity Don’t Work
• 3 Strategies to Make Boring Self-Care Tasks More Fun
• 3 Mindset Shifts to Help You Embrace Boring Self-Care