The Self-Care Trap How To Actually Care for Yourself on Your Journey to Improving

Don’t fall for the propaganda

Ayodeji Awosika
12 min readAug 12, 2020

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The following is an excerpt of my book — Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement

Self-care is crucial to keeping your energy high and sanity intact on the path to improving your life, but the idea of self-care can quickly become a trap.

And tons of people are promoting this perverted version of a useful idea.

They go by many descriptions — the self-care guru, meditation sage, the Buddhist hipster, the “treat yourself” enabler. Their goals and opinions are the exact opposite of the prototypical gurus.

Instead of telling you to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, they pretend bootstraps don’t exist.

Instead of telling you you’re weak unless you’re successful, they tell you that you’re strong because you’re not successful. Instead of telling you to hustle 24/7, they tell you to reward yourself for doing nothing.

Both sides of the coin are wrong. As often happens, the answer lies in the gray.

The Happiness Dichotomy

There are two types of happiness, memory happiness, and experiential happiness.

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