Guest post: Earning our wellness
Who ultimately benefits from the self-care industrial complex?
Jorden Cummings (they/them) is an educator, researcher, self-care activist, and clinician who lives on Treaty 6 territory in Canada. In the last cohort of FF1 (she is currently in FF2), we were talking about the commodification and corporatization of “wellness,” which happened to be an area of their expertise. I was talking about how mindfulness programs are pitched to companies as improving the productivity, increasing focus, and lowering stress of employees, but who ultimately benefits from those gains? Example: if a mindfulness program, or any other wellness program, increases employee productivity by 5%, what happens? Does the company produce the same amount and gives employees 5% more income or allow them to work 5% less? Have you ever heard this happen? Or does the company simply capture the extra productivity as profit? And raise the expectations of what should be produced by employees? The worker continues to run in place. Since this is Jorden’s area of research, I asked them to write a piece about this. She gets into interesting territory on the other side of the work-spend cycle of the “self-care” industry too: who benefits, and more importantly who does not, when we think of self care as buying products? Enjoy the read below.
Jorden shares their work at www.teachmeselfcare.com
By the time I finished my graduate school training and began my job as a tenure-track professor, I was substantially burnt out and suffering from all of the physical and mental health consequences that accompany that depth of weariness. At that point in my career, I still believed my brain could solve anything (I’ve since learned that much wisdom lives in the body), so I did what any academic would do: I read everything I could about workplace wellness and self-care. What began as a way to heal me turned into what is now a decade-long journey researching self-care.
Over the last five to seven years(ish), employers appear - on the surface - to be catching on to the idea that promoting wellness and self-care amongst their employees is good business. Unfortunately, many employers fall drastically short of developing effective ways to do so.
Douglas invited me to write about employer-led efforts related to well-being and self-care. I share some examples of this misguidance, why we should have a healthy skepticism about employer-led wellness plans, and the differences between false (commodified) and authentic self-care.
One of the best examples I’ve received of unhelpful (to say the least) employer gratitude plans is a company giving their nurses stones to demonstrate “they rock.” Some the stones have “you rock” messages painted on them. In others, the employer downloaded that work to the employees themselves. You do the, um, work!
This is especially disappointing if we consider the context that nurses (and other medical health professionals) have had to work in, especially since 2020. A recent meta-analysis estimates that almost 30% of nurses have post-traumatic stress disorder from their work during the pandemic.1 The likelihood of developing PTSD is exacerbated by inadequate protection at work and intense workloads.1 Moreover, healthcare workers have been leaving their fields en masse and not being replaced by governments or medical systems (depending on your country), further exacerbating healthcare worker shortages and the burden on those left behind. In my clinical practice, I have worked with many healthcare workers who have this experience - some of whom can no longer work at all due to the debilitation of their burnout or trauma
In that context, being given a rock and instructed to paint it yourself seems clueless at best and demeaning at worst.
Employees are understandably skeptical of workplace efforts to promote self-care, well-being, and work-life balance. So many, like the rocks, completely miss the mark. Instead of making employees feel appreciated and encouraged to enjoy a holistic lifestyle (of balance and wellness), these employer attempts often leave them feeling insulted and patronized. We should be skeptical - employers are, after all, in the business of generating profit. Many wellness programs developed don’t seem to hide that they are designed to benefit the employer by increasing your productivity or efficiency.2 Or even financially - my employer has introduced a plan, for example, whereby staff can take additional vacation days... if they buy them from the employer.
The Purpose of Work
As Your Money or Your Life reminds us, a job has one purpose: To pay us money. As I’ve written in my forthcoming book about self-care in higher education, “Being paid money is the only characteristic of a job that distinguishes it from an interest, hobby, volunteer opportunity, foray, eat-pray-love-style adventure or any other label we might think of for things we do that do not result in being paid money.”3 (Cummings, 2024).
For me, beginning to see my work as something I do for a paycheck allowed me to divest my identity from that work. Ironically, as I began to see myself as a more holistic person - not just a professor or an employee - my life became richer. I live my life more broadly and with synergy across “domains” rather than separating them into “work” versus “the rest of my life.”
Multiple researchers have demonstrated that pursuing a job for intrinsic reasons (for example, “having a calling” or “pursuing a passion” can be risky for us psychologically, especially if we are blocked from pursuing them (for example, by working for an employer who does not provide the proper resources we need to be successful in that calling - like overworking nurses rather than hiring enough nurses to provide safe care to an entire hospital unit properly). In those situations, we can experience disappointment, burnout, and a desire to quit (a “fall from the call”).4 Likewise, when we are paid for something we intrinsically value, we might lose our motivation to do it. Pursuing a job for a passion can open us up to exploitation at work as well, for example, by being pressured to work more hours than we are compensated for, being asked to do work not in our job description, or our employer assuming we enjoy extra work because of our intrinsic passion.5
I know many academics, myself included, who struggle not to go above and beyond. We know ultimately, it is students who will suffer under the neoliberal framework of higher education. When we have a passion, we struggle to set limits with it.
To summarize, finding paid work that meets our core values is fantastic, but we should consider that a bonus. The good news is that for every core value we can hold as dear to us, there are many, many ways to meet them outside of our paid employment. Financial freedom is one way to liberate our time to pursue what matters to us. It also gives us the freedom to remove ourselves from unworkable situations, including employers who undermine our well-being, devalue our contributions, or - in the case of some employers - our very humanity. For those of us in particularly unbearable (or unsafe) situations, this might include using a f*ck off fund.
Ironically, as I’ve addressed my burnout and tried to contain my career to something workable for me, I’ve reached some of the most productive years I’ve ever had as a scholar. I’m more creative and “think bigger” when developing my research and teaching.
The False Promises of Commodified Self-Care
Walking alongside inadequate employer-led wellness “efforts” is the multi-billion dollar wellness and self-care industry, promising solutions to the exhaustion and burnout we can experience from living and working under a system of extractive capitalism - for a cost, of course. These products often center around skin-care, relaxation, drinking, and travel (just to name a few). Of course, capitalism sends the message that we must “earn” these commodified versions of self-care by working as hard as possible. Rest, wellness, dream time, slowness… we have an inherent right to all these experiences just by being human. Capitalism loves to tell us we aren’t worthy of them. (For more on this, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance).
In a recent study in my lab, we analyzed videos produced by YouTube influencers related to self-care.6 We found that these influencers portrayed self-care as essential (for all people) by expressing that people shouldn’t feel guilty for needing self-care and should spend time creating habits to support their self-care. However, at the same time, as portrayed by the influencers, self-care requires substantial access and privilege, entwined with Western maintenance of beauty (and diet) ideals for women, required access to a trendy and expensive lifestyle, and encouraged viewers to earn entire days devoted to self-care (often using expensive products during that day). We concluded that the
“inherent privileges presented by influencers have the potential to create a fantasy of self-care that is unattainable by regular viewers and encourages adherence to aspects of consumerism, diet culture, and gender norms.”
Capitalist messages of self-care include that we should always be optimizing ourselves7 - our transformation is never complete, of course.
None of these self-care products are true self-care; instead, they are products. Notably, they are products designed to soothe us but not solve problems. No number of bath bombs will fix an issue that is negatively impacting our well-being. These examples are products designed to promote distraction and avoidance of profound (reasonable) reactions to working and existing within extractive capitalism (e.g., stress, burnout, and trauma) and to keep us spending money (which will require most of us to continue working) rather than spending energy healing ourself, pursuing wellness, and changing social problems.
Authentic Self-Care
Authentic self-care is not derived from a drive to consume or to simply soothe our (short-term, shifting) emotions. Authentic self-care is derived from our core personal values - that which we consider most important in our lives, the characteristics we each use to describe what makes our idiosyncratic life worth living, and the things we wish to be known for in the world.
Authentic self-care is the behaviours we take to move toward our core values, even when they might not feel good or benefit us far in the future. For example, Douglas’ Financial Freedom courses and Substacks often focus on long-term benefits to our life, energy, and spirituality that might involve challenging experiences in the short term. Examples of activities that you might not think of when you hear “self-care,” include things like going to the dentist (to move us to a value of health), playing a very dull game that happens to be our child’s favorite (to move us toward a value of connection), or spending an exorbitant unexpected amount of money at the vet after our beloved animal swallows an object that is not edible. Many of you likely read this Substack because your financial self-care is important to you.
Authentic self-care brings our external lives in alignment with our internal values. This is committed action.
Coming Full Circle: Supporting Meaningful Workplace Wellness
I have hope that one day more (even most) employers will genuinely value employee well-being and have policies and wellness plans that we can be less skeptical and cynical about. Millennial and Gen Z knowledge workers appear unwilling to sacrifice their well-being for an employer. It is becoming increasingly common each year when I interview potential new graduate students for them to ask questions about workload, balance, and their health during graduate school. Before the last few years, I was never asked.
In the meantime, however, we must rely on more grassroots approaches to promoting self-care in our workplaces and communities. We must learn to identify our core values and how we can care for ourselves in a way that aligns with those values. We need to talk to one another about workplace issues of stress, burnout, mistreatment, overwork, and abuse. We must support those around us in pursuing well-being - something we all have a human right to experience. Where we can, we need to push back against employers - in this space, self-care becomes critical labour activism.
Hernández-Bojorge, S., Campos, A., Parikh, J., Beckstead, J., Lajeunesse, M., & Wildman, D. (2023). The prevalence and risk factors of PTSD symptoms among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic - a systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13257
Douglas note: employee mindfulness programs!
Cummings, J. A. (forthcoming, 2024). Workable self-care for higher education. Routledge.
Hartnett, S., & Kline, F., (2005). Preventing the fall from the ‘call to teach’: Rethinking vocation. Journal of Education and Christian Belief, 9(1), 9-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/205699710500900103
Kim, J. Y., Campbell, T. H., Shepherd, S., & Kay, A. C. (2019). Understanding contemporary forms of exploitation: Attributions of passion serve to legitimize the poor treatment of workers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(1), 121-148. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000190
Knowles, L. A., & Cummings, J. A. (accepted, 2023). Influencers’ presentation of self-Care on YouTube: It’s essential, but inaccessible. The Journal of Social Media & Society.
Lakshmin, P. (2023). Real self-care. Penguin Life.
As someone who gets paid to deliver employee wellness webinars, it brings up an individual dilemma. I know the system at play and I know I’m just there for a short amount of time. And I want to be paid for my own financial freedom. Often in contemplation about how to show up and be present for these workers.