Why we are so bad at caring for ourselves
In brief: We know more about wellbeing than any previous generation, yet a great many people remain deeply depleted. This article asks why caring for ourselves has become so difficult, looking at what exhaustion does to our capacity to act, the lives we have built with almost no margin, the way even work we love can consume us, and the unequal freedom people have to change any of it. It also offers practical ways forward, from noticing what is really draining us to sharing the work of care with the people around us.
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly aware of how many people around me seem to be running close to empty. Some have withdrawn from the world around them and many have reached burnout. Others would probably resist that word, yet live with a more diffuse form of exhaustion that never quite lifts. I see it among leaders I respect, people working in community organisations, business owners, governmental agencies, universities, people carrying significant caring responsibilities and others whose lives look reasonably successful from the outside. They keep functioning, often very well, but there is more stress and anxiety behind the functioning, and less and less joy.
I recognise some of this in myself. I have a tendency to take on a great deal, partly because I care about the work I do and partly because I find it difficult to disengage from problems that seem urgent. This said, I also know enough about wellbeing to value the truth behind of the standard advice. I know I function better when I sleep properly, exercise, eat well, spend time outside and make room for the people I love. The basics. Most of the exhausted people I know understand much the same thing, so knowledge is rarely the main obstacle.
This is one reason I have become interested in the apparent contradiction at the centre of contemporary self-care. We have more information about wellbeing than any previous generation. There is an enormous industry devoted to helping us sleep better, exercise more effectively, manage stress, regulate our nervous systems and organise our lives. Yet a considerable number of people remain deeply depleted.
Burnout has acquired a much broader everyday meaning than its formal definition. The World Health Organization describes it specifically as an occupational phenomenon arising from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, associated with exhaustion, growing distance or cynicism towards work, and declining professional effectiveness. In ordinary conversation, however, people increasingly use the word to describe a more general experience: the sense that the demands of life have been exceeding their ability to recover for too long.
I am interested in that wider experience because it raises a deceptively difficult question. Given everything we know about the importance of care, how is it that so many of us end up so depleted all the time?
(Picture by Andrej Lišakov)
What depletion does to us
One answer is that the mind and body most in need of care are also the mind and body being asked to organise it. When we are rested and relatively secure, it is easier to plan meals, make an appointment, exercise, call a friend, say no to an additional commitment or think clearly about what needs to change. When we are depleted, the executive capacity required to do these things is itself diminished. We reach for what is immediate and familiar rather than for what will restore us over time.
This helps explain why temporary relief can so easily displace genuine restoration. Scrolling, streaming, alcohol, comfort food, shopping or working late into the night may offer distraction or a brief reduction in discomfort. There is no great mystery or moral failure in this. An overloaded nervous system seeks relief.
But we need to admit that relief and restoration are not always the same thing. What helps us escape our experience for an hour may leave our underlying exhaustion or isolation untouched, and sometimes makes the following day a little harder.
We have also become remarkably good at eliminating empty space from our lives. Waiting in a queue, taking a break from work, sitting on the toilet or waiting for the kettle to boil once gave the mind a few unclaimed minutes. Now a phone fills them almost automatically. We also listen to podcasts at the gym, music while walking, the radio while driving or cooking, and reach for something to read, watch or mindlessly scroll the moment there is a pause. Much of this is enjoyable and useful, and I do it sometimes too, but, as I have explored in an earlier article about my ‘non-thinking chair’, I am concerned that we are collectively losing some of the boredom and mental spaciousness in which thoughts can wander, experiences can settle, and we can notice what is going on inside us without immediately giving our attention to something else. A tired mind may seek stimulation precisely because silence feels uncomfortable, but the constant stream of information gives it very little opportunity to become quiet enough to recover.
For many of us, busyness also carries psychological rewards. It can give us momentum and a sense of importance. It can protect us from questions we would rather not confront: whether we are lonely, whether a relationship is working, whether our work still has meaning, whether we are frightened by what is happening in the world, or whether the life we are maintaining is actually the life we want. Slowing down does not always feel peaceful. Sometimes it allows everything we have kept at a manageable distance to catch up with us.
There is also the deeply embedded idea that our value lies in our usefulness, and this takes different forms. Women continue to carry a disproportionate share of domestic and caring labour, and may experience attending to their own needs as selfishness or as one more thing for which they do not have time. Men are often taught a different version of the same lesson: to demonstrate strength through endurance and to seek help only when a situation has become unmanageable. The behaviours differ, but both can produce people who struggle to acknowledge their limits.
Even self-care can become another arena of performance. We count our steps, measure our sleep, maintain meditation streaks and construct ideal morning routines, then feel inadequate when we cannot optimise ourselves successfully. Care becomes another task to complete and another standard against which to fail. Rather than asking what would genuinely support us, we ask whether we are being disciplined enough.
I have certainly caught myself doing this. It is remarkably easy to approach self-care with exactly the same mentality that has made us exhausted.
We have built lives with very little margin
There is, however, only so far we can go by examining individual behaviour. Much of contemporary life is organised in ways that consume the time and energy required for recovery.
Housing has become extraordinarily expensive. Many households need two substantial incomes simply to remain financially viable. Caring responsibilities have grown as health, disability and aged-care systems struggle under pressure. Digital technology has made large numbers of people continuously reachable, while many forms of professional work have expanded beyond any clear physical or temporal boundary. Administrative tasks that were once carried out by organisations have been transferred onto individuals, who now spend hours navigating portals, passwords, forms and automated systems.
Under those conditions, the ideal of the perfectly balanced life can become almost punitive. Someone already holding together paid work, children, an ageing parent and household finances can easily come away from the wellbeing conversation with a new sense of failure because they have somehow also failed to meditate.
As Annabel Crabb, who has written extensively about the mismatch between the way paid work is still organised and the realities of family life in Australia, puts it: "Parents are often expected to work as though they have no children and raise children as though they have no work". The tension is familiar to anyone who has tried to combine serious professional responsibility with caring for children. Workplaces frequently continue to operate according to assumptions created for lives in which someone else was taking care of the domestic sphere.
Time itself is unequally distributed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey found that women who participated in unpaid work spent an average of four hours and 31 minutes a day doing it, compared with three hours and 12 minutes for men. Women were also more likely to report regularly feeling rushed or pressed for time, with women aged 35 to 44 the most time-stressed group in the survey. The survey was conducted during the pandemic and should be understood in that context, but the broader point remains: the time available for care is shaped by gender, income, family structure, health, housing, culture and power.
Climate disruption, and the general global uncertainty we have lived under for the past few years, bring their own psychological burden, even for people who would never describe themselves as experiencing climate anxiety. There is a background awareness for many that the future is becoming less secure and that conditions they assumed would remain stable throughout their lives are changing. People may carry this anticipatory anxiety and grief without necessarily naming it.
Communities repeatedly affected by fire, flood, storms or extreme heat are not merely recovering from discrete events: people deal with rebuilding, insurance, financial strain and institutional processes while carrying memories of what has already happened and anticipating what may happen next. Under these conditions, exhaustion can be a proportionate response to circumstances that are themselves overwhelming, rather than evidence that an individual has failed to cope.
This is why exhortations to become more resilient can be so problematic. Resilience can be valuable when it increases our capacity to adapt and to support one another. It becomes harmful when it is used to shift responsibility onto people while leaving the conditions producing distress unchanged. Teaching people to tolerate an unhealthy system is not care.
When purpose gives us energy, and when it consumes us
At the same time, I don’t think structural explanations tell the whole story. There is a form of energy that does not come simply from working fewer hours or managing time more efficiently. It comes from coherence: from bringing what we believe, what we love, what we do and how we live into closer alignment. When our actions express something we care about deeply, we can feel carried by the work rather than merely depleted by it. Purpose can give us access to courage and persistence that might otherwise remain unavailable.
I explored this in an earlier article, From burnout to aliveness: The case for regenerative leadership. People sometimes describe me as a high achiever, but that description has never felt quite right. Much of the time I am simply doing work that I love, work that gives me meaning and that I would probably choose to do in some form even if I were not paid. When work is driven by curiosity and enjoyment rather than relentless striving, effort can feel energising rather than extractive.
But purpose is not an inexhaustible fuel source, nor is it inherently regenerative. In fact, the work we love can consume us precisely because we love it. People working in community recovery, health care, education, humanitarian action, climate advocacy or social justice can tolerate profoundly unhealthy conditions because the cause is urgent, the need is real and withdrawing feels like abandoning people and ecosystems. Passion allows us to draw deeply upon ourselves, but it does not make the body limitless.
This is where I find the distinction between devotion and extraction useful. Devotion means giving ourselves to something we love while remaining in relationship with our bodies, limits, families, colleagues and other responsibilities. Extraction treats even our deepest purpose as permission to consume ourselves. It may produce remarkable work for a period, but it progressively erodes the person and the relationships upon which that work depends.
I have seen this repeatedly in humanitarian work and community recovery, and I see it among people working on climate, health, education and social change. When the problem is serious and the consequences of stepping away feel real, it becomes very easy to override the signals telling us that the current pace is unsustainable. A person can endure conditions they would immediately identify as unhealthy for someone else because the work feels indispensable.
Purpose therefore creates a particular responsibility. The more meaningful the work is, the easier it can become to confuse self-exhaustion with commitment.
Recognising structural constraints prevents us from blaming people for conditions they did not create, but it does not require us to surrender all agency. Where we have some room to act, we carry a responsibility to notice when commitment has become compulsion, and when we are financing today's contribution by borrowing against our future health and relationships.
For leaders, this responsibility extends further, because the way we treat ourselves often becomes an unspoken instruction to others. When we normalise our own exhaustion and constant availability, the people around us learn what commitment is expected to look like.
There is a form of self-awareness here that I have come to associate with regenerative leadership: understanding where our energy comes from, and noticing early when work has begun drawing down resources that are no longer being restored.
The unequal freedom to care for ourselves
Any discussion of self-care must also acknowledge the privilege involved in having the time and mental space to read an article like this and reconsider how one lives. Some people are living so close to the edge, financially or emotionally, that reflection itself is a luxury. A person working multiple jobs, caring for children or an ageing parent, living with violence, navigating disability, recovering from disaster or facing insecure housing may have almost no discretionary time or energy. Telling them to establish better boundaries or develop a meditation practice can become another way of adding pressure onto them.
We should therefore be careful not to convert self-care into a universal moral expectation while ignoring people's radically unequal capacity to practise it. Responsibility is real, but it is not equally distributed. The greater our security, autonomy, resources and institutional power, the greater our responsibility not only to care for ourselves, but to create conditions in which other people can care for themselves. For someone in survival mode, care may mean accepting help or finding ten minutes without demands. For someone with authority over workloads, wages, schedules, leave or public services, care must include changing the conditions under which other people live and work.
In other words, the self-care conversation becomes much more useful once we stop pretending everybody is operating with the same amount of freedom.
Workplaces are an obvious place to apply this thinking because many of the conditions contributing to burnout are created there, which is why I will be exploring it in my next article.
What might caring for ourselves actually require?
I remain wary of writing an article about structural exhaustion and finishing with a prescription for a better bedtime routine.
There are things we can do personally, however, and I have started to think about them as attempts to read our own lives accurately rather than as techniques.
When I feel depleted, I find it useful to ask what is actually consuming the energy. Sometimes the answer is obvious: there is too much work. Sometimes I am maintaining a commitment through habit long after its value has diminished. At other times I am physically resting while continuing to carry a problem mentally, so the apparent break produces very little recovery.
There are periods when watching a film or doing very little is exactly what I need. There are others when the same behaviour leaves me feeling flatter because what I was really missing was connection, time outside, physical movement or the opportunity to deal with something I had been avoiding. The same activity can serve completely different purposes depending on what is happening underneath it.
I would suggest paying closer attention to rhythm. A balanced life is not necessarily one in which every day contains the correct proportion of work, family, exercise, friendship and rest. There are intense periods in almost any meaningful life. A new baby, a disaster, the beginning of an organisation, perimenopause, school holidays when parents are still at work, or a project approaching completion can temporarily consume a great deal of energy. The question is whether intensity is allowed to end.
Problems emerge when exceptional effort becomes the permanent operating model and recovery is continually postponed into some imaginary future in which life will finally become less demanding.
A more humane aim is to ensure that exertion is followed by recovery, and periods of intensity by periods of genuine slowing down. Bodies and relationships do not thrive on constant output. The real test is whether, over weeks, months and years, our way of living is renewing or depleting our capacity.
Care also becomes more possible when it is relational. Instead of treating it as a private project to be purchased and performed alone, we can talk openly about workload, redistribute domestic and emotional labour, establish reciprocal arrangements with friends and neighbours, and ask for help before crisis arrives. A meal brought by a friend, a shared school run, someone who notices our withdrawal, a manager who removes a task rather than merely expressing concern: these are among the forms through which care becomes real.
For those of us with greater room to choose, the question should extend beyond what we can do for ourselves. What conditions can we change for others? We can make a colleague's workload realistic, give an employee genuine permission to disconnect, assume a fairer share of care at home, design a meeting around part-time staff, fund access rather than merely recommend it, or support public policies that give people more material security and time. Self-care without collective care risks becoming a private escape available mostly to those who are already protected.
Finally, we need to recover awareness of our limits without treating those limits as defects. This means noticing the early signs of overload and communicating before we are at breaking point, so that care can be preventive rather than something we earn only after becoming unwell. It also means remembering that saying 'no' to one demand may be necessary in order to remain capable of saying 'yes' to what we care about most.
Concluding thoughts
Rest helps enormously, but a week away cannot resolve a life organised around chronic powerlessness or extraction. What many of us need runs deeper: a greater sense of agency over how we live, relationships in which care moves in both directions, work that connects effort with meaning, and enough material and emotional security to make genuine choice possible.
When I think again about the exhausted people who prompted me to write this article, I am increasingly reluctant to ask whether they are doing self-care well enough. Many of them are thoughtful people who already understand themselves reasonably well. Some are living inside circumstances that ask too much of them. Some have become accustomed to asking too much of themselves. For many, it is probably a mixture of both.
Caring for ourselves sits between the purely private and the purely structural. It is a practice of bringing greater coherence between what we love, how we live, what we ask of ourselves and the conditions we are constrained by.
Not always easy, I know, but neither is the way many of us are living now.
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