Reviewed and updated September 2026 by Iris Hogan, MSW, LICSW.
Sometimes I hear an almost audible sigh from women when the conversation turns to self-care.
Of course they know they’re supposed to take better care of themselves. That’s part of the problem. Self-care can start to feel like one more thing they’re not doing well enough.
And then there is the version of self-care we’re surrounded by: the bubble bath, the spa day, the luxurious hour set aside just for you. Lovely, if you can get it. But for a woman who barely had time to eat lunch, it can feel like one more impossible standard.
Self-care has somehow become shorthand for bubble baths, meditation, and finding time for yourself.
But sometimes self-care is much less glamorous.
It’s eating lunch. Going to the doctor. Going to bed. Saying no. Asking for help.
Or admitting that what you need cannot fit into a five-minute break.
Self-Care Is Bigger Than We Sometimes Make It
The World Health Organization uses a much broader definition of self-care than the one we usually see in advertising. It includes the things people do to maintain their health, prevent illness, and cope with health concerns, with or without the support of a healthcare professional. Sleep, physical activity, nutrition, social connection, and appropriate healthcare can all be part of it.
That broader definition makes sense to me.
Going to your annual physical after putting it off for two years can be self-care.
So can making yourself lunch instead of realizing at 3 p.m. that you’ve been surviving on coffee.
And sometimes self-care is acknowledging that you are, in fact, not a superhero.
Maybe tonight that means declaring it a pizza night instead of making the well-balanced dinner that would take an hour to cook and leave you with a kitchen full of dishes.
The pizza isn’t the point.
The point is recognizing that on some days, taking care of yourself means lowering the demand rather than adding another healthy thing you’re supposed to do.
Knowing What You Need Isn’t Always the Problem
Most of the women I work with aren’t confused about whether taking care of themselves matters.
They know.
They may even know exactly what they need: more sleep, some exercise, time alone, an appointment they’ve been putting off, or dinner that doesn’t come from eating pieces of their child’s food while cleaning the kitchen.
Knowing isn’t necessarily the hard part.
Actually making room for yourself in a life already full of work, children, relationships, appointments, aging parents, household responsibilities, and everything else you’re keeping track of can be much harder.
Research looking at how women manage chronic health conditions tells a similar story. A 2024 systematic review of 84 qualitative studies found that time, caregiving and household responsibilities, physical and psychological capacity, self-prioritization, social support, financial circumstances, and cultural expectations can all affect women’s ability to care for their health.
Research looking more broadly at women’s health also emphasizes that self-care does not happen in a vacuum. Women’s circumstances, responsibilities, resources, and available support can affect whether self-care is actually accessible.
That’s one reason I think it’s more useful to ask what is getting in the way than simply to tell women they need more self-care.
Here are five barriers I see come up again and again.
1. There Really Isn’t Enough Time
Sometimes a time problem really is a time problem.
If you’re working all day, picking up children, making dinner, helping with homework, doing laundry, answering emails, remembering that somebody needs poster board by tomorrow morning, and trying to get everyone to bed, I’m not going to tell you that the solution is waking up an hour earlier to meditate.
You may genuinely have very little discretionary time.
Research supports taking that reality seriously. In the 2024 systematic review, women repeatedly described the time demands of managing their health as a barrier. In 16 of the included studies, caregiving responsibilities interfered with following health recommendations or attending healthcare appointments.
Self-care advice can become strangely disconnected from the reality of women’s lives when it assumes there is unused time sitting somewhere waiting to be claimed.
Sometimes there isn’t.
That doesn’t mean small moments are meaningless. Research on brief breaks suggests that breaks of ten minutes or less can produce small improvements in energy and fatigue, although most of this research comes from work or task settings rather than studies of women’s self-care specifically.
So yes, five minutes may still be worth taking.
But five minutes can’t do the work of an hour. And an hour can’t compensate for consistently getting too little sleep, carrying an impossible workload, or never having meaningful time off.
If time is your biggest barrier, rather than immediately asking how you can become more efficient at fitting self-care in, look at where your time is actually going.
Is everything on the list necessary?
Are you doing something because you’ve always done it?
Is something being done to a standard nobody else in your house particularly cares about?
Could another capable person be doing some of it?
And are you carrying anything simply because everyone has become accustomed to you carrying it?
Sometimes you find ten minutes.
Sometimes you discover the problem is much bigger than ten minutes.
2. You Feel Guilty When You Stop
This one is interesting because you can technically have the time and still find yourself unable to take it.
Someone else takes over. You have thirty minutes.
And suddenly you’re unloading the dishwasher, answering an email, or wiping down a counter that did not become an emergency in the last five minutes.
I’ve worked with many women who can explain quite convincingly why rest is important and then feel uncomfortable almost immediately when they try to do it themselves.
There may be a running commentary in the background:
I should be doing something.
Everyone else is working.
I’ll relax once I get a few things done.
The trouble with that last one is that there is almost always one more thing.
Research on women’s self-management doesn’t tell us that all women feel guilty when they rest, and I don’t want to make that claim. What it does show is that self-prioritization, family roles, caregiving responsibilities, and social expectations can influence women’s ability to care for their own health.
Guilt also doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong. Sometimes it shows up because you’re doing something differently.
If you’re accustomed to being useful, responsive, productive, or the person who notices what needs to happen next, leaving something undone can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.
You don’t necessarily have to get rid of that discomfort before you take care of yourself.
Sometimes you notice it, let it complain for a while, and sit down anyway.
3. You Don’t Have Much Left in the Tank
Sometimes you have the time. You even know what might help.
You just don’t have much left in the tank.
After a day of working, caregiving, making decisions, answering questions, driving people places, keeping track of appointments, and remembering what everyone needs, “do something restorative for yourself” can sound suspiciously like one more assignment.
This is one reason I’m hesitant to call this a motivation problem.
There are times when motivation really is part of it. But there are also times when a woman is exhausted, grieving, anxious, depressed, physically unwell, sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, or simply carrying too much.
Those aren’t all the same thing, and they don’t need the same response.
If you’re depleted, the answer may not be to push yourself into a workout because you know exercise is good for you. Maybe it’s going to bed.
If cooking feels impossible tonight, maybe it’s time to declare it a pizza night.
If you’ve been putting off a medical appointment because arranging it feels like one task too many, maybe making the appointment is enough for today.
Sometimes taking care of yourself isn’t about adding something restorative. It’s recognizing what you don’t have the capacity for and lowering the demand.
4. You’ve Turned Self-Care Into Another Thing to Do Correctly
I’ve seen self-care become surprisingly competitive — even when the only person you’re competing with is yourself.
Exercise regularly. Meditate. Journal. Meal prep. Drink enough water. Get outside. Sleep eight hours. Stay connected with friends.
Suddenly self-care has its own to-do list.
And if you tend toward perfectionism, it is remarkably easy to turn something intended to support you into another standard you’re failing to meet.
A ten-minute walk doesn’t count because you were supposed to exercise for thirty.
You skipped meditation three days in a row, so apparently you’re bad at meditation.
You finally have an evening to yourself and somehow feel pressure to use it well.
This is one of those places where my clinical experience is more useful than pretending research has identified perfectionism as one of the five official barriers to self-care. I see this pattern often, particularly in women who expect a great deal of themselves.
Sometimes self-care needs to become considerably less impressive.
Maybe the walk is ten minutes. Maybe dinner is scrambled eggs. Maybe you haven’t meditated in two weeks. Maybe you sit on the couch and watch something ridiculous.
Self-care doesn’t become more valuable because you did it beautifully.
Sometimes doing it imperfectly is exactly the point.
5. You Need More Support, Not Another Self-Care Strategy
This may be the barrier we overlook most often.
We talk about self-care as though the individual woman is responsible for both identifying what she needs and creating the conditions that allow her to get it.
But those are two different things.
A massage gift card sounds like a lovely self-care gift.
But if using it means finding a babysitter, coordinating schedules, getting everyone fed before you leave, and making up for everything that didn’t get done while you were gone, that massage may start to feel like another project.
The gift becomes much more useful when it comes with:
“I got you a massage. What afternoon can I come over and watch the kids while you go?”
Sometimes supporting someone’s self-care isn’t about giving her another way to take care of herself. It’s taking something off her plate so she actually can.
Research supports the importance of that larger context. Social and practical support repeatedly emerge as important in research on women’s ability to manage their health. Financial circumstances, cultural expectations, caregiving responsibilities, and other practical constraints matter too.
The World Health Organization similarly emphasizes that self-care happens within an enabling environment. People’s ability to care for their health doesn’t depend only on individual motivation or good intentions.
Maybe you need your partner to take responsibility for dinner three nights a week without asking you what to make.
Maybe you need your family to understand that you cannot be the person who handles every crisis.
Maybe you need flexibility at work, practical help caring for an aging parent, childcare, medical care, or therapy.
And sometimes there are constraints that are genuinely difficult to change — financial pressure, illness, single parenting, a job with little flexibility, or simply not having people nearby who can step in.
Those aren’t failures of self-care.
They’re circumstances that affect how much care is actually available to you.
Start With the Barrier, Not the Self-Care Plan
The answer isn’t necessarily to try harder at self-care.
It may be to get more specific about what’s making it difficult in the first place.
If the problem is guilt, finding another ten minutes won’t necessarily solve it. If the problem is exhaustion, adding a morning exercise routine may give you one more thing to fail at. If the problem is perfectionism, you may need less of a self-care plan, not a better one.
And if the problem is that you’re doing the work of three people, no amount of meditation changes the math.
Different barriers need different answers.
So rather than beginning with “What should I be doing for self-care?”, try asking:
What’s making it hard for me to take care of myself right now?
Maybe you need lunch or sleep. Maybe you need to make the doctor’s appointment you’ve been avoiding. Maybe the laundry can stay in the basket tonight. Maybe you need to say no to something or ask someone else to take over.
Or you may realize that you’ve been trying to solve with self-care something that actually requires more support.
That’s worth knowing.
When Self-Care Isn’t Enough
Self-care can support your well-being, but it isn’t a substitute for healthcare or mental health treatment when you need them.
If you’re persistently anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, unable to sleep, struggling to function, experiencing frightening thoughts, or simply noticing that you don’t feel like yourself, you don’t have to keep trying to manage it on your own.
Sometimes reaching out is itself an act of self-care.
Therapy can also be useful when you understand intellectually that you need to make room for yourself but keep running into the same patterns — guilt, perfectionism, difficulty setting boundaries, anxiety about disappointing people, or the feeling that everything will fall apart if you stop holding it together.
The goal isn’t to become better at self-care.
It’s to understand what is making it so difficult to care for yourself in the first place and decide what might actually help.
Maybe Self-Care Needs to Be Less Impressive
I don’t think most women need another list of things they should be doing for themselves.
Sometimes what you need is quite ordinary: eat lunch, go to bed, make the appointment, take the walk even though it’s only ten minutes, declare it a pizza night, or let somebody else do something even if they don’t do it exactly the way you would.
And sometimes the most useful thing you can do is acknowledge that what you need is bigger than anything you can squeeze into five minutes.
Taking care of yourself isn’t another standard you have to meet.
It’s paying attention to what you need — and being honest about what would make meeting that need possible.
Until we meet again — breathe gently, walk slowly, and treat yourself with kindness.
— Iris
Research & Further Reading
Dwyer, L., Barber, C., Dowding, D., & Kearney, R. (2024). Barriers and facilitators to self-management of chronic conditions reported by women: a systematic review of qualitative studies. BMJ Open, 14(11), e088568.
This systematic review synthesized 84 qualitative studies involving 1,788 women across 20 chronic conditions and 24 countries. The authors identified recurring barriers involving physical and psychological capacity, time, caregiving responsibilities, social support, self-prioritization, financial circumstances, and culture. Because the review concerns women managing chronic health conditions, I use it to provide context rather than assuming its findings apply identically to all women or all forms of self-care.
Narasimhan, M., et al. (2024). Self-care interventions for women’s health and well-being. Nature Medicine.
This review examines self-care specifically through the lens of women’s health and emphasizes that women’s ability to engage in self-care is shaped not only by individual behavior but also by social, economic, health-system, and other contextual factors.
Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460.
This systematic review and meta-analysis included 22 independent samples and 2,335 participants. Breaks of ten minutes or less were associated with small improvements in vigor and fatigue. The research was primarily conducted in work and task settings, so I use it only to support the modest claim that brief breaks can sometimes help — not that a five-minute break is a treatment for anxiety, depression, burnout, or chronic stress.
World Health Organization. (2026, June 3). Self-care for health and well-being.
WHO defines self-care broadly as people’s ability to promote and maintain health, prevent disease, and cope with illness, with or without support from a healthcare professional. Its current guidance emphasizes that self-care happens within a supportive environment and complements rather than replaces healthcare.