Ep 195: Self-Care vs. Numbing

When was the last time you did something to take care of yourself and actually felt better after? Not just distracted or temporarily relieved, but genuinely, truly better.

We have a cultural obsession with self-care. The idea is everywhere—on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and Instagram—yet so many of the things we call self-care are actually ways of numbing. Today I’m unpacking the difference between the two and explaining why real self-care often looks different from what we expect.

And let me be clear: there is no shame in numbing. We’ve all been there. My goal is to help you recognize the difference so you can make intentional choices about how you care for yourself. Real self-care is one of the most loving, radical, important things you can do, and it is a foundational part of becoming your favorite you.

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Transcript

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hey there, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I am still your favorite podcast host and life coach, Melissa Parsons. 

And I'm once again so grateful that you're here with me today. I want to start today's episode with a question. And I want you to sit with it for a second before you answer it. Even if you're driving, even if you're on a walk, even if you're folding laundry, sit with it for a minute and let it sink in. 

Here's the question. When was the last time you did something for yourself? And afterward, you actually felt better? Not just distracted, not just temporarily relieved, but genuinely, truly better. Because here's what I've been thinking about a lot lately and what I want to dig into with you today. 

We have a cultural obsession with the idea of self-care. It's everywhere. It's on t-shirts and coffee mugs and Instagram captions. And yet so much of what we call self-care is actually numbing. And the difference between those two things is immense. 

So today we're going to get real about what self-care actually is from my perspective and what numbing is from my perspective. And I want to be clear for certain, and I want you to hear this, that I am certainly not here to shame anyone because I have done all of this myself. 

And I want to help you know how you can start to tell the difference in your own life so that you can choose whether you're going to call it self-care or whether you're going to call it numbing. So let's go. 

So I'm going to give you part of my own story first. I'm going to share something personal because I think it's going to sound familiar. For a long time, a really long time, I thought I was pretty good at taking care of myself. 

Genuinely, I had a whole repertoire of things I did for Melissa, and they looked great from the outside. They felt good in the moment. I would have defended them confidently as self-care. I used to think that treating myself to a delicious meal out or pouring a glass of fabulous wine at the end of a long day or on a really bad day having a, you know, gin and tonic was self-care. 

I mean, I had earned it. I was a physician. I was a mom. I was definitely exhausted and I for sure deserved it. I used to think that shopping was self-care. A little retail therapy never hurt anyone, right? 

A new pair of shoes because they kind of always fit, a cozy sweater, a thing I didn't need, but I wanted. That felt like a treat, like I was honoring myself. I used to think that planning my next vacation was self-care. 

And oh, I was so good at this one. I would spend hours on TripAdvisor and hotel reviews and, you know, planning all these different itineraries. And I would feel genuinely excited and alive while I was doing it. 

And don't get it twisted. None of those things by themselves are bad things. I want to say that clearly. A good meal is a joy. Vacation planning is fun. Shopping occasionally for things you love is fine. 

But here's what I've come to understand. I wasn't doing those things as a form of genuine care for myself. I was using them to feel something, or more accurately, often to stop feeling something. The stress of a hard day at work, the loneliness I didn't quite have words for, the anxiety that kind of hummed and buzzed underneath everything, the sense that I was constantly running on empty, but couldn't bear to stop. 

Those activities gave me a short-term hit of pleasure, certainly a dopamine hit. They gave me a hit of relief. They gave me a hit of distraction. And then the thing I was trying to not feel, guess what? 

It was still there waiting for me. That, my humans, my beautiful, beautiful humans, is numbing. And it is not the same as self-care, not even a little bit. And here's what real self-care for me turned out to be. 

The truest, deepest, most transformative self-care that I have ever practiced, the stuff that actually changed my life looked nothing like a spa day. It was not glamorous. It was not instantly pleasurable. 

And honestly, sometimes it was uncomfortable as fuck. The best self-care I've ever done was getting to know myself, really know myself, why I do the things I do, where my patterns come from, what I'm actually feeling underneath the busyness and the achievement and the, "I'm fine." 

It was learning what it actually feels like to experience my emotions in my body, because for most of my life, I lived entirely from the neck up. I was a pediatrician. I was trained to be cerebral, analytical, efficient. 

Feelings, those were things you either stuffed all the way down or you acknowledge briefly and then set aside because there were always more tasks to do, more patients to see, more notes to write, more specialists to call, more families to call back. 

Yada, yada, yada. Real self-care was being truly seen, heard, understood by my coach, by my therapist, in a way that had nothing to do with what I'd accomplished or what I was going to do next. Just me as I was being witnessed. 

That is where the healing happened. That is what actually filled me up, not temporarily, not until the next hard day, but in ways that stayed. So let's break it down. What's the difference? Let's get into actual distinction here because I think it's more nuanced than many people realize. 

And I want to give you something concrete you can use always. Self-care fills you up. It restores you. It adds something to your inner life, your inner world. You genuinely feel better afterward, not just different, not just distracted, but actually more resourced, more grounded, more like yourself. 

Numbing, on the other hand, usually takes something away temporarily. It creates distance between you and whatever uncomfortable feeling you're carrying. You feel relief or pleasure or excitement while it's happening, but when it's over, you're right back where you started. 

And honestly, sometimes in a slightly worse place because now there's the added weight of however much wine you drank or however much money you spent or however you offended someone, whatever it might be, whoever you have to apologize to. 

I mean, I could go on and on. Here's a test I love. Ask yourself before you do the thing, "What am I actually hoping to feel afterward?" If the answer is something like rested, reconnected, clear, grounded, creative, joyful, that's pointing towards self-care. 

If the answer is more like, I don't know what I want to feel, but not this, not stressed, not sad, not bored, then you might be reaching for more of a numbing behavior. You're moving away from something rather than towards something. 

That's kind of the tell. Now, of course, because life is complicated, I want to complicate things just a little bit because I don't want to turn this into a list of approved self-care activities and forbidden numbing ones. 

Life is not that simple. It never has been. It never will be. And you are not a formula. So the same activity that can be self-care in one moment can be numbing in another. It depends entirely on your intention and on your internal state. 

So going for a walk because your body is craving fresh air and movement and you come back feeling clearer and more alive, I would say that's self-care. Going for a walk because you cannot stand to sit with the thought you just had for one more second and you need to physically escape your own brain, that's numbing. 

It's the same walk, but there's completely different energy behind it. Watching a show because you genuinely love it and you enjoy something at the end of the full day, that's self-care. Watching four more episodes at midnight when you have to be up at 6 a.m. 

Because you cannot face the silence and the thoughts that come when you lie down, that is numbing. Eating a delicious meal that you savored and enjoyed and felt genuinely nourished by, self-care. Eating mindlessly past fullness because you're bored or sad or anxious and food is just something to do with your hands while you wait for that feeling to pass. 

Probably numbing. A solo shopping trip where you're thoughtfully treating yourself to something you've saved for and genuinely love. Self-care. Scrolling for three hours and impulse buying things to fill a hollow feeling you can't name. 

Probably numbing. Planning a vacation because you have something wonderful to look forward to and the planning itself brings you joy. Lovely. Planning a vacation at midnight when you're overwhelmed because imagining being somewhere else is the only way you can cope with being here. 

That's probably worth looking at. So this is not about the activity. It's about the relationship you have with the activity and what need you're asking that activity to meet. I also want to say something specifically about the term self-soothing because I think it gets lumped in with numbing sometimes unfairly, and I want to push back on that. 

Self-soothing is actually a really beautiful, healthy skill. When you're in an activated state, whether that be anxious, overwhelmed, grieving, frustrated, your nervous system genuinely needs to be tended to with care before you can think clearly, before you can make decisions, or before you can even access what you're actually feeling. 

Soothing that nervous system is not avoidance. It's prepping yourself to do the deeper work. So it may be a warm bath, a walk outside, petting your animal, listening to one of your favorite songs that helps you breathe again. 

These are really forms of self-soothing that I would absolutely count as part of self-care. You are regulating yourself so that you can show up more fully for yourself and for others. The distinction I'm drawing today is specifically about when we use pleasurable or distracting activities as a permanent bypass, when they become the entire strategy instead of just one tool in the toolkit. 

So if not the wine and the shopping and the vacation planning, what? What does self-care look like in practice? I'm going to share the things that have genuinely moved the needle for me. And I want you to notice that most of these involve turning toward yourself rather than away from something else, something that's uncomfortable. 

Therapy. Coaching. Any relationship or space where you are genuinely witnessed and helped to understand yourself more deeply. That is, in my opinion, some of the highest octane, best ROI self-care available to a human being. 

And I say that as a former physician. I guess I am a physician. I say that as a physician who was trained to believe that needing that kind of support was weakness. I was wrong. Getting curious about your emotions. 

When you notice you're reaching for something, the snack, the scroll, the shopping cart, pause and ask, what am I actually feeling right now? What does it feel like in my body? Can I just be with it for a moment before I do anything about it? 

This is a practice. It is not a personality trait. If you practice it, you will get better at it with time. Of course, rest, real rest, not the kind that looks like Netflix for six hours where you're actually anxious and avoidant, but intentional rest, sleep, stillness, doing nothing, zero guilt, giving your nervous system genuine downtime. 

Movement that you actually enjoy, not punishment, not a way to earn your food. Fuck that. But movement that makes you feel alive and at home in your body. Connection with other humans. Not surface-level social media connections with people you've never, ever actually had a conversation with, but real, honest, I can say the true thing here, connection with people who know you and love you anyway. 

And honestly, sometimes it's just sitting quietly with a cup of coffee or tea or water before anyone else is awake and letting yourself exist without producing a damn thing. That is self-care and that is nourishment. 

Here's what I want you to take away from today. You deserve more than just relief. You deserve to actually feel better. There's a difference. Numbing is not a character flaw. It's something we all do, often because we never learned another way or because the feelings underneath are genuinely hard to sit with. 

And again, there is no shame here. And once you can see what you're doing, you have a choice and you have power. So the invitation this week is simply to get curious. The next time you find yourself reaching for something, food, wine, for me right now, it's my phone. 

Just pause for a breath. Ask yourself, am I filling up or am I running away? And whatever the answer is, please be gentle with yourself about it. Awareness is the first step, always. Real self-care is one of the most loving, radical, important things you can do for yourself. 

It is the foundation of becoming your favorite you. And you are so, so worth it. All right, my friends, that's what I've got for you this week. If this episode hit home for you, I would love for you to share it with someone who you think needs to hear it. 

Leave a review if you haven't already on iTunes or Spotify. It genuinely means the world to me, and it helps more people find my show. And as always, in case you're wondering, I am out here rooting for you to become your absolute favorite version of yourself. 

See you next time.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!