Self-centeredness is an essential part of emotional health: you must focus on taking care of yourself. It may seem paradoxical, but focusing on yourself and taking care of yourself is in fact a way to care for those around you. After all, if you do not ensure your needs are met, someone else will need to—or they may need to deal with the emotional fallout of your inevitable burnout or breakdown.
It may seem strange to ponder at first, but selflessness, not focusing on one’s self, is actually a selfish position.
As a baby you were justified in being selfish. You were so helpless that you could not take care of yourself. No one expected you to wash yourself, exercise, keep a productive agenda; you could not even roll over without help. As soon as you could, you started wanting to do things on your own. But in our rushed, overprotective society, your caregivers may have made every attempt to limit your autonomy by not entrusting you with age-appropriate tasks, such as dressing yourself or helping with cooking or chores. More likely, your opportunities at autonomy fell under the umbrella of bodily functions: toilet training, brushing your teeth, and feeding yourself. And so we grow thinking that our main duty to ourselves is that of hygiene.
While hygiene is important, it’s really the bare minimum. Self-care is so much more than a daily shower or keeping our nails trimmed. Self-care should involve creating your life around your own thoughts, feelings, talents, and making your life as little stressful as possible. It should be listening to your body, staying mindful of when we need to rest or move.
The notion of emotional self-preservation is shockingly absent from the everyday experience and discourse. We throw ourselves into situations that we know would cause us stress and discomfort; we overburden ourselves with tasks; we flood our brains with meaningless entertainment. We look for diversion in spurious romantic relationships, inauthentic friendships, drugs and alcohol consumption, and scroll mindlessly through social media. We see conflicts where there are none, alternatives that don’t exist, and deny ourselves complex feelings, such as the possibility of loving and hating someone or something at the same time. In short, we have the capacity to be horrible to ourselves. No wonder that the highly idealized notion of selflessness is so appealing to us despite it being counterintuitive and biologically subversive.
We travel the time allotted to us in life with a host of misleading notions that invariably impede our satisfaction from our life. For instance, we share a belief of the supremacy of the “love ideal”, even though it is a constantly vacillating and unreliable emotion. We aspire to happiness despite it being so hard to achieve and even harder to keep. Yet we view self-interest, an essential part of survival, as an act of selfishness.
Let this be the reminder you needed. Go ahead, put yourself first. You are the most important person in your life, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is only natural. Taking good care of yourself only empowers you to pay noble and sustained attention to others, to good causes, to charitable acts; all that is beautiful and rewarding in the world. Your altruistic efforts are sustainable over time only while you simultaneously and consistently focus on yourself. Give yourself permission to show yourself the same love and attention that you give so freely to those around you.
