Why Some People Struggle to Care for Themselves

As WHO Self-Care Month begins, it's worth asking a question that often receives surprisingly little attention:

Why do some people find self-care so difficult, even when they know it's important?

Many health and mental health professionals have worked with clients who understand what they "should" do.

They know they need more rest.
They know they should eat regular meals.
They know they need better boundaries.
They know they need time to recover.

Yet they struggle to act on that knowledge.

Traditional explanations often focus on motivation, discipline, or habits. Sometimes these factors matter. But for some clients, something else is happening.

They may find it easy to care for others, yet difficult to extend that same care to themselves.

They are the people who volunteer for one more task, stay late to help a colleague, answer messages when exhausted, and put everyone else's needs ahead of their own. When encouraged to prioritise themselves, they often respond with discomfort:

"I'd feel selfish."

What appears to be a self-care problem may actually be a guilt problem.

Psychologists have used the term unmitigated communion to describe a pattern of excessive focus on others to the detriment of oneself. Caring for others is a valuable human strength, but when self-worth becomes dependent on being needed, helpful, or accommodating, self-care can begin to feel morally wrong.

The result is often burnout, emotional exhaustion, stress-related health problems, and repeated difficulty sustaining healthy behaviour change.

For practitioners, this presents an important challenge.

If a client's resistance is driven by guilt, then simply encouraging them to "put themselves first" may unintentionally increase that resistance.

A more helpful question may be:

How can we help clients care for themselves in a way that remains consistent with their values?

Rather than positioning self-care against caring for others, we can reframe it as what makes caring sustainable.

After all, people cannot continue giving from an empty cup indefinitely.

As we begin Self-Care Month, perhaps one of the most important messages we can share is this:

Self-care is not the opposite of caring for others. For many people, it is what makes caring for others possible :)