Your Self-Care Doesn't Need to Look Like Anyone Else's
The Hunt for What Works
I sat on my yoga mat, legs crossed, back uncomfortably straight, listening to the gentle voice from my meditation app urging me to "focus on your breath." Twenty minutes later, I emerged from the session more stressed than when I started.
This wasn't the first failed attempt at self-care. I had diligently tried journaling (abandoned after three days), nature walks (bored), and even adult coloring books (more frustrating than calming). Each recommendation came highly praised: "This changed my life!" "I do this every day and feel amazing!" "You HAVE to try this!"
Yet there I was, cycling through self-care strategies that worked wonders for others but left me feeling like I was checking boxes on someone else's wellness plan.
Was I broken? Was I incapable of properly caring for myself? Was I doomed to burn out because I couldn't find joy in the approved methods of recharging?
The Accidental Discovery
One Saturday evening, after another frustrating attempt at "proper" self-care, I found myself absentmindedly opening my laptop. Almost automatically, my fingers began typing code for a small project I'd been thinking about. Nothing serious—just a little tool to solve a minor problem I'd been facing.
Two hours vanished. I looked up, surprised to find it was dark outside. But more surprisingly, I felt... good. Calm. Refreshed.
Wait—wasn't coding work? Wasn't this exactly what I was trying to take a break from?
Yet something was different. There were no deadlines. No stakeholders. No Jira tickets or pull request reviews. Just me, creating something for the pure joy of building.
I had stumbled into my version of self-care, and it looked nothing like what I thought it should.
The Self-Care Paradox
In our latest Meta-Cast episode, Bob Galen and I discussed the "quiet things" leaders do behind the scenes that make them effective. When we hit the topic of self-care, something profound emerged: what works for each of us looks dramatically different.
Bob finds his renewal in fantasy novels and dragons. "If I spend two hours reading about dragons, I'm good," he shared. "When I'm reading fantasy, I'm not thinking about jobs, I'm not thinking about coaching, I'm not thinking about clients."
For me, it was building things. As I confessed on the podcast, "I had to figure out that just building stuff is what makes Josh's brain happy. And so I had to accept that my self-care looks different than somebody else's self-care."
The revelation wasn't just that we had different strategies—it was that our effective self-care methods often seemed counterintuitive.
The Resistance to Personal Care
Here's what kept me from discovering my true form of self-care earlier:
I was looking for the universal solution. There's a billion-dollar industry built around convincing us that their way of recharging is the right way. I bought into it.
I confused adjacency with sameness. Coding to recharge seemed too close to my work. Surely effective self-care needed to be completely separate from my professional identity?
I was trying to force enjoyment. I kept thinking I just needed to try harder at meditation or journaling, rather than recognizing that my lack of engagement was data, not failure.
I was ignoring my own wiring. My brain finds joy in creating and solving problems. Fighting against this fundamental aspect of my personality was never going to work.
When I finally accepted that building small, pressure-free projects was my form of meditation, everything changed. I learned to set boundaries around this building time—no business plans, no revenue strategies, no deadlines—just pure creation for the joy of it.
The irony wasn't lost on me. My self-care looked suspiciously like work, yet it provided exactly what traditional self-care activities promised but never delivered.
Finding Your Unique Self-Care Formula
What I've learned is that effective self-care isn't about adopting someone else's practices—it's about discovering what genuinely recharges YOU. Here's how to begin that discovery:
Pay attention to energy, not categories. After any activity, ask yourself: did this give me energy or take it away? The answer matters far more than whether the activity fits into a traditional "self-care" box.
Notice your natural gravitation. What do you find yourself doing when you have true downtime with zero pressure? What activities make you lose track of time? These natural tendencies offer clues.
Remove the "shoulds." The quickest way to drain the restorative power from any activity is to burden it with expectations. Self-care shouldn't feel like another item on your to-do list.
Consider your personality type. Introverts and extroverts recharge differently. People with different thinking styles and preferences need different types of mental breaks. Honor your wiring.
Create boundaries if needed. If your form of self-care borders on professional activities (like my coding), establish clear guardrails that keep it in the realm of renewal, not work.
Permission Granted
The most powerful moment in my self-care journey wasn't finding the right activity—it was giving myself permission to define "right" on my own terms.
If reading about dragons for two hours recharges Bob, wonderful.
If building small coding projects with no business purpose gives me the mental reset I need, perfect.
If your ideal self-care looks nothing like what wellness influencers promote, that's not just okay—it's exactly as it should be.
Your self-care doesn't need to photograph well for Instagram. It doesn't need to impress others with its mindfulness quotient. It doesn't even need to make sense to anyone but you.
The only measurement that matters is whether it genuinely restores you.
So I'll make you this promise: I won't tell you what your self-care should look like if you'll grant yourself the freedom to discover what actually works for you—even if it looks nothing like what works for anyone else.
Because the most radical act of self-care might just be trusting yourself to know what you need.
Josh Anderson
Editor-In-Chief
The Leadership Lighthouse