What is self-care? How to cut through marketing noise and actually practice it [nbcnews.com]

By Nicole Spector, NBC News, February 18, 2020

The English language has a proliferation of hyphenated compound words revolving around “self”. There’s “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “self-consciousness,” “self-indulgence” and “self-control” to name but a few — all of which deliver a fairly straightforward meaning. Then we have “self-care” — a term that is decidedly broader and seemingly everywhere you look, especially if you’re looking on social media.

You’ll find over 23.4 million #selfcare usages on Instagram — and that’s counting posts that are made public. What are these hashtags describing or identifying? Oh, so many things: You could be posting about happy hour with coworkers, or a solitary glass of wine at the end of the day, or about sobriety. You could be posting about french fries or broccoli or eye cream or butt masks. The options are endless and so too, is the marketing around this catchy buzzword.