I’ve been reading a good deal about “self-care” recently. I have read so much, in fact, that I am beginning to think about it. If you wanted to glance over a series of images about self care and you put the phrase “self care” in the search bar, you would eventually get to a picture of a man. You would be more than ninety images into the search, but eventually, you would find one.

Does that tell us anything about “self care” and gender? I think it does. I think it tells us that men who take care of themselves call it something else. I’m not sure what they call it .[1] What if they called it “maintaining the optimal conditions for long-term health and productivity?” Not much of a bumper sticker, I grant you, but if those were the common terms men used in thinking about “burnout,” it would take a long time to find it in a literature oriented to self-care.

A common notion is that we begin each day with an attention budget. That isn’t a bad way to begin, but it leads to the idea that everything you pay attention to is a drain on the budget—a withdrawal. But that isn’t true. Some of the things we pay attention to restore our attention balance—they are deposits. Everybody knows this. Think for a minute about the sense it makes to urge people who are on the edge of burnout, to pay attention to themselves for a little while. If “paying” attention [2] costs you, why would it not cost you also to pay attention to the condition you are in? The idea in paying attention to whether you need a break is that if you decide that you do, you will do something about it.

Nothing against taking a break, but I’d like to take a look at the step before that. Is it really true that “paying attention” depletes your store of attention? I think that depends a great deal on how you think of what you are doing. Let’s say you are “watching the kids.” That phrasing was chosen, I am sure, by someone who does not find it rewarding. If he had found it rewarding, he would have called it something else. Are there rewarding and fulfilling ways to watch the kids? Of course. Some people, men and women, do a good deal of it and find it rewarding and full-filling. (That extra l- and the hyphen make the point a good deal clearer.)

If you are watching the kids in a way that leaves you drained, maybe you are thinking of it the wrong way. Think, for instance, about what you get out of spending time with the kids. And I don’t mean what you think you ought to get; I am thinking about what you actually do get out of it. I am thinking about doing things you like to do as one of the ways you watch the kids.

You wouldn’t have to think of it that way, of course. You could define that time as work in which you have responsibilities and obligations and when you have met them, you have accomplished the task. There is no positive value for you in “meeting your responsibilities and obligations.” There is the threat of negative value, of course. That is the point of “obligations.” There is a cost for failing to meet your obligations, but there is no reward for meeting them. It is a game you can lose, but not a game you can win. No wonder it feels costly.

And right away, you wonder, who chose this game? And after that, you wonder whether it is possible for you to watch the kids in a way that makes a positive difference to your attention budget. And if a big part of self care is not overspending your attention budget, then doing some particular task in a way that makes deposits to that budget rather than withdrawals, seem like a good idea.

And that would be the case even if there were another person involved who insists that the task be defined and pursued in ways that are personally costly. It is doesn’t cost you, according to this logic, then you are not really doing the job right. It seems to me that a great deal of parenting has been inadvertently redefined in this way. The demands have been raised. The parents receive these new demands as part of some generalized social obligation, rather than deciding what kind of parents they want to be. The cost of failure to parent “correctly” keeps going up and the old sources of interactive pleasure keep going down.

So we see a lot of really “good” parents whose parenting costs them more than they can afford and there are other things they could have spared some attention for. Even in the middle of things, they know that. The attention budget gets expended early and often and the sources of replenishment are limited to “not withdrawing so much” rather than to parenting in a more rewarding way.

Needless to say, the examples could be multiplied, but there is no way that “self care” is going to keep up with the rising demands for attention and the declining resources to add capacity and enjoyment. And it is not at all hard to imagine that people who are used to deploying their attention in this way will simply turn the need for self care into another demand.

It seems to me that if we organized our tasks so that they were rewarding—as well, of course, as effective, we would have taken a long step toward restoring our attention budget.

[1] I am not referring to men as “them” because I am not a man. I am using the word “them” to refer to men because I am coming at this question as someone who reads a good bit about attention and even more about what “selves” are and how they should function. If I actually did any research, I would call myself a researcher.
[2] There is such insight built into the notion that attention is costly, that we actually do “pay” and that it actually does