Episode 256: Interrogate Your Self-Care with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin
“One person’s yoga class can be self care. And another person’s yoga class could be performative. “
- Pooja Lakshmin
Kate has a revelatory moment about a project she’s working on and Doree does a shoe clean-out. Then, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin joins them on the podcast to talk about what the difference is between real and faux self-care as defined in her new book Real Self Care, how to start thinking differently about how you spend your time, and what she learned from quitting her job, getting divorced and accidentally joining a cult in her 20s.
Photo Credit: Natalia D'Onofrio
Mentioned in this Episode
Strand Romance Panel: Wild Thing - The Universality of Romance
Connect with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin
To leave a voicemail or text for a future episode, reach them at 781-591-0390. You can also email the podcast at forever35podcast@gmail.com.
Visit forever35podcast.com for links to everything they mention on the show or shopmyshelf.us/forever35.
Follow the podcast on Twitter (@Forever35Pod) and Instagram (@Forever35Podcast) and join the Forever35 Facebook Group (Password: Serums).
Sign up for the newsletter! At forever35podcast.com/newsletter.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.
Transcript
Kate: Welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Kate Spencer.
Doree: And I am Doree Shafrir,
Kate: And we are not experts. Okay.
Doree: We're not. We're two friends who like to talk a lot about serums
Kate: And you can visit our website Forever35podcast.com for links to everything we mentioned on the show. Our Instagram is @Forever35podcast, and we can be found on Facebook groups at Forever35. The password is serums. What did I just say? I dunno. We can be found on Facebook. We have a group.
Doree: Yes.
Kate: It's called the Forever35 Facebook Group and the password is serums.
Doree: That is all true. You can also shop our favorite products at shopmy.us/forever35. Our lovely project manager Sami, has put together a fun spreadsheet of the most popular products that people have bought, so stay tuned for more on that. It was interesting. It was not what I would've guessed.
Kate: I think a lot of it is connected to our newsletter, actually, but still the number one thing was a shirt.
Doree: Kate, you just gave it away.
Kate: Oh no. Spoiler alert, but I didn't say what shirt.
Doree: Okay, that's fair. Speaking of the newsletter where we have great prod recommendations, you can subscribe to that at Forever35podcast.com/newsletter. You can call or text us at (781) 591-0390, and you can email us at Forever35podcast@gmail.com.
Kate: All right, last bit of Biz baby. We are doing a live show online. You are all welcome to attend. It's Wednesday, February 22nd at 5:00 PM Pacific, 8:00 PM Eastern. Tickets are $10. You can get them at moment co slash Forever35. We're also hosting an after party. Immediately after the show, we had a question about how long everything is going to be. So the show will be about an hour and the after party will be about 30 minutes. And if you can't make it to the show live, you can get a ticket and you can catch the recorded version for up into a week after
Doree: All of this is true.
Kate: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't lie. It'd be really weird if we were like punk'd.
Doree: It would be very strange. And we're going to have this exclusive merch I'm really excited about. We finalized it a week, a week or two ago with Brooke from Balance Bound and it's really cool. It's really fun.
Kate: We've got a guest, we've got a special guest, we've got a game.
Doree: There's so much happening.
Kate: We're going to answer your questions. We're really, really looking forward to it.
Doree: We are. There's costumes I won't say anymore.
Kate: Wait, there are costumes.
Doree: Yes. Kate, you and I will Well, for the after party.
Kate: You mean we're in an outfit?
Doree: Yes, we're in costume.
Kate: I mean, we're not dressed up like bunny rabbits. We are like,
Doree: No, but
Kate: We're dressed up. We have heightened versions of ourselves.
Doree: Yes. That is a great way to put it. Anyway, you can see all of that and more moment.co/Forever35 mere $10. It's going to be fun. Kate,
Kate: Yo,
Doree: Talk to me about this big shift that you've had had.
Kate: Okay. All right. Well, first of all, If you're listening to this on Wednesday, February 15th and you live in New York, I just got to give one final plug to come see me at Strand books tonight, link in show notes. But I'll be there talking about romance and I mentioned that because I'm writing another book and what actually something that our guest today talked about, it really resonated with where I've been in this book writing process of accepting that we might fail and reevaluating what that looks like and kind of grappling with our own ego because so much of I think anything that we do professionally, creatively, whatever, there's so much ego wrapped up into it. And this project I've been working on has been really a real challenge for me for a long, long time in ways that I just don't even fully understand slash I think everything can be chopped up to the fact that we've been living in a pandemic for three fucking years. So it's not like life is without massive stress and challenges. But anyway, I kind of turned a corner on it finally on this manuscript that I've been working on, and I've rewritten a bunch of times and I have really been in, there have been some real moments of self-doubt, real dark, some dark, some, I've been in some dark caverns and caves with this project and I don't know, a week ago it turned corner and now I'm so emotionally attached to the characters and now I'm very emotionally attached to it and I'm really kind of loving it and it's feels like something that I almost think I could be proud of. And that feels wild because there's been a lot of shame in the fact that I haven't really been able to get this going in the way I want it. So I don't know this is a lot of shit I'm going to talk about in therapy tomorrow, but it just has felt revelatory in the last week to really, I think I'm the kind of person who gives up on things when I find them hard. And I can't do that
Doree: I can relate to that.
Kate: Yeah, this is my job. Not only that I want to do this, I love it, but I am in times of my life often, and I see this in one of my kids, if something is, doesn't come easily to me immediately, I like to stop because it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable when something is continuously hard or you're quote continuously not good at it or it's not what you want it to be. And I also think sometimes we have to sit with the fact that sometimes the stuff we make is bad. And I think it's really easy for people to respond and be like, oh, don't say that. I'm sure it's great, blah, blah, blah. No. Sometimes part of making stuff is making bad shit doesn't mean that doesn't have value or worth, but that's just part of this whole process. So anyway, I have given up quickly before in my life, and to not do that is really uncomfortable for me to have to keep sitting with something and stick with it and keep emptying the puzzle pieces out and trying to put it back together again. Really, it's really hard for me. And so I feel like I'm learning a lot about myself through the process of writing this current manuscript that I've been working on. And right now I am happy to report. I'm feeling a lot of love toward it.
Doree: I'm glad that it all, it sounds like it all just sort of clicked for you,
Kate: Which is maddening about the process, but also such an important reminder. Things do require so much building and rebuilding and restructuring and rewriting all the things. It's a lot. It's such a fucking journey. I don't want to go on these journeys, but I do want to be on the journeys.
Doree: It's hard.
Kate: On a lighter note, Doree, a journey that I do need to stop being on is the journey of seeing a TikTok advertising a product, even though the person's like, this isn't an ad, I just am not going to gate keep this thing. And then me being like, ah, I've got to get this thing. And then impulsively buying the thing just because of one TikTok that creates this sense of urgency
Doree: Did you and I have this conversation on the podcast or over text or I feel like we talked about this whole convention of saying, I'm not going to gate keep this.
Kate: I don't know where we talked about it, but it's been coming up for me a lot because I'm hearing it more and more in videos in either Instagrams or videos or that I watch on TikTok. And it's
Doree: An Interesting
Kate: It's a marketing tool.
Doree: Yeah, it's an interesting sort of psychological trick I think, because it's saying, here's this thing that is kind of secret and maybe exclusive that I know about. And maybe in the past I would've wanted to keep it a secret, but I'm not like that anymore.
Kate: Well, it's kind of like I'm a good person. Yes. So I'm going to let you all in on this secret.
Doree: I'm going to let you all in on this and also use my affiliate link.
Kate: Right. And also I'm going to go viral and Yeah, I And look like it should noted.
Doree: Which is fine. Which is fine.
Kate: We have affiliate links. You and I as podcasters, we're
Doree: Totally
Kate: Cogs on the wheel here. That's not a thing anybody says, but it's just, yeah,
Doree: It's just funny. That has become the, the convention.
Kate: And I think when you see somebody say that you're immediately, or at least I am, it works on me. It works on me in a flash. I watched this video, this person was like, I was stopped three times today in Los Angeles because of the scent I'm wearing. I'm not, because we girlies don't gatekeeper on here. I'm going to tell you what it is. And I was like, oh my God, I fucking need this scent. I didn't even know what it smelled like. I literally just clicked and bought it. I mean, this is my impulse control problem. And oh, here's the story, here's the end of the story. I don't like how it smells. I don't like it.
Doree: Oh,
Kate: It's not for me. So now I have this perfume I spent money on. I dunno. God, damn it,
Doree: I mean, I dunno. Do you want suggestions or do you just want to kind of vent?
Kate: No, I just want to kind of vent because it was a reminder of, Hey girl, slow down. I think there's this feeling of if I miss out now, I'm never going to get it.
Doree: Oh Interesting.
Kate: There's the kind of scarcity mindset that again, is just all behind. Yes. Our yes. Economic systems. So it just was a good check on myself to just be like, Hey, take a breath,
Doree: Take a beat.
Kate: Take a pause a beat. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Need a pause. So anyway, that's where that's going on. Tell us about what's happening in your neck of the woods. Again, sometimes I quote the Today Show from 1985.
Doree: Hey, that's fine. We all do what we have to do. So I've talked to a bunch about how I am gradually trying to downsize and part of that downsizing, it's simultaneously trying to buy fewer things, which I also find challenging. And then also getting rid of the things that let's just say no longer serve me. And I'd done this quite a bit for clothing. I hadn't really tackled my shoes. And I recently decided to tackle my shoes, and I made some pretty ruthless choices. They're shoes that I was like, these are so pretty, I love these. And then I was like, I last wore these in 2018. You know what I mean? Or my feet got bigger after pregnancy and I still had shoes from pre-pregnancy that I was like, these still fit, but they didn't actually fit. My feet got about half a size bigger. And I think also I'm wearing just sort of different styles of shoes. I just don't wear uncomfortable shoes anymore, period. Not that I used to wear super uncomfortable shoes, but I would wear shoes that my toes were kind of smooshed together, or a heel that was maybe a little higher than I should have been wearing for comfort sake or whatever. And I was just like, I got to get rid of these shoes. So I sold a bunch of them, sold some in a local Facebook group that I'm in. I sold some of them on my Instagram. I also just want to put in a plug for my secondhand clothing Instagram, which is Doree's closet. I post infrequently, but when I post, post in batches, so I won't post for five months and then I'll post 15 things.
Kate: Yeah. When you post, you go all in.
Doree: Yeah, when I post, I post. And that's also really fun because I love the idea of my clothes and my shoes having a second life somewhere. And I so prefer, I think I've said this before, I so prefer selling stuff or giving it away to an individual person than donate somewhere where I don't know where it's going to end up.
Kate: Yeah.
Doree: We've had those conversations, we've all done that reading about how so much of the stuff we donate at a Goodwill or other places that actually just ends up in a landfill. And I just don't want to be part of that. So I really do try to get rid of everything that I don't want anymore on my own. So that's what I've been doing. And I have to tell you, when I look at my closet now with my shoes, it's very calming to me.
Kate: Good
Doree: because historically it was just a jumbled pile.
Kate: I'm so glad.
Doree: Cause they didn't fit and I didn't wear a lot of them. So this just feels good. So I just wanted to share that. And if you're a size nine and a half or 10, check out my insta. Actually I should say between nine and 10 because a lot of my pre-pregnancy shoes were like nine, nine and a half. And now I'm usually a nine and a half 10.
Kate: So, well, you really threw me for a loop because you got rid of one of my favorite pairs of your shoes and you posted it and I was outraged. I wasn't helpful. I was like, how? No, how dare you.
Doree: Yeah. I mean, know which pair you're talking about. The thing about that pair is, so also my right foot is probably a quarter size bigger than my left foot. And the toe of my right foot was hitting the edge of the shoe.
Kate: Ow.
Doree: And I've kind of been in denial about it. And then I was like, every time I wore them, I was like, you know what? This just isn't comfortable.
Kate: Yeah. That's no good.
Doree: So I'm going to let them go. That's it. That's the story.
Kate: Well, I honor you.
Doree: Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much.
Kate: I I think it's ultimately a good, it's totally a good thing and it, it's a necessary thing and it really does feel so much better when that happens.
Doree: It it really, really does. So
Kate: Anyway, I'm just going to miss those shoes is all I'm saying. They were so cute on you, but I know it's their time. They're going to a
Doree: Better place. It was their time. It was their time. They, they're going to a better place. That is true. That is accurate. That is accurate.
Kate: Well, Doree, why don't we introduce our guest on today's episode because we just had a really fascinating conversation that we think is going to resonate with a lot of listeners. We spoke with Pooja Lakshmin. Pooja is a board certified psychiatrist. So excuse me, I should have said Doctor Pooja Lakshmin. She's a New York Times contributor. She is a leading voice at the intersection of mental health and gender focused on helping women and people from marginalized communities escape the tyranny of self-care, which is all at the heart of her new book, Real Self Care, Out March 15th. It's fantastic. There's so much that we get into with her. And it's also also want to note that she founded Gemma, which is a physician-led women's mental health education platform that centers impact and equity. And she also has a active private practice. I mean, yeah, she's amazing. And she speaks from experience. She talks about her own journey going down this rabbit hole of wellness culture, anything very sucked into it and how she came out on the other side and what her understanding of wellness actually actually is. And real self-care is an excellent book. Doree and I really both got a lot out of it.
Doree: We did. All right. Well, we're going to take a short break and then we will be right back with Pooja
Kate: Pooja, welcome to Forever35. We're thrilled to have you here because your book really captures, I think a lot of what we grapple with on our show. So we're very excited to dig in.
Pooja: I am so, so excited to be here.
Kate: So you might get a kick out of this. We like to start every interview with our guests by asking about a self-care practice that they have in their own life. And we always give the caveat of, this can be anything, just whatever you consider self care. And your book is titled Real Self Care. So obviously you've given us a lot to think about after reading it. But we would love to know what does a self-care practice look like for you in your own day-to-day life?
Pooja: Yes. So I will say that this question is one that I get asked all the time, and I have to be a total psychiatrist about it and provide a question as my answer.
Kate: I love it.
Pooja: As opposed to, because the whole premise of real self-care is that there's not one thing that real self-care actually is an internal process. It's a way of being. It's not something that you just check off your list. It's not just something that you do. So my answer is that I have been in psychoanalysis for almost eight years now and have been on the couch in my own therapy. And that for me, real self-care is really about how I have designed my whole life. And along with that is another really important premise of the book, which is that privilege that we really can't talk about self-care without also talking about the choices that are available to us as women and as individuals. So I think the first thing that comes to mind as we're here chatting for the show is the fact that I'm able to be here is because I have childcare right now for my eight month old son and I have a partner who is great and does all of the cooking so that I can focus all of my energy or so much of my energy on this book launch and that I'm able to, I'm my own boss. I have a private practice, so I schedule my own patients. And so I'm the one that's in control of my schedule so I can fit all of these things in. So that autonomy and that flexibility is self-care for me. And then back it up 10 years, five to 10 years before I had all this in place, was making those intentional decisions and seeing what was possible with the resources that I had to have things set up this way. So that's my very long-winded answer.
Doree: Well, I think that's a good way of segueing into talking about your book, which I think Kate and I both got a lot out of and are really eager to hear you kind of expand on some of the things that you discussed. But for the benefit of our listeners who have most likely not had a chance to read the book, could you briefly describe it and also how you came to write it?
Pooja: Yeah, so the book is called Real Self-Care A transformative program for redefining wellness Crystals, cleanses and bubble Baths, not Included. And that sub subtitle was very much, that was my agent actually who came up with that because we were like, it's a very prescriptive book. There's lots of solutions, there's lots of exercises and questions. But fundamentally, this book really is a critique of wellness and a critique of what has been sold to us in particular as women. So the thesis, if I had to give a quick synopsis is that real self-care is not a product. It's not something that you just buy or something that you can do and check off the list. Real self-care is an internal process. It consists of invisible difficult decisions that we all know and understand, but that are very hard. Things like setting boundaries is the first principle. Learning how to talk to yourself with compassion, which I will say as somebody who typically rolls their eyes at compassion that's a tough one. Right? And then getting really clear on what your values are. So I have a tool in the book that's called the Real Self-Care Compass, which is really about understanding that as a society we are much to productivity driven and goal focused, and instead we need to pull back and really get clear on what are my priorities, what's the most important thing to me? And then the last principle is recognizing that this is actually power. And the reason that I say power is because there's a whole chapter in the book called The Game is Rigged talking about all of the different systems of oppression that we live in, whether that's white supremacy, whether that's toxic capitalism, whether that is all the different isms. There's like a million isms that we can talk about patriarchy but the fact that our social structures are the source of the problem, and then we internalize that and then we feel bad. And then we're sold a pretty branded Instagram ad of vitamins that are supposed to fix our anxiety when in fact, actually the problem is all of these terrible systems. So anyway, the last principle is that we have to stay hopeful. We have to understand that our power is in our choices one, and two, if you're somebody who does have privileges, for example, me, I had the choice to leave full-time academics, start a private practice, take a pay cut while I was building my practice because I have a partner who has he health insurance, so I could be on his health insurance. All these financial decisions, if you have extra, then your responsibility with power comes responsibility. We need to be pouring that in to women of color, to black women, to indigenous women, to marginalized groups that need more support. So it's a social justice message. But I think the other piece of it that's really important is, I think especially in the lens or the land, social media landscape that we're all in right now where it's like, Ugh, God, we all know that wellness is crap. We all know that capitalism is soul sucking. It's so easy to just feel totally despairing about the fact that our world is terrible and climate change is unchecked and there's nothing that we can do about it. And so this book is actually, I'm a psychiatrist. I take care of patients. I work very much on the individual level. So it's like I'm helping folks as readers just like I do in my practice with bringing it back to your very personal micro decisions and getting clear on what they mean to you. And then my reason for writing it is probably one of the most interesting parts of the book. So I'm a psychiatrist. I specialize in women's mental health, so I take care of patients who are struggling with things like postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, things like that. But about a decade ago in 2012, at that point, I was a young psychiatry resident. I was in my late twenties. I had just gone through undergrad med school residency. I was a good Indian girl, my dad is a physician. It was sort of always assumed that I would be on the straight and narrow. And I got to residency and I was burnt out and I just was really disillusioned with psychiatry because it was sort of like folks would come into the ER and it would be somebody who's homeless or unhoused. So we were taught, okay, you prescribe medication or you do psychotherapy, but obviously, and those, there's a place for those interventions, but obviously this person needs housing. They don't need Zoloft. But we weren't taught what is the solution for that? Yeah, how do you even deal with that? Or the woman who lost childcare for the fourth time in a month and is getting fired from her job again, Zoloft isn't going to fix that. So I was very rageful. I dropped out, I left, I moved into a commune in San Francisco, and not just any commune, but a commune that was focused on female orgasm. My Indian parents were really happy with me. And then I got divorced and I spent two years with this group, and I actually worked at the Rutgers F M R I imaging lab where we put people in F M R I machines and looked at their brains while they were having orgasms. And it was a really transformative period of my life. But ultimately, by the end of it of those two years, I realized that even in the woowoo complimentary spiritual space, there's just as many hypocrisies and contradictions as there are in mainstream medicine. And ultimately I realized I couldn't escape my problems. I couldn't just destroy my life and then pick up a new one and then be like, oh, everything's great now. And that's really the message of real self-care. All of this work actually has to come from us. There's not actually an external solution. And I so many women fell, was seduced by the idea that contentment, fulfillment, happiness lived outside of me and that I just had to do the right thing. Just do the right practice, find the right spiritual group, follow the right guru. And if I did that, then it would come. And ultimately many years later, I found out there was media reports that the story story inside this group was actually really dark. And it's a cult, which is even hard for me to say that now. And I've been in therapy for years, since leaving. I was very depressed after I left and had to contend with too, the fact that I was a doctor and I was with them for two years and deep in their Kool-Aid and talking about their practices because I really believed it. It had helped me. But really writing this book for me is sort of a culmination of the past 10 years of asking myself hard questions of, okay we're searching for something, right? We're searching for meaning. I think especially for not only for moms, but I do think motherhood in America really brings this sort of existential identity crisis. So we're searching and we're looking outside of ourselves. And I think I'm trying to model, as I talk about this compassion for myself that I found myself in very unlikely places. I learned a lot but when I left that group, I was still a doctor. I could come back to a life and a career that I had built. I could crash at my parents' house. I had resources. There were people who left that group and they were psychotic or they were homeless. So again, it does come back to privilege too, and the choices that are available to you. So that's kind of the personal story behind Real Self-Care.
Kate: That's extremely personal. And it sounds like, well, I don't want to assume, but a lot of your own personal reflection and healing inspired you to write this book.
Pooja: It did. It absolutely did. In the book, I'm talking about patience and my practice and stories, but I'm also sharing my own deeply painful, messy missteps. And it was important to me also when we're talking about self-help as kind of a genre. I know you guys, this applicable to your show, it's, it's so easy for somebody up on their high horse, whether it's a therapist or an influencer or a physician to be like, well, this is what you should do. Here are the rules, here are the things to follow. And I wanted to take a risk to be honest and vulnerable about my own journey, trying to find wellness and meaning. And also to acknowledge it's not, it's done either. I'm still grappling with it at every. And that's the thing with real self-care, it's not something you can't just be like, oh, I exercised today, done checked it off the list. Not that I'm not to knock exercise, exercise is great, but it's, it's something deeper and it's not with every new transition in your life, you will have to come to understand again for yourself, what are my values here? What is most important to me? And even with writing this book and speaking about it now, I'm again coming to what is my real self-care process. I want to show up as I'm talking to you guys. Yes, I'm Dr. Lakshmin. I'm a psychiatrist, but I'm also a human who fell for wellness and had a complicated relationship with it. And there was a lot that I learned and I was also deeply heartbroken by the fact that this group wasn't what I thought it was, kind of holding that both/And
Kate: I wanted to ask you start off in the book describing this idea of faux self-care and the tyranny of self-care. And these are two phrases that really just stuck out for me and are things that we've kind of talked about and how we grapple with our participation in some of these things. Can you share their audience kind of what you view them as, what they promise versus what they actually give us or really don't give us?
Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give an example of something that I hear in my practice all the time, which is a patient comes in, usually a mom, and she's like, Dr. Lakshmin I'm so stressed out. I'm not eating well. I'm not sleeping well. I don't have time to exercise. And I feel like it's my fault because I have this meditation app on my phone that I know I should be using and I know that I really should get to yoga, but I just cannot bring myself to, and any spare moment that I have where I'm not taking care of somebody else, I usually just end up spending it doom scrolling Instagram. And then that's right, feeling, feeling guilty. And that's what I call the tyranny of self-care or faux self-care, right? Because you are completely buckling under the weight of whether it's the mental load, the lack of support from a social level, whether it's childcare or whatever's going on in terms of your family life and the support that you have. You are totally underwater from that. But faux self-care as an industry and a commodity makes it seem like it's your personal choice and a moral judgment on you as to whether or you meditate or whether or not you use a bullet journal or whether you do the new fancy exercise, whatever the thing is, essential oils, right? There's like a million different things. It's
Doree: Its endless. It's endless. The offerings are endless.
Pooja: The offerings are endless. They're everywhere that you go. And one of the of my favorite chapters in the book part chapter two, I talk about sort of the faux self-care. And I dig a little bit deeper into the psychological reasons that women turn to these different solutions. So one of the reasons is escape, just the idea of getting away from it all because especially for women, it's like you're just surround, you're constantly just under this decision fatigue and there's no discretionary time. So in order to have any time and space to actually feel your feelings, you need to get away. So that's the person that goes on the retreats or even just to go get a Mani Peti. But the problem is those things don't actually do anything to change the larger systems that are causing us to need self carein the first place. One of the other kind of faux self-care methodologies that I talk about is actually efficiency and productivity.
Kate: Oh, yes, the question of this.
Pooja: So the life hacks. Yes. Right. So the things like the meals, delivery kits even things like bullet journals, the stuff that you feel like is helping you be more efficient. But I have patients who will come in and they're like, I'm doing all these things to optimize my time, but I feel like I am managing my family as opposed to actually being part of my family. I think if you query most women of a certain age, I feel like it would be nearly a hundred percent that would answer yes to that question. So again, these faux self-care "solutions" are still keeping us wrapped up in these systems, whether that system is capitalism, whether the system is patriarchal, whatever it is, we're still operating in the same way.
Doree: Can I just ask a follow up question to that?
Pooja: Yeah.
Doree: I guess what I'm struggling with is isn't it asking a lot of everyone to just feel like they constantly need to be changing systems instead of just getting a mani-pedi?
Pooja: Yes. Yes it is. And that actually is in the book, I have kind of the sections that's like, sounds great, but, and that's one of the specific questions. It's such a burden to constantly feel bad and guilty and ashamed that you should be doing more. And so my answer to that is that our job is not one person can't change the system. My job, my goal is not to make you feel ashamed for a treat yourself manicure. The way that I see my role is to help you think differently about how you spend your time. So I'll give you another example. And what I often say is that one person's yoga class could be real self care, and another person's yoga class could be totally performative. And what I mean is that if you realize that yoga is something that aligns with your values, because let's say for example, it helps you feel connected to your body, it helps you feel really strong, you like, it helps you get into your senses. So if in order to go to your yoga class once a week, you have a hard conversation with your partner about how labor is divided in the household. If you treat yourself kindly during yoga if you go through that internal process, then yoga, I would count that yoga class as real self-care versus another person who doesn't do any of that internal work but goes to yoga and spends the whole time worried about whether they can hold a headstand and taking a selfie and making sure that they're wearing the right lululemon outfit, I would call that faux self care. So again, it's less about whether you're doing the right thing or categorizing the things, and it's more about are you taking that internal process beforehand to figure out what your real self-care sort of solution is? And the other thing I'll say on that is in the book I differentiate between principles and tools. So all of these different activities are tools which a tool is something that is highly specific for your current circumstances, whereas principles, so the things that I'm talking about as real self-care, so setting the boundaries, doing the internal work. principles, they don't give you an answer, but there's something that you can per apply over a wide range of situations. And the reason that I think this is important is because I see this in my practice with women who say the things that I used to be able to have the time to do when I was in my twenties or my thirties, I don't have time anymore. I don't have an hour to get a massage, and then I feel bad that I'm not able to make that time. And that's like, oh no, that's because you're trying to apply this tool that worked at a different season of your life, but you need to go back to the principles and figure out what the new thing is. And I can't tell you what that new thing is. It's different for everybody. It might be your Peloton, it might be bullet journaling, but it's like you have to get there from the right place.
Doree: Yeah, I mean that really resonates something that Kate and I have been talking a lot about with regards to fitness and exercise and redefining our relationships to fitness and exercise and why we do it and how we do it. And yeah, it's all really interesting to think about. And I was also thinking about, it feels like a lot of what you're talking about in terms of the tenets of real self care are, and I think this is what you're kind of alluding to also is it's about dismantling white supremacy, things like perfectionism, the cult of productivity. And I'm just wondering, as we embark on these journeys to become more self aware, what are the aspects of white supremacy that we should be conscious of as we're learning all these new things and trying to change?
Pooja: That's a hard one. And I think the way that I, I'll just give you my framework and not somebody who is an expert at white supremacy or race training or things like that, but this is how I think of it, just from what I've learned from other folks that I've read, and specifically with my co-founder at Gemma, Dr. Cali Cyrus, who is also a psychiatrist and focuses on the dynamics of difference and identity and race. So for me thinking about white supremacy goes back to the extractive model of slavery and where an entire ecosystem is built on a group of oppressors extracting value from people who are oppressed. And I think you can use that sort of template for so many different systems in our culture right now. The other thing that I'll say is I'm currently been reading Isabel Wil Wilkerson's book Cast
Kate: Oh's. So good.
Pooja: I'm very late to it, so late to the book.
Kate: Yeah, better late than never. We all, like you said, there's a lot going on.
Pooja: Yeah. And it's interesting for me because my parents are immigrants from India, and I spent a lot of my childhood summers every other year in Bangalore growing up. And so obviously the caste system in India and kind of colorism, and there's so much there from the South Asian context, but to think about racism as a cast system and people in our society who are higher cast or lower cast, and then just again, with Real Self-Care, the goal isn't to yell at you or shame. That's the last thing that I want to do. The goal is to more open space up to ask yourself questions and think about the decisions that you're making in different ways. And so even right now as we're talking, and I'm thinking about like, oh, my son's in daycare. Most of the folks who work at his daycare are women of color, childcare workers are terribly underpaid. And just recognizing that that's, I'm operating in this cast system too as a woman of color with certain privileges. And then I think maybe getting to that point is the first up is having these conversations, bringing them out, whether it's on your text threads with friends in your social circles. It's what we're trying to do at Gemma, which is the women's mental health digital education platform that I founded with Cali. We're trying to bring together these different groups of women, and it's centered on mental health. But our kind of thesis is that you have to also be talking about identity when you're talking about mental health. And there's not an easy answer to it, I think in the same way that we're talking about wellness and okay, the system is the problem, but the solutions take time. It's a process of being uncomfortable with uncertainty and not immediately jumping to, okay, well I donated money to this candidate, so I did something and now I don't need to do anything else for a year. Actually, the thing that's more helpful is having these types of conversations. I mean, it's still obviously helpful to donate because again, coming to both ends still live in a capitalist society, right? So it's, and the other thing that I like to also mention is that, and because of capitalism, I could found Gemma.
Kate: Right. Right.
Pooja: So again, I think both and is really useful and acknowledging our contradictions and our disclosures and vulnerabilities and just being transparent about this stuff. I think that's part of the work of real self care too.
Doree: So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back. Okay. We're back.
Kate: Can we circle back, just because you mentioned how you discuss efficiency being pushed as self-care and you know, kind of quote you or you reference in the mid aughts when Leanin was coming out and the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa, Marissa Mayer, am I getting her name right? Talking about how you could just do everything if you just optimized your time correctly? And this has really felt like it's been pushed on women. And as we talk about a lot on the podcast, this is actually, it's impossible because of the systems that you're talking about. We have no paid childcare. We have no paid child leave in the United States. We have no childcare system. It's just a disaster. How do we push back on this idea? Because I think so much, and part of this is, excuse my rambling, but capitalism and the US specifically, the idea that the individual can make the change without ever acknowledging the systems that we're all trapped in. So specifically to this idea of efficiency as self-care, this is one that I really get stuck on myself. What are some steps that you see that people can take to push back on this narrative? That was a very long rambly question, but I'm still kind of working it out on my head because this is something I get really sucked into.
Pooja: First. I will say that I'm so glad that you asked this question because it's something that I totally struggle with too. It's a really tough one because it's embedded everywhere, and it's a moral imperative, I think, too, of the more efficient that you are with time, the more that you produce, the more that you get done just the better person that you are. I'm thinking for a second here, hold please. So what I have found to work for myself is approaching, approaching the addiction to productivity as a process of mindfulness in that you are constantly bringing your attention back to, oh, I'm doing it again. Like, oh, I didn't eat lunch today because I'm doing emails. What? I did it again. And in mindfulness the whole philosophy is structured around the fact that the point of attention is where you're growing and learning. So it's okay if your mind wanders, you just bring it back. So same with this kind of breaking the cycle of addiction to productivity. You're, you're always going to fall back. You're always going to fall back. While I was going through I V F while I was writing this book, and I was just like, oh my gosh, I can't be a complete hypocrite and burnout while I'm doing I V F and writing a book called Real Self Care. That would be the worst possible thing. So I had to keep, I was totally late on my deadlines. I fell off my schedule, and it was so hard. So the other thing that I would say is a lot of what Brene Brown says, which is like, you have to take a risk. You have to be willing to take a risk to let yourself fall behind. And I think there's the ego there too, being okay with, you're going to disappoint people. You're not going to live up to your expectations. I think you have to reframe that for yourself as a win. And the other thing that I'll say is that I think, what is grounding for me and is grounding in the conversations that I have with my patients, is, again, coming back to quality over quantity. When you're doing too much and when your entire life feels like a project management project, project management project, that is a sign to you that you have gotten away from your values and that you need to recenter and ask yourself again, what is your reasoning? Why are you doing the things that you're doing? And then you probably need to clear some house and I have to do that every three months, but I'm somebody who is addicted to productivity. Full disclosure, I don't know if you can write a book and not be that way, but you have to keep like, right. You guys know this.
Doree: Yeah.
Kate: So yes,
Doree: Pooja, I loved what you had to say in the book about boundaries as self-care. And I know you kind of go through this in the book, but just for the benefit of our conversation could you talk a little bit about how that works in practice? And then what do we do with friends or family who do not respect our boundaries?
Pooja: Yes. Boundaries are, I think, one of the hardest pieces of this real self-care framework. That's why it's the first thing, because it's where you have to start and it's the skill and the tool that takes the most mental fortitude. So I learned from a supervisor when I was just starting out on the faculty at George Washington University. She took me out to lunch when I just started and was like, Pooja you know, just want to give you a piece of advice. You don't have to answer your phone. And for me, that was a very weird thing because I had just gone through my medical residency where you have these pagers, people are listening, and probably what is the pager? It's like the paper thing. And as a doctor, it's like, you're always supposed to answer your pages. You have to call back right away. And my mentor she was just like, no, you don't have to answer your phone. You can let it go to voicemail, and then you can listen, and then you can decide how to respond. Whoa. And the reason that I used this is sort of the intro to boundaries, because it really kind of clarified for me that your boundarie is in your pause, it's in that wait time, the wait time before you answer a question, before you respond to an email, before you respond to your kids. It's like you take that time to collect yourself, and then you decide, and your decision can be yes, it can be no, or it can be to negotiate. And I draw attention to negotiate too, because I think a lot of times we use that word in business corporate America, but actually all of what we're doing in our personal lives and our relationship in our personal relationships is negotiating, soft negotiating in terms of what works, what is our schedule?Who's going to do this? Who's going to do that? Right? And I think coming back to that, the thread we were just talking about, efficiency and productivity. I think for women, we just want to get it done. So it's easier to skip the step of negotiation and just be like, okay, I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to get the answer, know that if it's on my plate or his plate, or whatever. And so part of the boundaries then again, is being okay in that between space of waiting of having to actually ask for what you want, wait for the other person to get back to you, tell you if it works. It's a pain in the butt. It's such a pain in the butt, but that's the only we have to do it. Right. I can't remember, you asked me another question about boundaries, and I totally lost the thread.
Doree: Oh, I was asking kind of what do we do with friends or family who don't respect our boundaries?
Pooja: Yes. I love this question. It's one of my favorite questions because it's literally the question that everybody has. And the way that I think about it is that there's two parallel processes going on when you're setting boundaries with family. The first is the very outcome, goal oriented. I need to communicate. I need to communicate. What do I want? What is my request? I just need to get the communication out. And that is the thing that most of the time when we're talking about boundaries, that's what you see a lot of advice about. But there's this whole other almost shadow process that's going on. That's all of the feelings that come when you set the boundaries. And of course, if it is somebody in your family, because of course our family relationships are the most fraught because I'm a psychiatrist, that's the scene of the crime. Of course, when you tell somebody in your family, Hey, I'm not going to be able to show up for dinner next week, and you've never set a boundary before, they're going to be pissed. They're going to be annoyed. They're going to try and push for, they're going to push up against your boundary. And where I see people get stuck the most is that they're expecting their family member to then take care of their feelings and say, oh, it's okay. I totally understand. But no, you're never going to get caretaking from the person that you're set setting boundaries with. You have to go somewhere else. You have to go to a therapist, you have to go to another friend. You have to go to a third party who can then be your support person for all those hard feelings. But you can't have both things happening in the same person that you're trying to set the boundary with.
Kate: Oof.
Pooja: And one last follow up point on this, because again, I think it's such an important conversation, the psychological skill that we're coming back to there is trusting that the relationship can withstand this tension. Again, it's being patient, recognizing, okay, I voiced this. I exerted, this person might be a little bit annoyed with me, but they'll come around. Our relationship is strong enough. I'm a good person. They're a good person. We will get through this. It might take a couple days, and you will find that there's some relationships that can't withstand on this. And that's when the work comes in of being able to let go of those relationships. It's not so, it's not easy.
Kate: No. But there is so much good usable advice and solutions in this book, which is what I really appreciate, because you do really kind of look at wellness with a critical eye and through a critical lens, but then you also offer a pathway of exploring and making changes in one's own life. It's great. It's really, really helpful.
Pooja: Well, I really appreciate that because it's funny, when I first wrote the book proposal, it was a very problem oriented book. It was very much take down of wellness, like shaky fist. But then when I actually started writing the manuscript, what came out was very prescriptive and tool focused and solution focused. And I realized it was because when I was writing, it felt like I was talking to my patients. And that was sort of what naturally kind of came out. And then I felt a little bit self-conscious because I was just like, oh God, do I really want to write a self-help book crap? But I think that I appreciate you saying that because I think there is a space for acknowledging these are hard changes. We're not saying that this stuff is easy, but there is a path to doing it differently. And it can, wherever you are, I think in your late thirties and in your mid forties, is it actually a really unique time for women in that it's like a space where you really often get to redefine your relationship with yourself. And I think it's the perfect opportunity to be able to ask yourself different questions instead of just staying focused on this treadmill of productivity or efficiency. What if you opened up to ask yourself things that you'd never thought about before? And then on that note, sometimes I will have people say, well, that's kind of scary, because what if I got an answer back that I don't like? And that's where I have a little bit of cred, because I can say, look, you don't need to quit your job and get divorced and join a cult because that doesn't work. I've done that. Okay. You don't have to do anything drastic. Again, this is all about conversation. You could get something back that feels scary and fine. You sit with it, sit with it for a couple months. Really, this is a process of just growing and learning and coming to understand your relationship with yourself.
Doree: Well, I think that's a beautiful note to end on. So thank you so much for this conversation. I mean, I feel like we could talk to you. I mean, I will speak selfishly for myself. I could talk to you for a few more hours, but we will let you go. And could you just let our listeners know where they can find you if they want to follow along with your work and see what else you're up to?
Pooja: Absolutely. So I am Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. I am on Instagram @PoojaLakshmin, and the book is called Real Self-Care. You can get it at all the bookstores and all the places that you buy books. And my company is called Gemma. We are a physician-led womens mental health platform, and we have a weekly newsletter that's called theTherapy Takeaway. So you can find us there too.
Doree: Very cool. Well, thanks again. Thank
Kate: You so much.
Pooja: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
Doree: She was one of those guests where I think it's also when people are in the mental health field, you just want to talk to them.
Kate: Yeah, of course.
Doree: So I really like talking to her, and I wish we could have talked to her for longer, but
Kate: One of the things I really appreciated in her book I meant to mention this in our interview, and I don't think I got to it, but she talks about this world of faux self-care and what that looks like. And then she does address the question of, but what if I enjoy this? And what if I like it and I want to do this? And which is something that I often grapple with. And I feel like she took a really kind of fair and balanced approach to examining our participation in wellness, why we do it, what it really symbolizes, and how we can make a shift to genuinely improve on our own self-care, as well as the community self-care and the self-care of others. I really appreciated what she had to say.
Doree: Yes, I'm a hundred percent with you there.
Kate: So tell me, Doree, about last week's intention of "tennis", because you did text me with a little tennis update.
Doree: Okay, so this was very interesting. Remember my whole thing about how I had gone to my class and it had been canceled, but I didn't, oh know. Sorry, what?
Kate: I said, oh, yes. Oh yes.
Doree: Yeah, I didn't know. And I was annoyed and embarrassed and frustrated and just wondering if I was going to get to play again, because it didn't seem like people were signing up for this class, whatever. So that was the whole background. And then on Friday, I get an email, or actually no, the day before Thursday, Thursday night, I get an email that I've been registered for the advanced intermediate class. And I was like, oh, well, they must not have had enough signups. And so they did what they should have done the previous time, and they put me in the other class. So I was excited that I was getting going to get to play, but also a little nervous because I hadn't played with these people in a few weeks. And they were the advanced class. And you know what? It was fine. It was totally fine.
Kate: Yay. Good.
Doree: And I went up to the coach afterwards, and I was like, am I good to be in this class? Can I stay in the intermediate three, or would you prefer that I just do intermediate two? And he was like, oh, no, you can be in this class, of course. And I was like, oh, okay.
Kate: Oh, look at that. So it sounds like there was a little bit of not, it made you feel better.
Doree: Yes, yes. I feel like I don't have to be constantly proving myself and that every stroke, it's like if I don't make it that I'm going to be banished. And then I was also, I started because I think my tendency is to just focus on myself and be like, oh my God, I miss that. I miss that. I miss that. So I started just paying a little bit more attention to everyone else, and I was like, okay. Oh, they all miss things all the time, too.
Kate: Yes. Doree, you're hard on yourself.
Doree: Yes, Kate. We know this.
Kate: I know. I know. But yeah, I mean, it's so good. It's so great when you have those moments of like, oh, wait a second.
Doree: Yes, totally.
Kate: I've been holding myself up to standards that nobody else is at either.
Doree: Totally, totally, totally. So that is my tennis update this week.
Kate: Well done. Well done.
Doree: Thank you. This week. Pretty straightforward. Now I have a pile of shoes that either didn't sell or I need to give away, and I need to get rid of those. They're out of my closet, but they're just in my office. And I need to figure out what I'm doing with them. So that is my intention for this week. What about you? How is Sunsama going?
Kate: I like it. I'm still using it.
Doree: Okay, that's good.
Kate: I seem to have, I use Google Calendar, Asana, and now Sunsoma tho. These have kind of been the three tools I'm using to just stay on top of stuff if I don't. It's interesting having, coming out of this conversation we were just having about efficiency and productivity and all these things, and I try to be reflective with these organizing tools on if that's why I'm using them. But also as Doree with the way that my brain works. If I don't have stuff written down and organized, I won't remember it. I won't do it. And so it is really important for me to have that managed as best I can for my own mental health. So it's going well. I'm sticking with it for another week before I pay for it. I have another little bit of a free trial left before I decide if I want to actually pay. So I will keep you posted on if I end up spending money on this product.
Doree: Please do.
Kate: And then I'm in the middle of a very big kind of product, clean out skincare toss, realistic skincare practice items, reorganization.
Doree: Ooh. Okay,
Kate: Yeah. I have started this and I am now just kind of putting into my medicine cabinet only what I need and use and leaving everything else out. And it's very bare bones so I just need to kind of finish this clean out.
Doree: Okay. Well this is exciting.
Kate: I will give you an update on the skincare lineup as I get a little bit farther down the road, but yeah,
Doree: please do.
Kate: We're having some big changes over here. Big changes, I mean, not that big. More just like I'm using la roche-posay. Pretty exciting. And lots of vanna cream on my face. Oh, lots of vanna cream.
Doree: Well, Kate, this has been a pleasure as always, and just a reminder that Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and you, Kate Spencer, and produced and edited by Sam Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager. Our network partner is Acast. Thanks for listening. Bye.
Kate: Bye.