The Wellness Industrial Complex has does a pretty good job of co-opting the idea of self-care and turning it into an aspirational lifestyle choice rather than ongoing maintenance of physical and mental health. The whole idea of self-care is now associated with affluence and privilege, or a kind of low-budget hedonism where pizza and Netflix where folks who can’t afford spa days and wellness make do with the small, ironic pleasures afforded to them.

And it’s not surprising, because actual self-care starts with small things that are incredibly hard to do when you’re actually in need of self-care.

Case in point: going to bed at a reasonable hour.

For me, this means getting my shit together at 9:30 and being in bed by ten, preferably without a screen nearby to distract me and keep me awake. That affords me a good eight-hour window in which I can sleep prior to my six AM “get up and write” alarm, even if I’m going to wake up after five or six hours because eight hours’ sleep seems beyond me.

I know this, and I know my life is smoother when I stick to the ten PM bedtime, and yet it takes effort to actually achieve it. It’s always tempting to stay up later—one more TV show, one more chapter, just a little more fucking around on the phone.

I pay a price for every hour I stay up past bedtime—a price in the amount of work done, the state of my mental health, and my trust in the routines that keeps things moving forward—so it’s almost never the right choice long-term, but humans aren’t built for long-term thinking. It’s not our default.

Real self-care is hard and incredibly goddamned basic and requires sacrificing the pleasures of now for the long-term gains. It starts with simple choices:  Go to bed at a reasonable hour, eat enough vegetables, do the stretches that help ease the lingering pain, stick to your routine.

All basically free—no affluence required—but it’s not as fun as self-care as lifestyle brand and incredibly hard to do.

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