Pooja Lakshmin
Dr Pooja Lakshmin, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist, New York Times contributor and 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. In 2020, Lakshmin founded Gemma - a physician led women's mental health education platform centering impact and equity. She maintains an active private practice, where she treats women struggling with burnout, perfectionism, and disillusionment, as well as clinical conditions like depression and anxiety. Having gone down the rabbit hole of extreme wellness herself, Real Self-Care is her answer to the juice cleanses, the gratitude lists, and the bubble baths - not only to care for ourselves for real but, in turn, to transform our broken culture.
Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included)
Pooja Lakshmin
From board-certified psychiatrist and women's mental health specialist Pooja Lakshmin, MD, comes a long-overdue reckoning with the contradictions of the wellness industry and hands-on strategies for practicing real and lasting self-care
You may have noticed that it's nearly impossible to go even a couple days without coming across the term self-care. A word that encompasses any number of lifestyle choices and products--from juice cleanses to yoga workshops to luxury bamboo sheets--self-care has exploded in our collective consciousness as a panacea for practically all of women's problems.
Dr. Pooja Lakshmin finds this cultural embrace of self-care incomplete at best and manipulative at worst. Self-care dogma says that to fix your troubles is as simple as buying a new day planner or signing up for a meditation class. But the game is rigged. The self-care fixes that our culture prescribes keep us looking outward--comparing ourselves with others or striving for a certain type of perfection. Real self-care, in contrast, is not as simple as a fancy spa retreat or a journaling app; it's an internal process that involves hard work and making difficult decisions.
Real Self-Care shows readers the difference between the two, lifting the veil on faux self-care and reconceptualizing our understanding of what a real practice of caring for yourself could--and should--look like. Using case studies, clinical research, and compassion, Lakshmin provides actionable strategies for real and sustainable change and solace, helping readers set boundaries and move past guilt, treat themselves with compassion, get closer to themselves, and assert their power.
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