 Welcome to the Anxious Morning, where each weekday morning we take a look at ideas, concepts, and lessons designed to help you understand and overcome your anxiety. For more information, visit us at theanxiousmorning.com. Yesterday on The Anxious Morning, I talked about why my occasional rants aside, self-care, is important. Today, I want to talk a bit about why I sometimes rant about self-care and how that concept can become problematic. Now, before I go on, I just want to be perfectly clear about something. I do not get to judge when you need to rest or take care of yourself. Nobody gets to judge that. Only you do. Only you can feel what you feel and know what you know about yourself. This is important. I cannot give you exact instructions on how or when to engage in self-care. I can tell you why you should and what the pitfalls are, but in the end, you are in charge of all of that. When we are driven by avoidance, which itself is driven by baseless but real fear, we often develop a curious and unexpected superpower. Anxious people often become galaxy-class masters of rationalization and self-deception. We quickly cultivate amazingly effective strategies for convincing ourselves that we're not avoiding anxiety or running from it. When we do an exposure on Tuesday, then take all of Wednesday off, we'll call it a well-deserved rest, the mental health day, or a me day. We will sometimes latch on to the most clickable of all mental health devices, self-care. I'm not avoiding. I know I've only left the house once in the last four days, but self-care. I get this. I really do. If you've given a gorophobic a choice between doing another exposure and taking a self-care day to lay on the sofa, disordered anxiety and irrational fear will choose self-care eight times out of ten. Even when that day off is the 26th day off in the last 32 days, an anxious person driven by the desire to feel safe will argue passionately that they need to listen to their body and engage in compassionate self-care. Now, sometimes we do need to do that and see yesterday's edition of the Anxious Morning for more on this. But remember the part a few paragraphs back when I said that you are always in charge of this stuff? Well, that comes at a price. That price is the willingness to be brutally honest with yourself about your motivation and what's driving your choices. You get to declare a self-care day whenever you need one, but you also have to accept responsibility for rationalized avoidance when it rears its head from time to time. When the idea of self-care and even self-compassion to some degree gets used as a shield to protect and justify avoidant behavior, then it has gone off the rails. You may not even be aware that it happened. You may never have intended for it to happen. But we all know how powerful anxiety and irrational fear can be. They'll take over and make everything about retreat and avoidance, then convince you that retreat and avoidance are the right things to do. Left unchecked, anxiety and fear will turn self-care into food, gorging themselves and sucking the air out of your recovery process. This is why I often rant the way I do about self-care and the misuse and misappropriation of the term. I'm not picking on anyone for wanting to rest or even for wanting to feel safe and comfortable. But when anxiety and fear are partying at your expense and running through your liquor cabinet while you're just trying to find your cat, somebody has to be willing to turn on the lights, unplug the music, and end the party before the whole house gets trashed. I guess sometimes I'm that person. I'll shut down the anxiety party when it needs to be shut down. What a buzz kill, right? If you're enjoying The Anxious Morning and you'd like to get a copy of the podcast delivered into your email inbox every morning, visit theanxiousmorning.email and subscribe to the newsletter. If you're listening on Apple or iTunes, take a second and leave a five-star rating. Maybe write a small review. It really helps me out. And finally, if you find my work useful and you'd like to help keep it free of advertising and sponsorships, you can see all the ways to support the work at theanxiestruth.com. Thanks so much.