Megan Voss is an integrative nurse at the University of Minnesota's Masonic Children's Hospital. She's also an assistant professor at the university's Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing, where she teaches a course on well-being and resilience for health care professionals.

Every Wednesday morning at 8:30 CST, Jill connects with experts and local personalities for some real talk about keeping our minds and bodies healthy — from staying safe in the music scene, to exercising during a pandemic, to voting and civic engagement. Looking for more resources and support? Visit our friends at Call to Mind, MPR's initiative to foster new conversations about mental health.

As I've been connecting with friends and colleagues, I think a lot of us have the same question: what is self care, and what isn't self care?

That's a really good question. You know, I think people get sick of hearing the buzzwords, "self care," but the patients and their caregivers that I work with on a daily basis tell me they don't even want to hear that [term] any more, because it's essentially become meaningless to them. When I started teaching about self care, I became really interested in, what is the origin of this idea of self care? Where did it start, and where have we taken it to?

I was surprised to see that self care was first defined by the World Health Organization back in the early '80s. In 1983, the WHO began to define self care, and what's amazing is, the definition they put out in 1983 I found to be so relevant to today's situation that we're in. It talks about self care being the activities that today's communities and families take with the intention of enhancing health and preventing disease, limiting illness, and restoring health.

So that's very relevant to the world we're living in today, when we think about the stay at home order, social distancing, behaviors like wearing masks...and those aren't things we normally think of as self care, but essentially, self care is anything we do to prevent ourselves tipping over on that continuum of wellness to illness, from the wellness side to the illness side.

So even though people get a little cynical when they think of self care, I think if you break it down and think of the basic behaviors we do every day, we're all doing self care all the time — or we wouldn't be here.

I imagine that people get a little cynical about it, because I think I've had some misconceptions about what it means even though...1983, I mean, I was born in 1982, certainly didn't ever grow up hearing that term, "self care," but I had a few misconceptions and I started to go down this road of, self care is all about the "treat yourself" attitude. Clearly a misconception about what it is. What have you heard, just misconceptions about what self care actually is?

One of the things that's been brought to light in the past year we just lived through is that maybe "self care" is a privileged idea. Maybe it's for the people who have the time and the luxury and the extra income to spend on spa days and fancy food and things like that. I work really hard, both in my role as clinician and in my role as professor, to break it down to a level that makes it applicable for people that don't have access to a lot of free time or free money: to think about ways that self care is more a way of how you talk to yourself, how you respect yourself, and how you learn to listen to yourself.

That's the first thing I say to my students in the academic course I teach: if you learn nothing else about self care, learn how to listen and interpret your body's needs. It's about getting the right diagnosis. What is it that you need right now?

That seems like really breaking it down to a basic level, because no matter what, we all have needs as human beings. Our bodies have needs. That's a good way to break it down.

Absolutely. It's really easy to get caught up in the list of things you should do. You know, we all have like 15 things we should do every day, and maybe time to fit in one or two of those things.

A common example I give is, everyone thinks I should wake up earlier and exercise — especially this time of year, right? In January, we all have these lofty goals. I encourage people to reframe that if what your body needs is sleep, then you're going to do better with an extra hour of sleep. Even your weight loss goals are going to do better if you're getting the proper sleep you need. You can't work out until you've gotten the sleep you need. So if that's what your body needed, you did the right thing, actually, by staying in bed instead of getting up to run.

That's not to say you can use that as an excuse every day to not do physical activity. You have to reassess and think about the ways you fit everything in, but really, self care comes with a set of building blocks and you have to think about the foundation. I really believe a good sleep is the best foundation that makes a lot of other things fall into place.

I've been thinking: my body isn't telling me that I need a manicure or that I need lip gloss. Generally, if I'm really listening — which I've really been trying to learn how to do in this past year during the pandemic, it often boils down to nutrition, rest, exercise, and I think the word boundary has come up a lot, especially as I'm trying to figure out the work-life balance during this time.

Boundaries, I think, are a big part of self-care and they're often overlooked. We've had shifting boundaries since the pandemic started and work from home became the norm, and really asking yourself what fills you up and taking control of how you spend your time and energy can be the best lesson in self care.

One of the things I recommend is that you take a few moments to write things down. You don't have to do prolific journaling or anything like that, but just make a bulleted list of the things that lift you up and the things that drain you throughout the day, or the things that took away your time, and you can identify patterns over time and really start to question: why do I go to that meeting every Wednesday. Just because someone else told me I had to be there? Does that really align with my goals or my professional or personal needs, or is that just something I'm doing because somebody else made me feel like I needed to do it?

So, identify areas like that where you can take control of how you use your time and conserve some energy to fit in the things that really matter to you.

I'm writing that down right now for the next time there's a meeting on the calendar! Another word that's been coming up: the word resilience has been big.

Yeah. I think resilience has been important because it reminds us that we can't dig ourselves out of a crisis by doing self care. Resilience is kind of a way to make a daily payment into a savings account that will help us when a moment of crisis occurs.

I work with pediatric patients at the Children's Hospital, and the way I describe resilience to them is that resilience is like a beach ball. If a beach ball is really full with air, it's really nice and firm. If you drop it on the ground, it bounces back, usually pretty close to the level from which it was dropped. But as that beach ball deflates, the bounce back gets lower and lower and eventually it's just flat. So that's what happens when you don't do self care: over time, you become the beach ball that's flat when a crisis occurs. Or sometimes it doesn't even have to be a crisis: it could be a sick child, or a change in plans, any little thing that changes the way you're functioning, you can't respond to or bounce back from.

So I think the concept of resilience just reminds us that self care is something we have to invest in...I would say every single day, but I would say it's every single moment. Every single decision you make sometimes really is an investment in self care. When you start to look at it that way, I think it becomes easier to have those boundaries and be less apologetic for having boundaries.

The other big piece of advice I have for people is to try and get out of the all-or-nothing mindset. If you didn't work out on Monday, the week isn't shot. If you don't have 60 or 90 minutes to do a total workout, it doesn't matter. If you get out for 20 minutes, that's better than doing nothing. So fitting in little pieces, often you'll notice at the end of the week, you added up more workout time than if you had scheduled two major workouts. So doing what you can, as you can, and then giving yourself credit for the small wins and what you did accomplish instead of focusing on what you didn't accomplish.

Self care really does look different for everyone, right?

Absolutely. It's totally dependent on the things that are impacting you in your life right now. Everyone has different baseline physical and mental health, everyone has different responsibilities both inside and outside the home. We don't all start with the same level playing field in terms of our social determinants of health. We're living through unprecedented times, with national and global crises, the pandemic, racial injustice. So it's important to remember that you can't compare your self-care to anyone else's, and the most important or impactful forms of self care: they don't cost anything.

If I were to leave people with a take-home message, it would be: slow down, if even just for one moment. Try to tune in, reflect, listen to yourself, and then act upon what you hear. As part of this routine, you can check out this website that we have called Taking Charge of Your Health and Well-Being. It's full of great free resources to help with all aspects of mental and physical health. We also have a free well-being assessment, and I think that can be a really useful place for people who say, "I've tried to listen to myself and I just still don't know what it is that I need." This assessment can help direct you, which aspect of your well-being you're struggling in and then lead you down a path of some useful tips for how to address that specific area. So it's a diagnostic tool.