Building wellbeing literacy through everyday self-care

First published by Edith Cowan University

Do you think about your own wellbeing? How do you communicate your wellbeing? Do you make decisions every day to care for you? These were some of the questions posed by Professor Narelle Lemon at the third ECU Lecture Series event, Building wellbeing literacy through everyday self-care.

Re-thinking wellbeing and self-care

Professor Narelle Lemon is a Vice-Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow in ECU’s School of Education, where she leads the wellbeing and education research community.

She is on a mission to talk about wellbeing and everyday self-care, a topic that is generally only discussed or talked about when there’s a problem, stress or exhaustion.

"I'm on a mission for us to think about self-care in a non-medicalised way, there needs to be an interruption to the damaging, commercialised messages of self-care," Professor Lemon said.

"I want to help us to build a wellbeing literacy, how we comprehend and compose an intentional language for wellbeing."

The turning point

For Professor Lemon, self-care was an abstract idea at the beginning, something she didn’t really think about until she went through a period of burnout ten years ago. She shared with the audience that she experienced exhaustion, withdrawal from social engagements, struggled to think rationally, and developed patterns that let her disregard the things she knew were good for her like exercise, healthy food, and social support.

"The turning point was actually being likened to a cow at an eight-week mindfulness-based risk reduction program where the facilitator asked us what we thought mindfulness was and why we were there," Professor Lemon said.

"I shared that I was about to burn out and the response I received was not expected, I was asked, 'Narelle, how long are you going to allow yourself to be milked like a cow? You’re not about to burn out, you are burnt out.'

"I hadn't had anyone speak to me so directly with care and a smile on their face. I was not aware that I was burnt out."

This experience was the beginning of Professor Lemon’s journey in building wellbeing through everyday self-care.

Wellbeing research

Professor Lemon shared that her experience is not uncommon with research exposing that many people feel self-care is selfish, they don’t have time, find it difficult, compare individual practice to others and find that they disregard good wellbeing decisions when they’re under pressure.

"There is evidence that those with little to no engagement in self-care practices prior to recommendations will remain less likely to follow professionals’ advice," she said.

"This uncovers the need to look at self-care, education and a rethinking of interventions that empower individuals in their self-care practices while raising awareness and building confidence and capacity to reduce the effects of stress, exhaustion, and burnout.

"What this revealed to me is a need to build a literacy of wellbeing and self-care in non-medicalised ways."

What is wellbeing literacy?

Professor Lemon described wellbeing literacy as a capability to comprehend and compose wellbeing language across contexts with the intention of using such language to maintain or improve wellbeing of oneself and others.

"Wellbeing literacy embraces building, maintaining and protecting wellbeing in order for individuals, collectives and systems to flourish," she said.

"By using the language, knowledge and skills of wellbeing, intentional communications of personal and communal wellness become feasible.

"Unlike other health choices that focus on physical health or mental illness, wellbeing literacy shifts our focus to what's possible rather than what's broken, and one way to build wellbeing literacy is self-care."

What is self-care?

A vision Professor Lemon has is to interrupt the selfishness, impossible, commercialised, and incorrect use of the term self-care.

She argues that self-care is anything you do proactively that helps develop, protect, maintain, and improve health, wellbeing, or wellness.

"It is about meeting yourself each day, learning who you really are and continuing to be present with your needs to help you be the best version of yourself today," Professor Lemon said.

By approaching self-care as an interruption of the self, Professor Lemon encourages people to think about the self in terms of self-compassion, self-love, self-regulation, and self-awareness.

"We think about the self not as the "I" but we think about it as relational, in terms of caring for "I", “us” and "others"," she said.

"Context matters and self-care changes across context. Each combination of people and setting influences self-care, you must tune in to, 'What do you really need right now?'"

The self-care toolbox theory

Professor Lemon shares that a way to approach everyday self-care is to think about it as a toolbox of strategies and practices, or tools that work for you right now to help you be your best.

A toolbox for self-care requires a variety of multiple intentional activities, strategies, or practices across diverse areas of wellbeing science.

For example, Professor Lemon shares what her self-care looks like in a day, it includes intentional practices like eight hours of sleep, green tea during a mindful moment ritual, homemade vegetable soup, appreciating ECU’s therapy dogs Edi and Watson and dinner with energy boosting friends.

"Thinking from a wellbeing science perspective, there's positive emotions, self-compassion, appreciation, engagement, creativity, boundaries, relationships with others and self, and health," she said.

"We can have tools that are new or tools that you use all the time, you can collect them, leave, borrow, or lend them, you can swap them and use them in multiple different ways to solve a problem.

"We acknowledge that tools do not always work in every situation, and they don't work in isolation, so the context and the reason for use is important."

Five dimensions

Professor Lemon's work focuses on self-care being thought about through five dimensions:

Mindful awareness
Noticing what is happening when it happens and paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.

Empowerment
The agency or choice you have in the moment. Telling the truth to ourselves about what we need and putting in place what we need.

Time
Time is a variable that guides us. How can you think about time with your self-care in terms of things like micro moments? What does time look like in terms of a pause, a stop, a tilt?

Habits
Habits are small choices that you make and repeat over time. We often underestimate the small changes, the little tweaks we make to our thinking and behaviour. We imagine they don’t make a difference. In fact, it is the small, tiny little tweaks we make, that add up and contribute to improvements in ourselves.

Self-compassion
This is a way to feel safe and protected and it draws our attention to how we respond to ourselves, we are encouraged with self-compassion to treat ourselves with kindness and gentleness.

Wellbeing research projects

Professor Lemon is currently working on several research projects that continue the conversation beyond what she shared at the ECU Lecture Series event.

Launched in May 2024, the Citizen Wellbeing Scientists Project draws from the principles of citizen science which invites participants to share what their self-care toolbox can and might look like. Members of the public are invited to document their own self-care practices using various multimedia tools such as photos, videos, or written notes.

Everyone is invited to contribute to the project or gain inspiration for your everyday self-care.

Flex Your PEX is a project that supports future teachers. Professional experience or PEX, is the work integrated component of a teaching degree. The project’s objective is to switch from the negative and deficit ways of seeing each other, challenges and the self in context, and to start to think about how we can be our best selves through character strengths and strengths-based pedagogy.

SHESpeaks, funded by the Department of Communities, is a project addressing the perception that self-care is unachievable by women and aims to challenge societal norms and empower women’s voices.

Watch Professor Lemon's full lecture online.

ECU Lecture Series

Established in 2015, each year the ECU Lecture Series features distinguished Professors sharing their research expertise with ECU students, staff and members of the community.  A Q&A discussion, these events are a valuable opportunity for the audience to ask their own questions and are open to the general public.