The Self-Care Mistake I See Every Day — From Someone Who Sells Reminders for a Living

Alyssa Ostroff is the founder and designer of Self-Care Shirts, a mental health apparel brand. She writes personal essays on mental health twice a week and lives with Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism.

A few years ago, I quietly built a small business on a hunch that most of the wellness industry had it backwards. I make hand-drawn mental health apparel — shirts and stickers with phrases like "Rest Is Productive" and "You Don't Have to Be Merry" — and every day, thousands of people tell me, through what they buy and what they write me, which version of self-care actually works for them. It is almost never the version we're sold.

Here's the mistake I see everywhere, and it's costing people the exact peace they're chasing: we've confused self-care with self-improvement, and comfort with positivity. We've turned "take care of yourself" into one more thing to perform, purchase, and optimize — and then we wonder why the bath bombs aren't fixing us.

I'm not a clinician. What I am is a founder who has read tens of thousands of customer messages, and a person who lives with Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism — so I've been on both ends of this: the one struggling, and the one watching a whole community struggle in remarkably similar ways. That vantage point taught me something the "10 Ways to Practice Self-Care" listicles never will.

The tell: which messages actually land

When I started designing, I assumed the cheerful stuff would sell. Good vibes. Sparkles. "Choose happy." That's what wellness looks like, after all. It flopped. Consistently.

What people reach for — what they buy for themselves at 11pm and then message me about in tears — is the honest stuff. "You're Not in Trouble, and No One Is Mad at You." "My Anxiety Has Anxiety." "You Don't Have to Be Merry." The designs that admit the hard thing outsell the ones that paper over it, every single time. My single best-seller is a shirt that exists purely to interrupt an anxious spiral, not to pretend the spiral isn't happening.

That pattern isn't a marketing quirk. It's the whole thesis. People are not soothed by being told to feel better. They're soothed by being believed.

What toxic positivity actually does

There's a name for the thing I watched fail: toxic positivity. It's the well-meaning insistence that we stay upbeat — "everything happens for a reason," "just think positive," "good vibes only" — and it does real damage, because it asks people to abandon their actual emotions in favor of acceptable ones.

The psychology here is sturdier than the Instagram version suggests. Research on emotional suppression has long found that pushing feelings down doesn't make them smaller; it tends to make them louder and more persistent, while quietly raising your stress load. And the antidote isn't forced optimism — it's self-compassion. Psychologist Kristin Neff's work on self-compassion has shown, across a large body of studies, that treating yourself with the same kindness you'd offer a struggling friend is associated with lower anxiety and depression and greater resilience — more than self-esteem or positive thinking.

In plain terms: "good vibes only" is a door with no handle on the inside. Self-compassion is the room you can actually rest in.

The reframe that changed everything for me

The single most useful shift I ever made wasn't a product, a routine, or a supplement. It was a sentence: rest is not something I have to earn.

I have narcolepsy. For years I treated my need to nap as a moral failing — proof I was lazy, behind, not trying hard enough. I'd push through, crash, and hate myself for crashing. The day I started thinking of my naps as medication rather than weakness, my entire relationship with myself changed. I stopped spending energy fighting my own brain and started, for the first time, working with it. My health improved. My work got better. And — the part that surprised me — I became far kinder to everyone else who was struggling, because I'd stopped being cruel to myself first.

That's the reframe underneath real self-care, and it's the opposite of the industry's version. It's not "do more, buy more, optimize more." It's "stop fighting the parts of yourself you were taught to be ashamed of."

What actually helps (and it's rarely for sale)

If the performative version is the mistake, here's what I've watched actually move the needle — for me and for the community I've accidentally built. None of it is glamorous. That's the point.

1. Name the feeling instead of fixing it. The fastest way out of an anxious spiral I've found isn't positivity — it's accuracy. "I'm not in trouble. No one is mad at me. This is my nervous system, not a fact." You're not arguing yourself into happiness; you're just telling the truth. Truth is more calming than cheer.

2. Treat rest as maintenance, not reward. You don't earn sleep, food, or breaks by suffering enough first. If you wait until you "deserve" rest, you'll wait forever. Build it in like you'd build in charging your phone — before it hits 1%, not after.

3. Downgrade the word "self-care" itself. Real self-care is frequently boring and occasionally unpleasant: going to bed on time, having the hard conversation, canceling the thing, taking the medication, drinking the water. If your self-care is always pretty and never inconvenient, it might be self-soothing dressed up as self-care. Both have a place — but don't confuse the bubble bath with the boundary.

4. Let "and" replace "but." You can be grateful and exhausted. You can love the holidays and find them hard. Toxic positivity demands you pick the acceptable half. Acceptance lets both be true, which is usually what's actually happening.

5. Find the people who let you be honest. The most therapeutic thing isn't a product; it's a person — or a community — who doesn't flinch when you tell the truth. Half my job, it turns out, is just being the brand that says "me too" out loud so people feel less alone in the thing they were sure only they felt.

The point readers didn't know to ask about

Here's the question underneath all the "how do I practice self-care?" searches, the one nobody phrases directly: Am I allowed to feel this bad and still be okay?

The answer is yes — and no amount of positivity, product, or optimization will get you there. Only acceptance will. Acceptance isn't resignation and it isn't giving up; it's telling yourself the truth about where you actually are, and then being kind to the person standing there. Everything I've built, and everything I've watched help real people, comes back to that.

We don't need more reminders to be positive. We're drowning in those. We need permission to be honest — and the radical, unglamorous discovery that honesty is where the relief actually lives.

I sell that reminder on a shirt now, which still makes me laugh. But the shirt was never the medicine. The permission was.

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