“We have to take care of ourselves. No one else will”: lessons from essential workers

Beyond the self-care binary

Self-care has become a frequently used term, widely circulating as a solution to stress, burnout, and exhaustion. In feminist and critical scholarship, it has long been the subject of intense debate, oscillating between two dominant poles. On one hand, Black feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde (1988) and bell hooks (1993) theorise self-care as a radical act of survival and political warfare for those living under intersecting systems of oppression, collapsing boundaries between the personal and the political. On the other hand, critical social theorists have shown how self-care has been appropriated by neoliberal governance as a technology of self-responsibilisation, self-optimisation, and emotional regulation that shifts attention away from structural violence and austerity (Michaeli, 2017). As such, commodified self-care can reinforce inequalities while depoliticising structural sources of exhaustion (Jain, 2020).

Yet as more recent scholarship argues, this binary between radical resistance and neoliberal co-optation risks flattening the heterogeneity of practices and meanings that gather under the label of self-care (Kim and Schalk, 2021). Riccitelli’s (2024) notion of “critical self-care” is particularly helpful here, emphasising how the same practices can simultaneously reproduce and contest neoliberal regimes. Everyday practices that appear banal – resting, cooking, walking, and talking – may quietly resist hegemonic temporalities of overwork, sustain capacities for care, and create small spaces of otherwise within hostile environments. Zuckerwise (2024) further insists that self-care was never solely about the individual, but about the self in relation to others.

Essential workers’ everyday self-care practices

Three clusters of self-care practices emerged as central to sustaining workers’ bodies and minds across our heterogeneous sample: avoiding stress, recharging batteries, and attentiveness to bodily signals. For some, avoiding stress involved carefully organising daily routines to minimise rushing around and feeling anxious, for example by waking up very early. Silvina, a cleaner of public infrastructure, chats with her former colleague Dijana about this:

This short chat between Silvina and Dijana illustrates how self-care can take shape in small, routine practices that help workers maintain a sense of calm and autonomy within demanding schedules. Silvina’s early-morning ritual shows how “avoiding stress” is not merely about rest but about creating personal time and emotional space amid care and work obligations. Her practice reflects attentiveness to bodily and emotional signals. At the same time, the dialogue suggests recognition and subtle admiration among peers for such coping strategies, hinting at a shared understanding of the need to protect one’s well-being in precarious labour conditions.

Many workers described urban green spaces, riversides, and forests as being central to recharging their batteries after noisy, emotionally intense, or sedentary workdays. Day care employees spoke of restorative walks along the river, while bus drivers described walking routes as a way of counteracting back pain caused by long periods of sitting, as well as maintaining psychological balance. Others turned to team sports or strength training to cope with the physical strain and irregular hours of shift work. While seemingly ordinary, these practices constitute vital infrastructures of endurance in the face of long hours, early starts, public exposure, and low wages. Ivana, a shop assistant, explains this in a conversation with her former colleague Priya:

Paying attention to bodily signals emerged as another crucial form of self-care, particularly for workers in physically demanding sectors with poor labour protections. As we have seen in the initial chat conversation between Khulan and Valeria, this can involve switching hands and altering movements to avoid the surgery that many of their colleagues had undergone. In a sector where many workers lack formal contracts, paid sick leave, or access to adequate health care, such embodied knowledge is essential for survival. For undocumented domestic workers like Khulan, self-care often involves self-medication, enabling them to continue working when no institutional support is available.

These examples make clear that self-care is far from a leisure activity; it is a necessary condition of possibility for continued labour in contexts where bodies are literally worn out by repetitive, undervalued, and often invisible work. Yet the capacity to practise self-care is deeply uneven. Day care centres marked by chronic understaffing leave workers with barely any meaningful breaks; domestic workers like Khulan spend “breaks” commuting unpaid between households, arriving home exhausted with little time for rest; single mothers shoulder the combined weight of essential work and sole responsibility for children. For them, self-care is both indispensable and almost impossible. This underlines the necessity of an intersectional lens (Anthias, 2012; Carbajal et al., 2026), foregrounding how migration status, legal precariousness, gendered care responsibilities, age, and occupation intersect to shape the availability, timing, and meaning of self-care. While some workers can use self-care to set boundaries or refuse additional work, others lack the structural security to say no. In this sense, self-care can both challenge and reproduce inequalities: it may help individuals endure exploitative conditions, but it can also mask systemic failures by translating structural neglect into individual coping strategies.

Self-care and care entangled

Self-care is often seen as a personal practice, separate from caring for others. However, the experiences of essential workers reveal that self-care and caring for others are deeply intertwined and often occur simultaneously. Beatriz and Marella’s conversation is emblematic of this:

During interviews, we learned that essential workers regularly engage in self-care rituals, such as drinking tea. However, such practices are rarely purely individual. Domestic workers, such as Beatriz and Marella, share tea with their neighbours, friends, and even the interviewer, inviting them to participate in a ritual combining physical care, emotional regulation, and consideration for the well-being of others. Self-care thus becomes entangled with caring for others, forming part of the intimate relations of care that extend across households, neighbourhoods, and even transnational borders. This pattern was particularly apparent among the domestic workers interviewed, many of whom were embedded in global care chains and had left children and other relatives in their countries of origin. They sustain these ties through remittances and emotional support, while also relying on relatives or others to take on care responsibilities at home. The fluidity of self-care and other forms of care is also evident when considering the emotional labour performed by essential workers. They described how their work involved absorbing the fears, frustrations, and loneliness of others, especially during the pandemic. Peter, a public transport driver, described one such situation in a conversation with his mother:

Emotional labour often falls outside official job descriptions, remains unrecognised, and is unpaid. Self-care enables continued participation in the emotional infrastructures of society — the invisible work of listening, soothing, and maintaining social relationships. Our data show that self-care is inseparable from the broader moral and emotional economies within which essential workers are embedded. It is both a condition for and a component of caring for others, revealing the porous boundaries between self-care and care work.

Collective care and the limits of self-care

Self-care takes on additional meanings when practised collectively. Among the workers interviewed, numerous examples emerged of mutual care and everyday solidarity that not only lighten individual burdens but also open spaces for political articulation and resistance. At the level of workplace micro-practices, day care teams described how they redistributed tasks to accommodate colleagues’ shifting capacities, preferences, and life stages. Older workers, for instance, stepped back from physically strenuous work with babies to focus instead on older children; while others took on excursions that involved stressful navigation of public transport and traffic. Such adjustments quietly challenge rigid job descriptions and enact a collective ethic of care in which self-care and care for colleagues are deeply intertwined.

For workers labouring in isolation, such as many domestic workers, collectives provide crucial spaces of mutual support. Informal groups of “undocumented” migrants, so-called Sans Papiers Collective, illustrate this well. In various Swiss cities, these groups bring together “undocumented” migrants to discuss strategies for navigating everyday life without legal status and to collectively demand rights. Members describe these networks as “like a family,” emphasising the sense of safety, recognition, and joy found in regular meetings and holiday celebrations. Taking time to attend these gatherings is itself a form of self-care, allowing workers to “keep going” by replenishing emotional reserves and countering isolation. At the same time, these spaces function as political infrastructures where experiences of exhaustion can be translated into collective claims. Day care worker Sarah talks about an activist group in a chat conversation with her former colleague Anna:

Sarah’s shift from feeling undervalued to participating in a march reflects a move from individual grievance to shared resistance, where recognition is sought not only from employers but through solidarity with others. The mention of parents’ participation also suggests a widening network of support, linking care workers’ struggles to broader social concerns about the value of care.

Yet there are clear limits to the entanglement between self-care and collective organising. Some activists report feeling overwhelmed by the additional demands of meetings, demonstrations, and administrative tasks on top of already exhausting work and family responsibilities. One “undocumented” domestic worker, heavily involved as secretary of a Sans Papiers Collective, spoke of being “super tired,” having no time for herself, and needing to “take a pause” from activism. Her account highlights how practices of self-care may also involve refusing or stepping back from collective activities – without necessarily implying a lack of solidarity. Following Emejulu and Bassel’s (2020) argument that declaring exhaustion can itself be a call to solidarity, these moments of retreat can encourage others to recognise their own limits and renegotiate collective expectations. Self-care, even when enacted through temporary stepping back to prevent burnout, remains deeply relational; by acknowledging the impossibility of endless giving, it challenges heroic narratives of activism and opens space for more sustainable forms of collective care. Taken together, our examples show how essential workers build everyday infrastructures of solidarity that both sustain and exceed individual self-care. At the same time, they reveal the fragility of relying on informal collectives to compensate for systemic neglect.

Self-care as necessary but insufficient

The analyses presented here point to three broader implications for feminist debates on self-care. First, self-care is indispensable to essential workers’ ability to inhabit their roles. Practices such as managing stress, recharging batteries in nature, and listening to bodily signals act as forms of scaffolding that enable workers to continue providing the services and care on which societies depend. Where institutions and welfare regimes fall short, these practices compensate for systemic gaps, helping individuals navigate labour markets structured by insecurities, early hours, and long shifts. Yet the very necessity of such practices underscores their fragility: rest and recovery require time, stability, and security, all of which are unevenly distributed and frequently denied to those deemed “essential.”

Second, self-care manifests in differentiated ways across intersecting social positions. For relatively privileged workers, it may involve setting boundaries, refusing additional tasks, or accessing therapeutic support. For those without residence permits or secure employment, self-care often takes the form of bodily endurance and self-medication to remain employable, sustaining income flows and remittances under conditions of legal and economic vulnerability. These differences caution against universalising narratives that either celebrate self-care as inherently empowering or dismiss it as simply neoliberal. Instead, self-care appears as a field of practice in which survival, resistance, and co-optation intersect in context-specific and ambivalent ways.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, self-care is relational and embedded within broader ecosystems of care that span intimate households, workplaces, transnational networks, and activist collectives. Drawing on Tronto’s (1993) relational conception of care, self-care can be understood as one moment in a continuum of caring practices that includes caring for, caring about, and caring with others. Essential workers’ self-care practices enable them to continue supporting children, partners, employers, colleagues, and distant relatives, even as they themselves are often denied adequate care by institutions. At the same time, collective practices show how self-care becomes interwoven with infrastructures of mutual support and political contestation.

These insights resonate with Black feminist scholarship (hooks, 1993; Lorde, 1988) that calls for the revaluation and redistribution of care, insisting that self-care must be connected to collective strategies that transform the very conditions that make it necessary. In contexts where debates about the “care crisis” increasingly surface in public discourse, essential workers’ accounts force us to confront a central paradox: those who sustain everyday life are often the least cared for. Employers and institutional initiatives that promote individualised well-being while refusing structural change risk deepening this paradox by obscuring responsibility.

For feminist politics, the challenge is therefore twofold. On one hand, it is crucial to recognise self-care practices among essential workers as forms of knowledge, agency, and survival that are already transforming how care is organised in everyday life. On the other hand, it is necessary to insist that self-care cannot substitute for universal, collectively guaranteed rights to rest, health, and social protection. To care collectively is to build institutions, policies, and infrastructures that support rather than exploit workers’ capacities for care, making self-care less precarious and less dependent on individual ingenuity.

Self-care, then, should be understood as a necessary but insufficient dimension of feminist struggles over care. It sustains life in the present, revealing both the violence of current care regimes and the relational practices through which workers refuse disposability. Yet only transformations that redistribute care and power across gendered, racialised, and classed lines can create futures in which essential workers are no longer forced to patch up systemic failures through their own bodies and relationships. In such futures, self-care would remain important, but not as a substitute for collective and institutional care: rather, it would figure as one element within a more just and shared ecology of care. In the meantime, Ivana takes care of herself: