What is up, daddy?
Gang?
It is your founding father, Alex Cooper, with call her daddy, doctor Pooja Lakshman.
Welcome to call her daddy.
It's such a pleasure to be here.
With you, Alex, I am so happy to have you here.
Your work focuses on women's mental health, and your new book, real Self Care, highlights the problematic ways the wellness industry promises a quick fix.
Your message is that real, real self care is not a thing to buy or to do.
It's a way to be.
When it comes to self care, why aren't the essential oils and the bath bombs and the juice cleanses actually working?
There's two reasons, and we can kind of dive into them, and I'm excited to sort of really go super deep here.
The first reason is because we are using methods, right?
So the massages, the crystals, whatever the thing is, that's a method that you can buy or that you can do.
But real self care, you know, I'm a psychiatrist.
Real self care is an internal process.
It's something that you have to give yourself, and it comes from your decision making.
It's not actually stepping out of your day to meditate for 15 minutes.
Real self care is actually bringing your internal values to every single decision that you make over the course of your life.
So whether that's like, what kind of career you have, whether you go back to grad school, who your partner is, you know, how you interact with your friends, real self care is actually threaded through all of the roles that we embody and all of the decisions that we make.
So that's kind of the first piece.