She Speaks: what women actually mean by self-care
Across four seasons and sixty-two episodes of She Speaks, not one guest recommended a spa day. No one named an expensive product or an app subscription as the thing that keeps them well. A GP came up as a first port of call exactly once — and even then, as one option among many, not the default answer to a hard day.
That absence is the finding. When women are given unhurried, non-commercial space to talk about how they actually look after themselves, they describe something the wellness industry has almost no language for: care that is free, everyday, relational and embodied. Care that costs nothing and asks for no equipment. Care that happens in kitchens and car parks and school runs, not in day spas.
I've spent the last few years listening to this, and I've now written it up. Listening as method: She Speaks and the case for podcasting as a feminist research methodology in women's non-medicalised self-care is out in Women's Studies International Forum, and because it's open access, you can read and download it for free.
I want to share what the conversations revealed — and why the way I gathered them matters as much as what they said.
Self-care that costs nothing
The practices that surfaced again and again were almost embarrassingly simple. Putting your feet flat on the ground and feeling the floor beneath you — in a queue, in the car, in a meeting. The 3-2-1 reset: three things you can see, two you can hear, one you can smell, which gets you out of a spiralling situation and back into your body as a sensory being. A small change of language — swapping "I should" for "I could", which quietly hands you back your choice instead of leaving you feeling like you've already failed.
None of these take money. None take more than a few seconds. And that is precisely the point women kept making, unprompted: the things that actually steady them are available to anyone, anywhere, whatever their income or circumstance. This is a long way from the programmes of health promotion or the products of popular wellness. It's also, quietly, a political claim — that you don't need to buy your way to wellbeing, and that the version being sold to you might be part of the problem.
Self-care is something we do together
The second thread cuts straight against the way self-care is usually framed — as something you do alone, for yourself, in the gaps between looking after everyone else. Across the series, women described the opposite. Self-care turned out to be relational: care for yourself so you can care for others, but also lean on others as part of caring for yourself. It bounces backwards and forwards.
Women's circles, support villages, being heard without being fixed — these came up as infrastructure for wellbeing that needs no clinic and no product. Sasha, reflecting on sixteen years of facilitating circles, described the most powerful thing she'd witnessed as women hearing their own stories in someone else's mouth and realising: it's not just me. Delyse reframed asking for help not as a burden but as an honour you extend to the person you ask — because if someone can say no, then asking them isn't an imposition, it's an invitation.
There's a phrase that kept surfacing across all four seasons, always unprompted: you are also someone who needs tending. Not instead of the people you care for. As well as. That "as well as" is the whole argument.
Naming things without pathologising them
A lot of what women wanted to talk about — neurodivergence, the perinatal months, body image, cyclical living, running low on energy — are experiences that health systems are quick to turn into symptoms to be managed. The conversations took a different route, holding these through lived experience, community and self-compassion rather than diagnosis.
Spoon theory was one of the most useful frames to emerge. You wake with a set number of spoons for the day, and everything — getting dressed, making breakfast, work, seeing friends — costs one. When they're gone, they're gone, and you can't give what you don't have. It's a language for energy that doesn't require anyone to be a patient. Alongside it: connect before you correct with a dysregulated child, because a child is having a problem, not being one. And a genuinely useful piece of evidence literacy from Felicity, who tracked her own body closely but was wary of the paid programmes springing up around cyclical living — flagging their lack of peer-reviewed backing and their habit of loading already-stretched women with yet more things they "ought" to be doing.
The version of self-care that gets sold to us
If there was one thing the women of She Speaks agreed on — across completely different lives, having never heard each other's episodes — it was that the commercial image of self-care is a distortion. "Bubble baths and face masks" became a kind of shorthand across the series for everything self-care isn't. One guest wished women could block the noise telling them there's only one way to look after yourself and it's the expensive spa trip. Rachel skewered the fantasy directly: the advert where you drop everyone at school, have an amazing day at work, collect the kids, do soccer and ballet, and have dinner on the table by six with your lipstick on — "insert Prozac ad."
That last line does a lot of work. It names not just how unreal the image is, but the logic underneath it: that when the image fails you, the answer offered is a clinical fix, rather than a different image altogether. The women I spoke with were reaching for that different image — one where a complete act of self-care might be a single breath, a swapped word, or a question you ask yourself: what does three-year-old you want you to know?
Why the listening was the method
Here's the part that turned a podcast into a piece of research. I didn't run interviews and then make a podcast to publicise the findings. The podcast was the method. The conversations were the research, and they were public from the moment they were released.
That choice changed what became sayable. Audio does something a survey form can't — it holds hesitation, humour, the pause before someone admits the thing they've never quite said out loud. Women reflected differently with a microphone between us than they would have with a clipboard. Ideas emerged in the space between two people talking, rather than arriving pre-formed. And because the episodes were free and findable on an ordinary morning walk, the knowledge went back to the very women it came from, rather than disappearing behind a paywall.
That's the argument of the paper, in short: podcasting isn't a soft add-on to "real" research. For understanding the texture of women's everyday lives, it's differently rigorous — and sometimes it's the only method that can reach what you're actually trying to study.
Coach yourself
If the women of She Speaks are right — that genuine self-care is free, relational, embodied and already within reach — then the useful question isn't "what should I buy?" but "what do I already have?" Sit with these:
When you picture "looking after yourself", whose image is it — yours, or one you've been sold? What would your own version look like, stripped of anything that costs money?
What is one steadying practice that takes you less than a minute — feet on the floor, a slow breath, a look up and out of the window? When could you use it today?
Where in your week do you already care for yourself in order to care for others — and would it change anything to name that as self-care, not just duty?
Who is in your support village? When you last needed help, did you ask — and if not, what story were you telling yourself about being a burden?
Try the swap: take one "I should" from today and change it to "I could". What shifts when you do?
And the one that cuts to the centre: what does three-year-old you want you to know?
You are also someone who needs tending. Not once the list is done. Now.
Read the paper
The full article is open access, so you can read and download it for free: Listening as method: She Speaks and the case for podcasting as a feminist research methodology in women's non-medicalised self-care.
Lemon, N. (2026). Listening as method: She Speaks and the case for podcasting as a feminist research methodology in women's non-medicalised self-care. Women's Studies International Forum, 119, 103398.
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