Putting Down the Self-Care Potato Chips and Reaching for Something that Satisfies 

“Amber, you seem like someone who knows how to use your voice. You just don’t know how to be heard.” 

This sentence, spoken by my therapist, stopped me in my tracks. I was thirty years old and had devoted my life to speaking. I was a Speech and Debate Champion in high school. I’d traveled the world doing speaking engagements about my research in graduate school. I’d built a large social media following where I showed up every day simply to talk. What did he mean I didn’t know how to be heard? 

It shouldn’t have stumped me as much as it did. I was, after all, in therapy to deal with feeling chronically unknown by those who were supposed to love me the most. I was surrounded by people, yet utterly alone. 

Still, it took a lot of healing and growth to truly digest what he meant. What I finally learned was that, although I was thoroughly comfortable talking about interesting but impersonal things like academics, politics, or the latest trends, I didn’t know how to communicate the things that mattered deeply and personally to me. I didn’t know how to speak the things that made me feel seen, heard, and known. 

I didn’t communicate my needs, didn’t ask for help, didn’t let people know when I was overworked and underwhelmed. 

I didn’t know how to set boundaries, navigate conflict, or say the hard things that other people would rather not hear, but that needed to be said if we were going to stay in right standing with each other. I had become a people-pleasing, feelings-stuffing, invisible yes-woman who was whispering into a microphone that wasn’t plugged in. 

My therapist told me I had learned to live off the self-care equivalent of potato chips. I fed myself tiny, empty-calorie morsels that might temporarily satisfy, but that couldn’t actually fulfill. Isn’t that what people-pleasing is, at its core? It’s how we create a temporary comfort in our relationships with others, at the long-term expense of our own happiness and well-being. We make ourselves a mirror, letting others see themselves when they look at us. Then we’re surprised when our relationships don’t satisfy—when we feel alone even in a crowded room. 

My quest to be heard, seen, and known was going to take a lot of work. I decided it would be a good idea to journal about it all. If anything, it would help me gather my thoughts and document my journey. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have these things to look back on when applying what I was learning felt too hard.

It was a two-year process. I wrote about the day my therapist told me, “you can’t heal where you were broken,” and the day (several months later) I decided to separate from my husband and move into my own apartment. I wrote about the euphoria and the sorrow of having that conversation, and the bewilderment of how those two feelings could co-exist. 

I also documented the day that, after months of therapy and work on ourselves, my husband and I chose to reconcile and rebuild.

I wrote about clearing the people from my table who didn’t enrich my life—who didn’t pour into my cup the way I was pouring into theirs. I also wrote about the relationships I was working to cultivate—how I was becoming more honest, more vulnerable, more willing to be a window instead of a mirror.

I wrote about memories I was revisiting and what I wish I’d done differently, imagining how I would handle them now that I’d learned to say the hard but necessary things, if only I could go back in time. 

As I memorialized every hard conversation and uncomfortable moment in that blessed journal, I began to see a new me emerging. This me was well-boundaried. She knew how to hold those boundaries firmly and with compassion. She had become confident, self-assured, and courageous. She was finding peace within herself and harmony with others. She felt seen and heard for the first time in her adult life. 

Someone had plugged her mic in, she thought. And with a hand on her shoulder, I told her it was her who’d done it. 

It seemed to me like other women probably needed to plug their mics in, too. Maybe they just needed someone to show them how. So, I took a deep breath and began the process of turning that journal I’d taken years to write into a book. Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips: Choosing Nourishing Self-Care in a Quick-Fix Culture is part memoir, part self-help. It is the story of how I learned to stop reaching for self-care potato chips and to reach for the stuff that satisfies instead. The process was difficult and often pushed me way too far out of my comfort zone. But I realized that sometimes being heard means exactly that—letting yourself be vulnerable, unselfconscious, and brave. It means unapologetically revealing yourself to the world. It means, I suppose, cranking up the volume and letting your voice ring clear, even if it shakes. 

Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is my love letter, and instruction manual, for all the women who are sick of talking and ready to be heard. 

It is a call to action for women everywhere to reach instead for nourishing self-care. Though this may sound easy in theory, many women struggle to carry it out. We struggle because we have forgotten how to reach. Our training as little girls taught us that it is polite to be grateful for what we get. To say thank you but I’m full when offered second helpings. To accept the potato chips we are given because there are people on this planet who have none, so how dare we ask for more? 

Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a mindset—a way of embracing and stepping into all of our divine, feminine power—that I found through writing. 

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Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips: Choosing Nourishing Self-Care in a Quick-Fix Culture

From a cognitive psychologist, a trusted voice among millennial women, a call to action for readers everywhere to enter their true self-care era that will nourish and sustain them.

Toxic self-care culture tells women that bubble baths and Botox are the route to happiness and fulfillment. Though these types of self-care can fill us up in the moment, they cannot provide long-lasting nourishment. They are empty calories—the potato chips of self-care. And from them, we can never get full. In the same way, we will not feel fulfilled by reaching for the empty calorie “self-care” trends that toxic, materialstic self-care culture sells us. To fill our exhausted bodies and weary minds, to live fully and authentically, we need the kind of self-care that nourishes.

Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a call to action for women everywhere to reach instead for nourishing self-care. Though this may sound easy in theory, many women struggle to carry it out. We struggle because we have forgotten how to reach. Our training as little girls taught us that it is polite to be grateful for what we get. To say thank you but I’m full when offered second helpings. To accept the potato chips we are given because there are people on this planet who have none, so how dare we ask for more?

Through the narrative voice of a psychologist who is also an exhausted millennial mom trying to keep it all together, Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips explores courageous self-care in the areas of marriage, motherhood, family dynamics, friendships, career life, and mental health. The author’s personal stories range from the hilariously-yet-painfully relatable to the resonantly heart-rending. Each of these stories—the beautiful, the sparkling, the sad and the chaotic—teach women something about what it means to reach. What it means to stop settling for potato chips and to instead grasp for the things that truly fulfill. Beyond Self-Care Potato Chips is a mindset—a way of embracing and stepping into all of our divine, feminine power.

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Amber Wardell, PhD, is a cognitive psychologist, writer, Psychology Today contributor, and trusted social media influencer with over 690K followers on TikTok and Instagram @sensible_amber where her authentic advice on motherhood, marriage, and mental health has made her a trusted voice of honesty and reliability among women who are looking to embrace nourishing self-care and self-empowerment.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing