The cuppa, the garden, and the closed door: what self-care actually means to us as carers
- Laura Martin
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
“Self-care” is a word that gets used a lot and, as unpaid carers, it can make us wince a little. We hear it from health professionals, from well-meaning friends, from posters in the GP surgery waiting room, but it can feel like there are precious few opportunities for us to actually practise it. To explore the topic more, we put a Mobilise Moment survey to our caring community and asked a simple question: what does self-care look like for you, if anything does?
Over 1,100 of us answered, and described personal experiences which resonated throughout. When we asked what self-care looks like, almost nobody described a spa day or a weekend away. Again and again, we talked about the patch of ground outside the back door. "My garden is my sanctuary," one of us wrote. Another described the only moment of peace in the whole day as "sitting in the garden with my dog and a cup of tea, so peaceful and quiet." A few minutes outside with something warm to drink, and nobody asking us for anything, came up more than any other answer.
Tea comes up so often in our community that it is almost a running joke, and plenty of us pointed that out ourselves.
"If needed I have asked my close family for help with caring for my mam so I can go to my own home, sit down and enjoy a cup of tea,"
Behind the cliché, however, is something important. A cup of tea is often the only break going, snatched in five or ten minutes between everything else. For a lot of us, that five minutes is the whole break, not an add-on to a bigger one.
A good number of us said our self-care spot is somewhere with a door that shuts - the bathroom most often.
"I lock myself in the toilet, it's the only place I am not followed,"
Others find their few minutes in the car, on a walk, or up before the rest of the house wakes, because a closed door and a bit of quiet are sometimes the whole ask. Reading, crochet, jigsaws, a dog to fuss, a friend for a coffee, all came up again and again as well. Nothing elaborate, just small, repeatable things that make our day feel a little more like a life and a little less like a rota. As one of us put it, getting up an hour earlier "for a quiet cup of tea, read a chapter of my book, and just sit in silence" was worth the lost sleep.
Someone who gets it
The other thing that came up over and over was each other, not a professional or a helpline, just another carer who does not need the backstory explained:
"A weekly cuppa with my friend who also cares for her mum, so we can have a moan and laugh about some of the things going on in our lives that a non carer would not understand,"
Another of us said that meeting friends for lunch once a week was the one fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable week. Someone else put it simply:
"Knowing you can talk to best friends and know they understand means a lot, especially with a cuppa."
This keeps showing up alongside the garden and the tea because a lot of what makes caring hard is not just the practical load, it is the sense that nobody else quite sees what our day actually looks like. Talking to someone who has lived something similar does something a leaflet cannot. It is also one of the few forms of self-care that does not require anyone else's permission or a gap in the rota, just a phone and a friend who understands.
When "have a cuppa" does not cut it
A good number of us used the open comments to push back on the word "self-care" itself, which we had anticipated.
"A quiet cup of tea only gives opportunity to worry and over think things,"
Another put it more bluntly:
"Give it a rest with the cuppas and quiet cup of tea. Not a solution for the absence of care or genuine support for carers."
Someone else told us that:
"Local Authority self-care is little more than verbal mumbo jumbo."
And one comment read:
"I hate being told that five minutes outside, a quiet cup of tea, saying no to something, is a meaningful contribution to my mental and physical state."
The garden and the cup of tea are genuinely what gets a huge number of us through the day, and at the same time, plenty of us are tired of being handed those same small things as if they were the whole answer. Both things are true at once. Self-care is not a replacement for respite, for a GP appointment that actually happens, for a social worker who calls back, or for a bit of financial breathing room. It sits alongside those things rather than standing in for them, and the survey suggests a lot of us want that distinction taken seriously rather than assumed.
The guilt that comes with taking five minutes
One more thread ran through what we told each other: guilt. One carer wrote:
"I can feel quite guilty that I don't have the energy to take care of myself these days."
Another said:
"There is nothing that feels like self-care, if I try to do anything for myself it feels like I shouldn't and then I feel guilty, so it's tarnished anyway."
Caring has a way of making our own needs feel like they belong at the bottom of the list, if they make the list at all, and this showed up repeatedly regardless of who we were caring for or how long we had been doing it. One comment offered something worth holding on to:
"Trust yourself and don't feel guilty for thinking about yourself. You are important and your own person."
What actually helps, and where we go from here
We keep doing the small things, because they clearly matter. A garden, a walk, a cup of tea with the door shut for five minutes, these are not nothing, and we shouldn’t apologise for needing them. These healthy daily habits can often have a more positive impact on our health than grander less frequent things.
We also keep saying the other part out loud, to each other and to the people who plan services for us: self-care is not a substitute for support. Local authorities, NHS teams, and anyone working alongside carers, we hope, will hear both halves of this survey rather than just the comforting one.
In the meantime, we don't have to figure any of this out alone. Whether it is a virtual cuppa with someone who gets it and doesn't need the the backstory explained or it's reading back through what other carers have shared in the Mobilise Hub, this community exists because none of us should have to invent our own version of self-care from scratch, in isolation, while also doing everything else.
Mobilise resources are here to help
Want more support to build on these foundations? There's lots to explore in the Mobilise Library which carers in our community have found useful:
The Mobilise Hub is also a great resource for carers. Start with our Blogs and Guides section where we can find advice written for carers, by carers. We also have videos to take a look at, which are recordings of conversations with carers on certain topics. For example, if guilt is the bit biggest struggle, here's a video on setting boundaries which might help, written by carers who've been in exactly the same place.
We can also get to know other unpaid carers by joining in with our community conversation space, a space to connect with other carers, share what's on our mind, and find support that makes life a little lighter. Why not start a post with a simple "Hi!" - we promise we won't bite!
And finally...
We created the survey on self-care because we wanted to know what was actually true for us, not what we are supposed to say when someone asks if we are looking after ourselves. The answer turned out to be both things at once. The garden helps, the cup of tea helps, the five minutes with the door shut genuinely help, and none of it replaces the respite, the support, and the recognition that so many of us are still waiting for. So we will keep doing both: taking the five minutes where we can find them, without the guilt, and telling the people who plan services for carers that small comforts are not a substitute for real support, until they stop having to be.
Mobilise Hub is always open for you to reach out. And if a garden, a cup of tea, or a locked bathroom door is getting you through today, that counts too.
