This is admittedly simple advice, but it’s not always easy to understand in the moment that you might be upset because you’re hungry, or that doing an unpleasant chore now might make you feel better later. The guide, created by Jace Harr, explicitly states that a lot of its questions, like “Do you feel triggered?” or “Are you feeling dissociated, depersonalized, or derealized?”, are aimed at common mental-health problems. The push to take stock of your physical and emotional state could be particularly helpful for someone who’s depressed, or whose clinical anxiety is acting up.

But several people I’ve seen share this link have pointed out that it could also be useful for anyone who’s having a hard day, or just isn’t naturally good at looking after himself. Sometimes when you’re stressed or dealing with things further up the Maslow pyramid, it can be hard to see how your experience is affected by how well your baseline needs are taken care of. How much of my bad mood could be fixed with a healthy meal, or by leaving the house? These are not idle questions.

Harr’s guide bears a remarkable similarity to a sort of mental checklist that I try to use myself—I will often, at the end of the day, just feel weird and bad, physically and emotionally, and not be able to pinpoint a concrete reason for the fog.

The checklist goes something like this:

Drink water

Eat something

Work out

Go outside

Take a shower

The logic is, if I still feel bad after doing these things, then something might actually be wrong. But usually, completing the checklist in part or in full makes me feel better.

These are the basics. People approach self-care in different ways. For some it’s a Parks and Recreation “Treat yo self” ethos. For others, it’s getting the hell off the Internet when the news cycle gets sad and overwhelming, as the news cycle is wont to do.

In a regular column for The Hairpin, Fariha Roísín and Sara Black McCulloch interview women about what self-care means to them, and discuss it amongst themselves.

“I think that initially, I had some misconceptions about idea of self-care,” Black McCulloch wrote in a recent column:

To me, it was a way to build resistance to bullshit, disappointment, and a bit of depression—a way to ward off uncertainty. But I’ve learned, along the way, that this is impossible. You’re never going to be consistently happy and you can’t prevent sadness or life from running its course. Self-care is a way to at least strengthen yourself, find some inner core so that you’re ready when life comes at you.

There could be an impulse to write off such reflection as navel-gaze-y, to question the value of publicly discussing how people spend their alone time. But I think this is a tributary of the impulse to sneer at first-person essays, a suggestion that the self isn’t worthy of time or consideration.