There is a sentence Pooja Lakshmin MD said in our conversation that hit really hard, so much so that I had her repeat it just to let it really sink in.
Society tells us: “If you’re a good mom, you can just productivity your way out of this.”
She said it as a critique. As the lie. As the message we are being fed every time we open an app, scroll a feed, or buy another planner that promises to give us our lives back. And the second she said it out loud, I felt it click into place. Because I have absorbed that message. You probably have too.
Pooja is a board-certified psychiatrist, a New York Times contributor, the author of the national bestseller Real Self-Care, and a mother of three including ten-month-old twins. She came to the very first Breadwinners dinner seven months pregnant, and she has been one of the sharpest voices in my orbit ever since. This episode is dense with reframes, and I want to give you the ones that really struck a chord with me….
Real self-care is infrastructure, not a reward.
This is the line that landed hardest for me, and I think it’s the thesis of everything Pooja teaches. We have been sold self-care as a thing you earn after the work is done. A bubble bath at the end of the week. A massage you “deserve.” A retreat you book to recover from the life you built.
That is not self-care. That is recovery from a system that is grinding you down.
Real self-care is the infrastructure underneath every decision you make. It is how you build the life you want, not what you do to survive it. If the infrastructure is shoddy, the house falls down. You cannot productivity your way out of a foundation problem.
Faux self-care is the yoga class you leave feeling worse than when you walked in.
Pooja’s example is one we’ve all experienced, one too many times. You are a working mom. You decide to go to yoga on a Wednesday night. You put your mat down. Within ten minutes you are comparing your leggings to the woman next to you, you cannot do crow pose, your kid has a math test tomorrow, and you are pretty sure you are a bad mom for being there.
You leave the class more stressed than when you came in.
That is faux self-care. The activity is not the problem. The internal work you did or did not do before you walked in the door is the problem.
The four principles of real self-care are boundaries, compassion, values, and power.
These are not affirmations. They are operating principles. Boundaries with your partner so you can actually get to the yoga class. Compassion with yourself in the room. Values you have named for why this activity matters to you in the first place. Power, which Pooja defines as the agency to be present and actually take in what the practice has to offer.
If those four are in place, the yoga works. If they are not, the yoga is just another thing on your list.
Your to-do list is delusional.
This one made me giggle, because its so honest and so true. Pooja says this to nearly every patient. She says it to her friends. She says it to herself. The to-do list most of us carry is not grounded in reality. It is grounded in what we think a good mother, a good partner, a good founder, a good employee should be doing.
The first principle of real self-care is boundaries, and the first place to apply them is your own schedule. Audit it block by block. Get honest about what is actually optional. The kindergartner does not need basketball multiple nights a week. You do not need to be on every call. You can skip that dinner that you don’t really want to go to.
To what end?
This is the question almost no one is asking. We bring in the meal kits and the delivery apps and the support so we can have an extra hour. And then we sit on the couch and doom scroll because we have spent so many years serving everyone else that we no longer know what we want to do with our own time.
Lighter is not the goal. Lighter for what is the goal.
Find the thing that is uniquely yours.
Pooja’s prescription for the doom-scroll inertia is to find something hyper-specific that is just yours. Not yoga because yoga is good for you. Not working out because you should. Something that is a little weird. A little frivolous. A little embarrassing to admit.
Intricate puzzles. Japanese bikes. Singing in a choir. Tennis.
The qualifier matters: it cannot be productive, it cannot be performative, it cannot be posted on social media. There is a Substack note that I read that I have thought about daily since I read it: What would you do to truly enjoy something that no one else needs to see?
If you do not have an answer, that is the work.
The Real Self-Care Thermometer.
Pooja built a quiz in her book, and the framework is the easiest gut check I have heard for whether your internal infrastructure is holding.
Green: You feel spontaneously generous. Someone asks you for something and you are genuinely happy to help. You reach out to a friend for coffee because you want to. You have extra.
Red: Everything is a chore. You say yes but resent every yes. You are a zombie on the couch. Everyone around you can feel it, but you will not admit it.
You can be in the red and still be functioning. You can be in the red and still be winning. That is the trap.
The boundary is the pause, not the no.
This was the most useful reframe of the entire conversation for me, and I have been applying it all week.
A boundary is not saying no. A boundary is the pause before you answer. And after the pause, you have three options: yes, no, or negotiate. Every no has a cost, and sometimes you cannot absorb that cost today. So the real question becomes: what do I need to do over the next six months so that six months from now I am closer to being able to say no?
That is not a boundary problem. That is a strategy problem. And it is something you take to your coach or your therapist or your book club, not something you carry as guilt.
Guilt is a faulty check engine light.
When you start setting boundaries, guilt shows up immediately. Most of us read the guilt as a signal we are doing something wrong. Pooja says no. The guilt is a broken indicator on the dashboard. It is flashing, but it is not giving you valid information. It is the external message we have internalized so deeply we cannot tell the difference between the world’s voice and our own.
Acknowledge the light. Keep driving.
Compassion is not soft talk. It is real talk.
This was the reframe that hit me second-hardest. Compassion is not telling yourself everything is fine when it is not. Compassion is saying Pooja, your to-do list is delusional. You cannot be in five places at once. You cannot say yes to that dinner and that call. That does not work.
Compassion has to be truthful or it is not compassion. It is appeasement.
You cannot rush a quantum shift.
Pooja’s next book, scheduled to launch in 2027, is called Quantum Shifts. It is about the in-between space after a major life change. Divorce, a launch, a diagnosis, a birth, a death. There is a very clear before. There is a very clear after. And there is a space in the middle where the old you no longer exists and the new you does not exist yet.
High-achieving women try to sprint through that space. We want to fast-forward to the next version of ourselves. But the in-between is the work. Following the breadcrumbs. Holding space for the uncertainty. Resisting the urge to rush.
Building The Breadwinners has been my own quantum shift. I sat in the unknown at that first dinner. It was uncomfortable. And that is exactly when this business fell into my lap.
Burnout is what will stop you, not the work.
Pooja landed in the hospital for four nights after her bestseller came out. Gallbladder surgery. A kidney stone. The whole thing. She had said yes to everything because she had never been an author before and did not know what the cost of a no would be.
Her executive coach told her something I have written down: The thing that will stop you from reaching the heights you want is not your skill as a founder. Not your ability to write a bestseller. It is burnout. If you keep going through these cycles, that is what will stop you.
I am writing this as someone who knows that I run hot. If you are reading this and you know you run hot, I want you to take that sentence seriously. I know I am after my conversation with Pooja, because I’m close to my boiling point.
Your slow is most people’s fast.
This is what Pooja tells her patients, and what I needed to hear. If you are an entrepreneur, if you are a founder, if you have ADHD tendencies, the issue is almost never that you are going too slow. The issue is that you are going too fast. There are lessons that only arrive if you give them the developmental time and space to land.
The slow-down advice I rejected for thirty years is starting to look like the most important skill I am developing in my forties.
The one thing I want you to take from this episode
If you read nothing else, read this:
You cannot app your way out. You cannot meal-kit your way out. You cannot planner your way out. The mental load is not solved by a better system. It is solved by a different question.
To what end.
To what end is the 6am call.
To what end is the kindergarten basketball league.
To what end is the dinner you said yes to before you checked your week.
To what end is the meal kit subscription that was supposed to save you.
That question is the infrastructure in which you are able to feel a bit of reprieve, an exhale of relief, a comfort in feeling good that your day-to-day structure works for you, not against you.
Thanks for being here, as always.
— Alexis
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin wherever you get your podcasts. And if this resonated, share it with a woman who needs to read it.
Find Pooja’s writing at poojalakshmin.substack.com.
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