If someone else recommends a hot bath, I’ll hit them

Perhaps your manager suggested it. Or the nurse when you had your blood pressure taken (high again?) Or one of the hundred self-care apps on your phone, that you never have time to open.

A hot bath.

The advice is everywhere, and it is relentless, and somewhere along the way self-care became another job. Another thing you're not doing well enough. Another metric by which you are, quietly, failing.

Here's what nobody says: sometimes the bath doesn't help because the problem isn't that you're insufficiently relaxed. The problem is that something in your life has stopped making sense, and no amount of Epsom salts is going to touch that.

Capable people get stuck in a particular way. Not through lack of effort — through too much of it, applied in the wrong direction for too long. You've been managing, showing up, overriding the signal that something isn't working. You're very good at it. That's the problem.

Resilience culture tells you to absorb more, recover faster, bounce back better. What it doesn't ask is whether the thing you're bouncing back to is worth returning to.

That's a different question. And it's not one a bath can answer.

If you want somewhere to start that isn't another wellness task — google Julia Cameron's morning pages. Three pages, longhand, first thing, no audience. Not journalling. Not processing. Just the unedited contents of your mind, before the day gets its hands on you. Two weeks’ time, get a highlighter, and mark through themes that recur. Or things that surprise you. Or make you do a sharp intake of breath. That’s where you begin.