Soak, Steam, Spritz: It’s All Self-Care

In the days after the presidential election, Jessa Blades, an herbalist and makeup artist in Brooklyn who supported Hillary Clinton, was devastated. “All I could think to do was blend a tea to control my stress,” she said.

Ms. Blades, 37, mixed three pounds of lemon balm, nettle, chamomile, rose and oats together “for soothing the nervous system, calming, giving the right amount of boundaries and opening the heart” and put it in brown paper bags with “love for you and the world” written on the front. She gave them out to friends with instructions to use the combination for self-care.

The term self-care has, over the past few years, become part of the vernacular. But what does it mean? “I always say it’s a daily practice,” she said. “It can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be: making sure you get enough sleep and drink enough water, monthly facials, fermented foods, a meditation app for your phone or packing healthy snacks for the plane.”

In recent weeks, though, self-care has often been invoked as a way of dealing with open-ended anxiety.

The term has been inescapable online. A search on Google Trends showed that self-care peaked in search interest popularity from Nov. 13 through Nov. 19, the largest increase in the last five years.

On Nov. 11, the website Quartz posted an article titled “The Rise of Donald Trump Demands We Embrace a Harder Kind of Self-Care,” and the same day, Mic published “A Self-Care Guide of TV to Watch to Forget About Donald Trump’s Rise.” (“None are the kind of challenging, difficult shows we normally recommend, but they’re also not the kind of shows that will melt your brain into mush.”)