Pooja Lakshmin, MD

NPR’s Best Books of 2023

Realistic and trustworthy - InStyle

Boundaries, Burnout, and the “Goopification” of Self-Care —

Listen to Pooja in conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom on the Ezra Klein Show, discussing her philosophy for pursuing real self-care in a society where commodified wellness fails us personally and collectively.

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"Lakshmin’s Real Self-Care is a self-help book that aims to offer self-care tips that go beyond telling individual people to buy more expensive face creams, and instead help readers both live within the systemic outrages of capitalism and find ways of changing the system." - Vox

A National Bestseller, and as featured by NPR’s Code Switch, The New York Times, The Guardian, Good Morning America, Talks at Google, and an Amazon billboard in midtown Manhattan.

From women’s mental health specialist and New York Times contributor Pooja Lakshmin, MD, comes a long-overdue reckoning with the contradictions of the wellness industry and a paradigm-shifting program for practicing real self-care that will empower, uplift, and maybe even start a revolution.

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Hi, I’m Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

I’m a psychiatrist and author specializing in women’s mental health. I serve as a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine and a contributor to The New York Times.

I have spent thousands of hours taking care of women struggling with burnout, despair, depression, and anxiety in my clinical practice. My work focuses on the intersection of mental health and gender. My new book, Real Self-Care, helps women and marginalized groups heal from the tyranny of faux self-care, while exposing the systems that have gotten us here.

I frequently deliver keynotes and consult with organizations and Fortune 500 hundred companies to help women and marginalized groups feel empowered and to connect with their agency in the workplace. Learn how to bring me to your employer here.