Self care is personal health maintenance. It is any activity of an individual, family or community, with the intention of improving or restoring health, or treating or preventing disease.

Self care includes all health decisions people (as individuals or consumers) make for themselves and their families to get and stay physically and mentally fit. Self care is exercising to maintain physical fitness and good mental health. It is also eating well, self-medicating, practicing good hygiene and avoiding health hazards such as smoking and drinking to prevent ill health. Self care is also taking care of minor ailments, long term conditions, or one’s own health after discharge from secondary and tertiary health care.

Individuals do self care, and experts and professionals support self care to enable individuals to do enhanced self care.

Self care support has crucial enabling value and considerable scope in developing countries with an already overburdened health care system. But it also has an essential role to play in affluent countries where people are becoming more conscious about their health and want to have a greater role in taking care of themselves.

The self is an individual person as the object of his or her own reflective consciousness. The self has been studied extensively by philosophers and psychologists and is central to many world religions.

The philosophy of self seeks to describe essential qualities that constitute a person's uniqueness or essential being. There have been various approaches to defining these qualities. The self can be considered that being which is the source of consciousness; the agent responsible for an individual's thoughts and actions; and/or the substantial nature of a person which endures and unifies consciousness over time.

The philosophy of a disordered self, such as in schizophrenia, is described in terms of what the psychiatrist understands are actual events in terms of neuron excitation but are delusions nonetheless, and the schizo-affective or schizophrenic person also believes are actual events in terms of essential being. PET scans have shown that auditory stimulation relates to certain areas of the brain and imagined similar events occur in adjacent areas but hallucinations occur in the same areas. In such cases, external influences may be the source of consciousness and the person may or may not be responsible for "sharing" in the mind's process; and/or the events which occur, such as visions and auditory stimuli, may endure and be repeated often over hours, days, months or years -- and the afflicted person may believe themselves to be in a state of rapture and/or possession, which their artistic expression may tend to confirm. Whether art has moral responsibility is difficult to relate to the idea of a unique source of consciousness and rapid thinking may lead to an insubstantial nature of the enduring person's consciousness over time; it can be said in view of these two exigencies that the person is vulnerable.

Care may refer to: