“Self care is really important in tough times, but I think we often get the self care wrong. We think it’s only about a nice bubble bath or a glass of wine alone, but the research shows that effective self care often looks a lot more like community care.” — Laurie Santos, PhDThe importance of friends and community is often omitted from discussions about self care, but apparently that’s changing. According to Well+Good, a website devoted to wellness, these troubled times of pandemic, hate-politics, and reckoning with our history of systemic racism have increased our need for reaching out to others for mutual support.Dr. Laurie Santos, PhD, a professor at Yale University, whose course, “The Science of Well-Being,” has been seen by nearly 3.5 million viewers since it went online in mid-March, cites research showing that relationships are a vital part of self-care, for example, buying gifts for others yields more happiness than buying things for oneself. The Well+Good a…