Wellness sets us up to fail

followed by a quiet hour of reflective journaling and a naughty celery juice.

It’s not only cool, it’s a symbol of your ability to be a good adult. It says that toned, tanned, tightly held-together bodies are a sign of self-control and therefore inherent moral fortitude. And in reward for your life of self-denial, you’ll find the pastel-tone peace you’ve been searching for your whole life.

Which is why the industry is thriving. Broken, crumpled people flock to it looking for salvation. It’s a tribute to how many people are bouncing around in high-functioning burnout that it’s worth more than $4.2 trillion worldwide.

And yet, it really did not work for me. In fact, it made it all worse. Obviously I’m not saying that eating healthily/exercising/getting sleep isn’t good for you. Of course they are. But wellness culture isn’t about following the vaguely wholesome life advice about eating more veges.

As soon as you dip a toe into the industry, it springs up as a many-headed, leafy-green Medusa insisting that you now must drink this, eat that, exercise now, meditate here . . . You start off with yoga and before long you’re being ordered to follow the ancient Korean tradition of steaming your lady parts. (Yep, that’s a thing Gwyneth advises.)

It’s an all-encompassing lifestyle pushed at you constantly by effortlessly happy influencers, saying you too can be this happy if you simply put 16 hours a day into meal prep/exercise/meditation.

The problem is that, when you’re already a burnt-out wreck, wellness becomes another stick to beat yourself with. Today’s mantra for good living sounds like a USSR factory poster: utilise every second of your time to maximise your output in all corners of your life, comrades!

Be the high-flier at work, the perfect parent, the fun friend, the good child, and the Instagram influencer who documents all these achievements . . . it’s exhausting and naturally leads to burnout.

So when you’re trying to also follow the righteous, rigorous demands of ‘‘wellness’’, of course it backfires. You don’t have the time for it, so instead of revitalising you it exhausts you even more. Making you even more likely to eat junk.

And even more likely to hate yourself for it because we link ‘‘wellness’’ so tightly to our moral worth. You’re a lazy, self-indulgent slob who wants Coco Pops – where’s your freshly-steamed-vaginafuelled fortitude?

When it came down to it, the last thing I needed was another corporate-backed influencer telling me to exfoliate away my stress. Until you actually tackle why you’re stressed, wellness is just another way to feel you’re failing.