The mantra of wellness is making us all stressed
My litmus test for whether I’m having a breakdown is the cereal aisle in the supermarket. There have been enough times now when I’ve burst into tears at the sight of a box of Coco Pops to recognise that crying at the sight of nutritionally barren puffed rice is a sign I’m entering crazy town.
It’s not that there’s anything especially offensive about Coco Pops, although they do resemble uncommonly fragrant mouse droppings. They’re just the perfect lightning rod for my mix of burnout-and-quarter-life-crisis-induced hysteria.
Anyone else who has ever stress-shopped knows the moment when you stand in front of the cereal aisle, craving the bright yellow box of over-sugared mouse droppings. You try to reach out to buy it, and your internal Gwyneth Paltrow chastises you, ‘‘Verity! You can’t possibly eat that much sugar!’’
You argue with yourself that you’re a fully functional adult who can eat cereal if they’re having a bad day. ‘‘Well,’’ snaps Gwyneth, ‘‘clearly you don’t care about your body, obviously you have no self-restraint, and naturally that means you’re going to fail at everything you do in life. And speaking of failures, let’s review the last 20 years of yours right now while that bemused attendant watches you cry.’’
It’s likely that you too have got some variation of an internal autocrat, but if yours also sounds like the severe lovechild of Gwyneth Paltrow and Judith Collins, then it’s likely you’ve also been a victim of the ‘‘wellness industry’’.
It’s understandable. Wellness has become the omnipresent backbone of modern culture. It’s not just the rise of lilac dream journals and Karen from Finance’s new insistence that you need yoga classes at work. It’s the emergence of a culture that demands you put your health, mental and physical, at the centre of life. It glorifies the rigid selfdiscipline of eating healthily, exercising daily, meditating nightly – and buying $300 face creams made from frozen otter testicles.
Once it was cool to stay out all night snorting, sniffing and ricocheting off sweaty walls. Now it’s cool to get up at 6am for a morning disco rave, 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.
When you’re already a burnt-out wreck, wellness becomes another stick to beat yourself with.
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 at home, the fun friend in your leisure time, the good child, and the Instagram influencer who documents all these achievements . . . it’s exhausting, unsustainable 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-vagina-fuelled 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.