Do you ever get the feeling that there’s always a better you? Or that the current you just isn’t good enough? Well, you are not alone. This is what happens when ‘wellness’ goes bad, and it is happening at an alarming rate. Esquire Middle East investigates if our obsession with self-improvement is actually doing more harm than good, and how we can find our way back to a more balanced approach…
Are you among the one in two people who take daily vitamin tablets or supplements? And have you asked yourself why you do so? After all, too much vitamin A or D, for example, can weaken your bones. Too much B6? That might lead to nerve damage. Too much folic acid and you may mask a deficiency in B12. Result? Brain damage. Fish oil supplements? Strokes. Excess iron? Expect to stay close to the toilet. In other words, taking the pills can be bad for your health.
They may be the tip of the iceberg too. For many people ‘wellness’ — which might be loosely defined as a process of active optimisation — has become a ritualistic and sometimes all-consuming mindset. We may each have a different conception of what wellness means — from popping a few tablets to practices like yoga and meditation, right through to juice cleanses, digital detoxes, herbal infusions, breath workshops, energy channelling and holistic anything, fasting, earthing and sound bathing, crystals or, care of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand, the wearing of psychic vampire repellent, “to protect from psychic attack”. But what has become a huge US$5 trillion industry, bigger than the global pharmaceuticals industry, is hard to avoid. A wellness spin is applied to sport, to work, to hobbies. Wellness is on your supermarket shelves, all over Instagram and Tiktok, in every celebrity babble.
Certainly wellness has not only transmuted from the counter-culture to the highly commodified mainstream, one that’s able to adapt fluidly to solving the fashionable concerns of the moment — from productivity to better parenting, screen time to ultra-processed foods, exercise and then recovery from that exercise, de-cluttering, better sleep, and on and on. It’s gone so far that some are now loudly arguing that wellness — so often proven the snake oil salesmanship of the 21st century, big on the promise of an improved life, small on scientific evidence for efficacy — has itself become toxic.
“I’m sympathetic to wellness because I’ve experienced aspects of it that I’ve felt genuinely enriched my life, but I’ve also come across a lot of nefarious products and services,” says Dr. Stephanie Baker, a sociologist at London’s City University, UK, and author of ‘Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform’.
“As much as the wellness label is being applied to almost anything now, part of the challenge is that it’s a confusing blend of the beneficial and the problematic,” she adds. “That’s especially the case when this unregulated space, with so much deceptive marketing, is weaponised or monetised as a cure-all — those really extreme remedies said to cure cancer, for example, or the US$10,000 ‘bio-charger’ to stop Covid, or the likes of anti-viral leggings…”
So why do so many of us buy into wellness – even its worst quackery — and especially in a time when modern medicine and the conventional means of keeping healthy — exercise, good diet – have never been more prevalent? Baker suggests one reason is that it’s still so hard to navigate all the constantly evolving, apparently inconclusive health questions we’re faced with: “Is coffee good for you or bad? What about red wine? It’s probably both and there are trade-offs, but the advice keeps changing”.
But there are other reasons too, at the intersection of the psychological and the cultural. “I was a hardcore wellness devotee,” admits Rina Raphael, author of The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care. “It was only when I started investigating that I understood that so much of the marketing doesn’t align with science and began asking why we’re so obsessed with wellness anyway. I think a part of that is our tendency now to fetishise health. And ultimately that’s because it’s all about me, me, me”.
Certainly it’s in our natures both to make ourselves the star of own story — to define our lives through a narrative of progress — and to stand apart from the tribe by showing ourselves to be making that progress, something for which social media — with its narcissism and its projections of an often confected positive public image — has proven wildly well-suited. It’s given us what might be called conspicuous wellness.
Blame too, perhaps, the decline of religion in many cultures — and the nationalism or social justice campaigning or, yes, the fixation on health that has filled the gap. Wellness is a deconstructed religion, a faith in oneself. “Instead of the priesthood we have therapists and coaches,” argues Svend Brinkmann, professor of psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and author of Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze. “People used to look to something beyond themselves but secularisation has moved that absolute authority into ourselves. We’re told that if we believe in ourselves we can achieve anything”.
Wellness’s emphasis on self-improvement — the pursuit of what’s often referred to as our “best self” or the desire to “live our best life” — has maybe also helped to address a sense of powerlessness felt in the rest of our lives. As Raphael suggests, the relentless optimism of wellness may not actually deliver but it at least offers the hope of cures for our loneliness, for our being often so cut off from nature, for our lack of mojo, for our not being listened to, for our sense of helplessness in the face of global events, for the many lifestyle diseases that now dominate the health conversation but which we largely bring on ourselves…
“I think a part of [the growth of the wellness industry] is our tendency now to fetishise health… it dangles the promise of control. It dangles solutions at a time when we want quick fixes”
Rina Raphael, author of ‘The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care’
“Wellness dangles the promise of control. It dangles solutions at a time when we want quick fixes,” she suggests. “If you’re tired, there’s an app for that. If you feel lonely, you can find some kind of community at the gym. Wellness taps into the psychology of belief – just putting that supplement in the shopping cart can start to make you feel better. Wellness gives us rituals that allow us to rise above [all the noise] even if in the end it’s just you riding your Peloton, clutching your crystals and your credit card”.
Alongside the decline of religion, the breakdown of trust in institutions and the questioning of authority have also been a spur to the wellness industry’s growth – some have attributed this to the way in which, over the period of the Covid pandemic, many governments around the world played fast and loose with scientific fact to deliver the absolutes they needed for their drive towards tighter social control.
A wider disdain for scientifically-grounded medicine as ‘mainstream’ – and therefore open to question, or missing some wider insight – has further encouraged the exploration of alternative remedies, the alleged efficacy of which social media, with its self-proclaimed experts, has only served to endlessly echo. The World Health Organisation has called this disinformation tsunami an “infodemic”. Studies suggest that the more susceptible you are to misinformation on any topic, the more likely you’ll embrace the more woo-woo end of the wellness spectrum too.
Indeed, according to a 2022 study by Baker, the pandemic saw a blurring of wellness and conspiratorial politics, with influencers strategically branding themselves under whatever banner was fashionable — wellness being the latest — in order to galvanise the public to iniquitous ends.
Baker has dubbed these ‘alt-health’ influencers and noticed how many follow what she calls a “persecuted hero narrative”: the lone individual with the special insight to stand against the dominance of the institutions and their received ideas. Wellness, after all, has long promoted ideas of individualised solutions, of unlocking one’s potential, of thinking outside the institutional framework. No wonder then that, with your meditation instructor also pushing the dangers of 5G, wellness has even become a gateway drug to fighting the supposed deep state. As Baker says, there’s a strong hint of the cultishness around the followers of many wellness practices.
This can also be flipped on its head. Conspiratorial as it may sound, the scholar Carol-Ann Farkas has argued that the wellness craze has proven the ideal distraction from the real problems of the world out there, preventing our collective action to address them: we’re all too busy focused on our individual selves to worry about affronts to the wider community, or to society at large. Others have argued that wellness encourages us to demonise those not on the bandwagon as weak-willed or lazy.
“Wellness might even be another means by which we can take our minds off the existential void,” chuckles Stephen Palmer, professor of coaching psychology at the University of Wales, and director of the Centre for Stress Management. Unfortunately, that inward attention comes at a price – and more than the money which, as the saying goes, is soon parted from a fool.
“The result of all this focus on wellness is, ironically, often poor health, because people end up overdoing it, because the industry’s focus is so much built around excesses and imbalance.”
Stephen Palmer, Director of the Centre for Stress Management
“The result of all this focus on wellness is, ironically, often poor health, because people end up overdoing it, because the industry’s focus is so much built around excesses and imbalance. Physically and mentally it becomes a form of self-abuse, not least because this quest towards wellness requires such energy,” argues Palmer, who describes the core con-trick of wellness as convincing people that just because they’re not sick, doesn’t mean they’re not unwell. “It’s as though the right to the pursuit of happiness, as they call it in the US, has crazily been linked to some right to the best health and some ideal appearance too. And we’ve become obsessed with our appearance. But if your self-esteem is built on how you appear and feel – and wellness promises to improve this – then it’s bound to fail”.
This, not least, adds Brinkmann, because such promises are never-ending, predicated on goals that are impossible to fulfil: “The fundamental problem with wellness now is that it tells people indirectly that no matter what they do they can be better, which in turn tells them they’re not good enough as they are,” he says. “The risks to metal health are obvious given the basically human need we all have to feel good enough as a person.”
This isn’t to say wellness is all bad. Wellness can identify overlooked health problems. Sometimes it can provide relief. Baker stresses that, before it became corrupted by various forces, its origins were well-intentioned. It was back in 1959 that a doctor by the name of Halbert Dunn argued that there was an important difference between good health – as defined by medicine – and what he coined as “high-level wellness”. This he saw as an active and ongoing pursuit “oriented toward maximising the potential of which the individual is capable”. In that there is, arguably, both a powerful sense of agency – pampering as even a moral imperative – but also the potential for self-blame. If you don’t have wellness, who’s fault is that? But just as long as that dissatisfaction keeps you spending…
“The pioneers didn’t monetise the concept of wellness and struggled financially. In a sense wellness has since become a victim of its own success,” Baker suggests. “It’s a joke that if you search the web for ‘wellness’ now you’ll get the likes of ‘wellness dog food’, which is a long way from wellness’s original goals”. And, it’s because the conception of health as more than the absence of disease is still a useful one – and also because medicine does sideline some health issues, historically notably women’s health issues, which may partly explain why women are particularly drawn to wellness – that Baker doesn’t see the broad concept of wellness going away. If anything, possibly it needs rescuing from its charlatans.
Before that, is there a necessary counter-strike against wellness afoot? Raphael argues that, in her native US at least, peak wellness has already passed, and that now there is a growing resistance movement. In part that’s through work such as hers and Baker’s – the self-help mantra now finds opposition in books the likes of ‘The Wellness Trap’, ‘Who is Wellness For?’ And ‘F*ck Feelings’ – but it’s also because the times have changed.
If wellness has long been the preserve of the anxious middle and upper-middle-classes – as a 2021 study by Southwest University, Chongquin, underscored, the tired and poor don’t have the time, space or money to indulge in such self-centredness, let alone through wellness’s more crackpot ideas – even the privileged are feeling the pinch more now.
“People are really thinking much more carefully about what they spend their money on, which is why I think the era of the Goopified kind of wellness at least is over,” says Raphael. “Understandably people want more evidence [for the claims made] too”. That’s even, she notes, if the wellness industry has already moved to counter that by offering more of what purports to be ‘scientific’ – though typically pseudo-scientific – substantiation. There have been more scandals, and so more skepticism.
But, she warns, the wellness industry is very good at keeping at least one step ahead of those people who carnival barkers and confidence tricksters used to call the suckers. “These days, with each new fantastic claim wellness makes it knows it has about six months before the public wises up. So it keeps changing the trend. One minute it’s all about bone broth, the next, and right now, it’s all about longevity. What we’re really talking about here is a giant game of whack-a-mole”.