The Potential Harms of Wellness Culture

Wellness culture is all about healing – healing from stress, dissatisfaction, trauma, toxic relationships, and poor physical health. However, wellness culture can also encourage an obsession with healing that ends up being counterproductive. When you’re constantly focused on healing – getting better, working on yourself, going from one healing modality to another – your mental health can worsen. This can happen for several reasons.

The first thing that wellness culture or an obsession with healing may encourage is perfectionism. In the relentless pursuit of feeling well and improving the self, there is a risk of turning into a harsh self-critic. There are myriad ways in which a perfectionist mindset can result from being overly focused on healing.

To begin with, there is a dizzying number of possible health, lifestyle, and healing choices one could make, which aim to tackle some physical, emotional, or spiritual problem. And these can fall under the umbrella of either mainstream or alternative approaches. An obsession with healing may motivate individuals to try out and pursue as many lifestyle choices and techniques as possible: meditation, yoga, diets, supplements, gong baths, tai chi, qi gong, psychedelics, retreats, reiki, chakra healing, ecstatic dance, fasting, cold plunge, and so on.

Of course, many of these activities are evidence-based and can genuinely enhance well-being, but trying to fill your life with classes, retreats, and positive habits in the name of healing – healing as well as possible – can get exhausting. Self-discipline plays a role in positive mental health, but when it’s excessive, it can leave you miserable. Feeling well should involve being able to relax and enjoy life without every decision you make being driven by the motive to feel well. That may sound counterintuitive, but this excessive motive of becoming a better person can turn life into a task, characterised by productivity, success, and failure. I do think this tendency of wellness culture to encourage self-competition is driven by a deeper cultural and political context, which places great value on individualism.

On the topic of wellness culture and perfectionism for Refinery 29, Sadhbh O’Sullivan writes:

[I]f your motivation towards self-improvement through wellness is not realistic, whether consciously or subconsciously it can slip into perfectionism. This is particularly pernicious given how the promise of wellness culture is that through your actions alone you can achieve your 'best self' (with the definition of 'best' veering from mildly out of reach to completely unattainable).

Wellness culture may also lead to perfectionism by creating a false sense that it’s completely up to the individual to feel well (which I would argue again is a result of a deeper political and cultural climate of individualism). Yet as Curran points out in the article for Refinery 29:

When you put pressure on people to better themselves and don't talk about the things around them that they can't control, that leads to a lot of self-blame and a lot of self-criticism.

The self-betterment movement puts the onus on individuals to push against things that they have no control over. But what good is self-betterment if at the end of all that effort to improve ourselves it's still a hostile, competitive, individualistic, pressurised, insecure, precarious world outside, just waiting there when we've finished!

Being obsessed with healing could also feed a tendency to monitor oneself. When you’re excessively focused on feeling better and being more self-actualised, you may monitor yourself and your activities throughout the day, leading to thoughts such as:

• Am I making progress?
• Am I being my true, authentic self?
• Is this making me feel better or worse?
• I’m not being my best self in this social interaction.
• Am I being present enough?
• I shouldn’t be feeling negative. I should be feeling gratitude and peace of mind right now.
• I’m not feeling great today. Should I be worried about this? What if this is a sign of worse things to come?

Related to perfectionism and self-monitoring is self-focus, and wellness culture can encourage or magnify this tendency as well. This is because wellness culture has always been focused on the self. Sirin Kale writes in The Guardian that wellness has consistently been centred around “three tenets: robust individualism, distrust of Western medicine and a commitment to self-optimisation”. O’Sullivan states:

In practice, this hyperfocus on the self results in messaging that subtly promises to eliminate insecurities without challenging their basis, enabling fatphobia and exacting beauty standards. It also centres all power to do away with struggle and disease on your own willpower, disregarding the wealth of external and biological factors that are crucial in determining people’s health. This has led historically to a disregard for and misinformation about neurodiversity, chronic illness and disability, and can come with devastating social consequences, seen most acutely in the connection between wellness communities and COVID vaccine conspiracy theories.

[M]ore broadly, improving your own life becomes part of improving the lives of others. This takes many forms and is different for everyone. Perhaps it is using meditation to manage your anxiety so you can better engage in your local community; maybe it's disengaging from fatphobic views on bodies and health and advocating for better access to healthcare; maybe it's running a free yoga class for your neighbours.

Part of wellness culture also involves an insistence on an individual ‘trusting their intuition’ and ‘listening to their body’ when it comes to their health. But as much as intuition can often guide us in the right direction, it can be mistaken and baseless as well. This attitude is, again, born out of the individualist virtue of self-reliance; it ignores the importance of sometimes turning to others, including legitimate experts.

The point above about how wellness can lead people to avoid Western treatments is an interesting one. Of course, Indigenous methods of healing hold much promise, and we often ignore them to our detriment. Moreover, we have reason to be wary of some Western treatments; people can have legitimate concerns about efficacy, safety, and malpractice.

Nonetheless, if wellness culture leads people to reject Western treatments wholesale, this can get in the way of healing.

In addition, the wellness industry has its own set of problems when it comes to malpractice. There are many bad actors in the industry, including unqualified and untrained healers, unscrupulous shamans, snake oil salesmen charging extortionate prices, and people with inflated egos who exploit vulnerable people. People seeking healing through non-conventional or unregulated modalities may find themselves at risk of abuse and harm, which at their worst can traumatise or re-traumatise them. Other healing seekers may find physical health problems deteriorating as a result of forgoing safe, evidence-based treatments and pursuing ineffective treatments sold as magic bullets.

Another way in which wellness culture can frustrate healing is through the avoidance of deep healing. This, again, is another ironic effect of focusing so much on healing. A lot of wellness culture is, unsurprisingly, about ‘feeling well’ – yet this can sometimes involve avoidance of painful emotions that are at the root of mental health issues and relationship problems. While meditation and psychedelic retreats may lead to a confrontation with these emotions, and sometimes this can result in emotional healing, continually pursuing altered states and wellness treatments doesn’t necessarily do the deep inner work that is necessary for healing.

The pursuit of ‘healing’ may, it turns out, be an attempt to pursue positive emotional states and to ignore more difficult feelings. This is known as spiritual bypassing, and it is quite common in wellness and spiritual circles. These difficult feelings might not only be sources of emotional pain accumulated from childhood but also more existential issues such as meaning, purpose, freedom, identity, and mortality.

In some cases, specialised, long-term psychotherapy may need to be at least a component of emotional healing. But this can be an emotionally difficult process, with many ups and downs, as well as periods of feeling stuck. Building a close therapeutic alliance – which may be crucial for addressing personal defences, unconscious pain, and relationship issues – takes time. It can be awkward and challenging at times, but also rewarding and transformative. If one becomes obsessed with wellness approaches, to the exclusion of deep psychological work, then this can also get in the way of healing.

The subject of therapy brings us back to the fact that wellness culture often neglects the social dimension of our lives. Stable, healthy relationships are essential to a contented, fulfilled life.

Yet working on improving existing or future relationships is difficult (and wellness culture, which promises healing, often doesn’t address this).

While wellness culture can make people feel worse, this is only the case because of its current form and tendencies. It is clear that wellness culture needs to be a lot less individualistic, and if it wants to promote a truly ‘holistic’ approach to well-being, then it needs to take into account our most fundamental needs and interests.

17