Well Now

Could our relentless pursuit of wellness actually be making us unwell? There are a growing number of skeptics who have some pretty serious misgivings about the movement as a whole. Read on before you sign up for that detox diet or salt room sesh.

- Sydney Loney

Being healthy is great and all, but being well, ah, that’s a whole lot sexier. It’s a concept so broad and inherently ambiguous that it can be bent, molded and shaped to encompass what you do every day, where you travel and even the home you buy (who wouldn’t want to stay in a hotel that offers cryotherapy and gravity colonics, or own a house that adjusts to your Circadian rhythm?).

“Wellness has wormed its way into every aspect of our lives,” writes Stockholm University associate professor Carl Cederström in The Wellness Syndrome. At first, this might seem like a good thing. After all, instead of relying on our overburdened medical system, we’re taking a proactive approach to bettering ourselves. We’re booking yoga classes and seaweed body wraps like never before, lacing our meals with the latest superfoods, tracking our sleep, detoxing our livers and trying to make a habit of doing all of the above as mindfully as possible. You’d think we’d be healthier than ever, except that we’re not. In fact, some of the biggest threats to our health — cancer, heart disease, obesity, anxiety, depression — are on the rise.

At best, our collective unhealthiness suggests that wellness simply doesn’t work, or at least not in the way we’ve been promised. But could our relentless pursuit of wellness actually be making us unwell? There are a growing number of skeptics, Cederström among them, who have some pretty serious misgivings about the movement as a whole. I tracked him down in Italy where he was vacationing (not a wellness vacation, he was quick to point out, just a regular family holiday). One of his biggest beef with wellness is that it’s now an ideology, a standard by which we’re all judged. “Wellness is not just something we choose,” he says. “It is a moral obligation.”