Why the Wellness Industry is Making You Sick

This is a challenging topic to address, because it is multifaceted and layered. I want to start by outing myself; I too, being for years a part of the problem. Falling for what I thought I needed to do to embody what I thought was the ideal choices for optimal health. Exploiting my own body to fit "norms" that actually are inaccessible to most, and at best elusive, and unsustainable. Todays article I am going to stick to themes that more broadly effect the masses. If you are reading this article and into alternative health at all, you most definitely have been effected by the following at least on some level. contemplation brings awareness. Awareness is the first step to change.

The Self Empowerment Movement.

We've all heard it before, I have likely even said some of this to you before if you're a client.

If you are in any sort of pain, depression, anxiety, or god forbid fatigue and total burnout. You are immediately met with a self empowering remedy.

"Have you kept up with your stretching?" "Have you been taking walks?" "Have your tried HIIT?""Have you tried yoga?" "How is your sleep?" "Have you tried any mindfulness or breath work techniques?""Are you staying hydrated?" "How is your diet?" "Are you getting enough protein?" Innocent and honest questions, addressing some basic pillars of health. Sleep, hydration, balanced diet, stress levels, activity levels, the works. All in which effect mood, focus, hormone levels, and overall feeling of well being in the body/mind.

Truthfully, in most scenarios, we want solutions, we want to know the power is in our hands to fix this uncomfortable feeling. To feel better, to be better. After all self improvement has been drilled into all of us as the pinnacle of human existence as we are born in American culture, the greatest country on earth. Our health, being the epicenter of proof, we were living a good life.

With documentaries such as "What the Health" and various other sources led us to exposure of how our Big Pharma would push pills onto Americans that actually created more diseases that the individuals taking them needed more pills for. The America Heart Heart Association and The American Cancer Society had an alliance with companies like Kelloggs and Yoplait to sell products with their company labels on them on foods that actually caused cancer and heart disease. This way, both organizations profited and people became sick. Simultaneously we decided to take our health in our own hands. Along with the yoga boom on Instagram as well as the rise in wellness trends. This pull to take autonomy over our health sunk it's teeth into many of us allowing us for another alternative to find a more preventive care approach and ideal lifestyle.

Being poor myself, in my twenties, I went hard into eastern approaches to healing. I was for a time highly against western med. I refused to get my bloodwork done for years, even though my body felt off. I literally looked at doctors as money hungry murders that didn't give a damn about weather I lived or died. I listen to the yogi's, the natural paths, and every podcast I could on wellness I could find. I still do have an aversion to hospitals, health insurance, and invasive procedures. However I do see there is time and place for it.

That being said, I am not saying there is anything wrong with yoga, or exercise; or that doing workouts and eating whole foods doesn't help you feel better. I strive for it every day. Finding the right balance of foods that are nourishing, some that are for pure indulgence, and exercise that both strengthens and supports my body. Breath work does calm the mind, limiting caffeine and alcohol does improve sleep. These are scientific facts that I am not trying to argue with.

Self empowered health isn't the problem; so what is?

Performance Wellness as a Spiritual Bypass.

Imagine; you just worked a forty hour week, you are looking for a second or maybe third job because the cost of living is so expensive. You just had a fight with your spouse, or you don't have one and trying to find time to date. Maybe you have kids you're raising, you cook every night nutrient dense meals, go grocery shopping, clean the house, and took care of errands. You collapse on the couch and turn on your favorite Netflix series so you can just relax. Then, the guilt creeps in. I told myself this morning at 6 A.M. I would start my new yoga routine to help decrease my inflammation and pain, shit, I couldn't do it because I was too exhausted and I told myself I would do it now; but I am so depleted. I also forgot to dry brush before my shower, and gua sha after. I forgot to do my strength exercises too and my back hurts so badly, ill never lose weight, what is wrong with me?

You feel shame, to numb the pain you open your phone. Instagram shows you a million ads in thirty seconds as you scroll, some are of perfectly toned bodies wearing the most expensive organic cotton athletic wear alerting you to the microplastics leaking into your skin slowly killing you. Another ad for Eminence skin care to fix your forehead and smile lines and make you glow from the inside out, another shows you supplements to fix your gut inflammation and balance your hormones and fatigue. They are only 80$ a month. You instantly feel worse, but you know Instagram is bad idea. You phone a friend to tell her how lousy you feel about "falling off the horse." She convinces you not to be a victim, and to get back on, and to go to a power yoga class at 6am with her the next morning. You both get green juice, then talk about how you need to do yoga more.

IF you possibly are able to keep this routine up for a while, maybe you lose weight and feel a bit better about yourself. However, there are thousands of ways in which you can improve. being marketed to you all day, every day, all the time. This Self improvement continues to plague your mind. It seems no matter how many rituals you preform, there are still more you could have, should have, and would have done. You still have fine lines, acne, bloating, and extreme fatigue. You are already stretched thin with your regular life obligations, let alone stacking more requirements onto yourself to just be good enough, well enough, desirable enough. The problem doesn't lie in the action, it is in the approach. Which doesn't come from wellness, it comes from internalized shame programmed by our systems.

When the Body Collapses

The above scenario was an example for the average white American without an intense amounts of trauma. Now imagine if you are a marginalized group, imagine if you didn't even have money to go to yoga, imagine if in your daily life you are just trying to survive. You are constantly ridiculed just for the way you look, sexual orientation, or inability to fit yourself into the mold society has created. You end up with auto-immune symptoms that you can't manage on your own because your time is spent working, the healthcare systems don't offer support and you cant support yourself because you don't have the resources. Then you are told your health is your responsibility. That you are the one that created your circumstances because you didn't try hard enough. Meanwhile the elite and ignorantly privileged prance around in their lululemon either shaming you for not prioritizing your health or feeling sorry for you, for not having the access to get the care you need.

The nerve pain, migraines, body aches, and consistent feeling that you are alone, and further more worthless infects you with a darkness that is hard to describe.

Capitalism only cares about profit, it only cares about scaling at all costs, it doesn't consider the average life of the American worker, or those in marginalized groups, or those without access to healthcare. Which thousands have lost in recent months. We need to stop blaming individuals for their poor health, and start looking at the systems that create it.

This is why I write this, not to offer you another way to fix yourself, but to offer you awareness into a world that is deeply broken.

A Body That Doesn't Feel Safe, Can't Heal.

The very real thing is that "scarcity mindset" isn't a mindset for a lot of people. It's a lived reality. When all that you know is that meeting your needs is a constant game of Russian roulette, it would take years of truly living without that threat to come into a place where your able to shift your mindset. Breath work, meditation, and mindfulness are free. They tools to navigate even the most difficult situations. They can create space in your life and aid you in moving through really hard things. Yet they won't absolve you from your pain, they won't fix the situations at hand, and they won't heal you.

So long as you are stuck in fight for flight, your body stays in it's sympathetic response and you will be scanning for threat, poverty, is a very real danger, as someone that doesn't fit the norms of capitalism, you are going to be under constant threat. The responsibility to heal cannot be yours alone. It takes a village. In indigenousness cultures, if one person was wounded they wouldn't tell them to go away and meditated until they were in a better mood. It was their wound too, they would heal with you

You Are Not A Problem to Fix

For those struggling, but not yet ill

It's important to note even in the most seemingly insignificant ways you do have the ability to turn towards yourself as exactly where you are, and embrace what you do have capacity for. Which may simply be putting less pressure on yourself. Even If that is around rituals that are supposed to make you well. Where you create boundaries with you time, your work, your demands on yourself. Where you set limits, where you listen when your tired, and where you keep promises to yourself to show up for the workout if your body is crying to move, but not out of shame, out of love. Perfection cannot be attained through products, performance or rituals. It doesn’t achieve anything other than filling a self proclaimed expectation programmed by our systems. You are Enough.

For those with Autoimmune

You symptoms are not the enemy, they are messengers and signals notifying you that something is wrong. Turn towards them, love them, love yourself for fighting a battle harder than most people can imagine everyday of your life. You are not broken, you body is wise to systems that are broken. There is nothing to change or fix, other than you own resistance to your own cells. Let yourself breathe, you do not need to heal to be worthy of love.

For those in Marginalized Groups

I will never know the pain you walk, the life you have survived. All I can say is your health is not something to earn and your wellness is not something to mold yourself into through colonized capitalistic product and performance. Your body is divine and your power is so far beyond our systems. Remember who you are, keep fighting, keep knowing your worth, the old paradigms will fall in time.

The Future of Wellness

Wellness is not something you earn, it's a birthright. It's found in rest when the world is screaming at you to push forward, it's found in community and standing up for human rights. It's found in the spaces in between where you pause and take in the beauty of the world around you. It's found in being able to listen to the wild calls of your body and not let corporations infect and control you mind. The first step is awareness, the next is compassion

This I believe is the future of wellness, and so many of us are waking up to this. How can we create space? How can we choose not to monetize every moment and create a life that feels sustainable. I feel the waves of change washing up on the shore of our consciousness. It’s slow, until its not, like the earth, having tremors that turn into quakes.

If this article spoke to you I would love to hear your feedback. For a more direct personal story of what I went through being a direct conduit of wellness culture; the programming I and am still unraveling under late stage capitalism visit my Substack, as the link the is under the tab "Olivia Embodied"