The Afterword: The mainstream wellness movement is kind of lying to you

Truth be told, there’s a lot of reasons to hate the wellness movement. Let’s start easy. I think many of us know what it feels like to open Instagram to a tirade of wellness influencers beaming ear-to-ear as they gear up for another day of competing in the Productivity Olympics. Kale smoothies. Morning meditation. Chakra realignment. Hot yoga. Regular yoga. It can feel overwhelming, to say the least. 

What if we look a little deeper? The lifestyle that the mainstream wellness movement encourages its followers to ascribe to is an expensive and pretty inaccessible one. It caters predominantly to white and affluent demographics, often reinforcing Western beauty standards while alienating marginalized communities from the wellness rhetoric. Beyond this, diet and exercise culture has taken the place of weight loss mania in a similar sense to how skin care has stolen the commercial spotlight from makeup. Same evil, different mask.

What if we look a lot deeper? What if we, say, analyze how the social media wellness movement holds up under scientific scrutiny? Spoiler alert: not too well.

From the moment we wake up and check our phones to when we turn them off before bed, we are force-fed the narrative that we have absolute control over our emotional state and mental and physical well-being. Influencers and wellness platforms sell us a dream by convincing us to invest in products and habits ostensibly promoted as causal links in the wellness chain. A 10-day cleanse here and some vitamin supplements there should do the trick, they tell us, hiding behind sponsorships and paid advertisements. 

Not only has wellness rhetoric on social media reduced mental health talking points to aesthetically pleasing graphics and catchy one-liners, it has also twisted (and at times directly contradicted) established scientific research at the cost of the well-being of those it is purported to help. Let me be blunt: The underlying philosophy of the wellness movement does not prepare its subscribers for the arbitrary and egregious unfairness of the real world.

Let’s talk genetics. Each gene in your body has two alleles, one from each parent. There is a particular gene called a serotonin transporter gene, and it ensures that the serotonin in our brain (the neurotransmitter implicated in mood stabilization, feelings of well-being and happiness) gets to where it needs to go to produce those positive effects. Now, this gene comes in two sizes: long and short. Two long alleles is a best-case scenario; this form of the gene makes you less susceptible to stress and more resilient in the face of trauma. One short and one long puts you somewhere in the middle. But get shafted with two short alleles and risk of developing major depressive disorder jumps steeply. 

There’s no punchline there — some people get lucky and some don’t. Some people are born equipped with genetic weaponry and some are not.

This isn’t to say that we have no agency or that our biological fate is predetermined. Rather, the takeaway is that we all start our lives from highly unique genetic baselines and that the overgeneralized “wellness” model, what with its emphasis on learned mental fortitude, does not account for these individual differences. 

But individual differences do not stop at genetic makeup. The biopsychosocial model is a relatively new and interdisciplinary framework that considers the interconnection between biology, psychology and socio-environmental factors in determining a person’s medical state.

Take chronic heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. You can be biologically predisposed to cardiovascular problems (genetic susceptibility), but psychological factors (adherence to medication use, monitoring of symptoms, etc.) and social factors (stress, socioeconomic status, etc.) can influence the progression and severity of illness. No one set of indicators alone is sufficient; it is the interaction among them that tells a holistic story.

This brings us right to research on adverse childhood experiences, better known in the psychology world as ACEs. ACEs range from childhood abuse (physical, sexual or emotional) to living with household members who are substance abusers, mentally ill, suicidal or incarcerated, among other factors. In a groundbreaking longitudinal study by Felitti et al. in 1998, researchers found a strong relationship between the breadth of exposure to ACEs during childhood and risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults. 

ACEs are stressful. While stress is the body’s way of protecting itself from external and internal threats, repeated activation of the body’s stress response can lead to suppressed immune function, declines in brain functioning and poor sleep habits. In a study on the long-term effects of childhood trauma on the brain, researchers found that children who grow up in families high in conflict or criticism and low in warmth and nurturance were more likely to have depression, cancer, lung disease, heart disease and diabetes as adults compared to those who did not.

Again, the message here is not to do away with the wellness framework and accept that we are all powerless over external forces out of our control. But the idea that all mental afflictions are fixable with a handful of positive affirmations, a fruit smoothie and an Alo Yoga workout set has got to go. 

The harsh reality is that the wellness movement misses the mark in its presumption that anyone can bounce back from dysfunction at any time. For many people, the damage has already been done. For many people, the prospect of mental well-being is a pipe dream obfuscated by more pressing needs of food or income stability. For many people, no amount of wellness tips will do the trick. 

The call to action here is to divert attention away from the wellness movement and onto primary prevention initiatives that seek to prevent disease before it occurs. By increasing funding and accessibility to create programs that support families and offer mental health care in communities where they are lacking or stigmatized, we can cut the head off the snake. By increasing educational programming for children and adolescents, we can impart valuable health information at an age where individuals are more likely to retain and incorporate it into their identity. 

Point being: Our time, effort and funding ought to be focused on preventing health problems rather than retroactively managing them. Not only is this a far better use of resources, but it also accounts for the role of development in adverse health outcomes, something the wellness movement neglects entirely. We cannot only ask, “what can be done now?” We must ask, “what happened before?” “How did we get here?” “What can we do to stop this?”

Rachel McKenzie is a senior writing about pop culture. Her column, “The Afterword,” typically runs every other Wednesday.