It’s Not Wellness If It Doesn’t Feel Good
Picture this: your alarm goes off at 5:00 am; simultaneously, your Google calendar blurts out the notification that you've got a spin class in one hour. Deep in weeks of poor sleep, you spent the night tossing and turning after struggling to fall asleep to begin with. You're awake but your body isn't; hours spent in bed with no remuneration of feeling rested. You contemplate where you will be in the next hour whilst at the same time deciding that you don't have a choice. Pulling yourself up from your bed, whether sleep-deprived or dying, the show must go on, right?
It was in my most committed pursuit of wellness that I began to question who and what I was doing this for. Like I'm sure many of you do, I have a hard time recognizing when to push through something that feels uncomfortable and when to stop because surely it shouldn't be this bad.
When I first set out on this journey to optimize my health and well-being, I sought an extensive routine, one that would tick all the boxes and align me with the view I had created of my future wellness self. I was enthralled and energized; I did not want to waste a minute of this novelty.
As I scoured Pinterest for photos resembling the perfect wellness lifestyle, I became so tied up and consumed in other people's ideals; workout splits, snacks for hormone health, the perfect morning routine and how to be mindful. I rejected listening to my body and being present, ignoring all signs and cues of what I actually needed and when. Instead of just feeling how I felt, I fixated on an imaginary end goal, believing that only through rigorous routines and elaborate schedules would I be able to reach this ultimate self.
Mired in blueprints on how to conduct my days, I became disillusioned with what my own core beliefs actually resembled. In this crazed and frenzied fixation on smoothies and supplements, it occurred to me that there were some areas of my wellness I was completely ignoring.
The word wellness was first coined in 1950 by Halbert Dunn, an American physician who, writing in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, sought to define "high-level wellness." He argued that it's an "integrated method of functioning which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable." In this definition, we see that this idea of wellness is more than just feeling fit and healthy and not so far off from what we now recognize as personal development. If not a judgement of your health, how useful is 'high-level wellness' in contributing to your feeling good?
It was then that I decided to take back ownership of my routines and habits, silencing the noise online and what just overcomplicated what it actually means to feel good.
Wellness no longer resembles an exhaustive list of things to buy, eat, drink, and do. I now see wellness as the act of listening to my body, being intuitive and kind, and remembering that I am the responsible keeper of my body. I'll reside in this body for the rest of my life, so I should cultivate love instead of excessive punishment.
By stripping it back to the basics, I connected with what wellness truly looks like for me, asking myself, how can I actually feel like my best self?
I made a conscious effort to focus on my sleep, implementing a strict routine out of care. Instead of forcing myself to work out on little sleep, I learned to recognize when extra time in bed is actually more productive than taking my body for a gruelling workout. In taking this approach, I began to get better at realizing and accepting that sometimes less is actually more.
The knock-on effect of this helped me limit my screen time. I stopped using the time just before I closed the day out to furiously scroll, and instead, I made a committed effort to unwind by journaling about my day. Replacing the act of raising my cortisol by looking for supplements to take and healthy lunches to make by emptying my thoughts on a page has allowed me to drift off easily without my brain going 100mph.
Of course, this isn't the reality every day, but when it is, I remind myself that wellness does not have to exist in this all-or-nothing approach.
Approaching my wellness with kindness, I've been more aware of how I speak and think about myself. I encourage myself to feel proud and grateful for what I have achieved; I focus more on what I did rather than what I didn't. I remind myself that, even when you are so far from where you want to be, self-improvement should always come from a place of love.
When I reflect back now on how tunnel-visioned I was in my pursuit of wellness, I feel sorry for the girl who was focusing so much on this end goal, this final tick, this one meal or workout or supplement combination that I thought would take me to this feeling of, this is it. Because what I now know is that wellness is about care; it's not this competitive and aggressive intention to maximize your potential; it's about doing things that will prevent you from burning out, not encourage it.