I once lived a perfect day. It started with sitting cross-legged by an open window for 30 minutes of meditation, with morning light beaming vitamin D directly into my face. After that, it was time to stretch: one, two, three sun salutations, timing the movement of my limbs to long, deep breaths. In the shower, I slowly turned the warm water to cold in order to flood my system with endorphins, before stepping out and repeating a round of positive affirmations into the mirror.
In the evening, I chewed my dinner mindfully before switching on the TV. Then, two hours before bed, I put away all my screens and lit some candles. By the flickering flames, I wrote down all my worries in a journal and bullet-pointed how I’d tackle them the next day, before listing the multitudinous reasons I had in my life to be deeply, truly grateful. With eight full hours left before I needed to be up again, I lay down on my pillow, closed my eyes, took a round of deep, calming breaths and finally… panicked.
The lure of the wellness industry can be incredibly strong, particularly if you suffer from anxiety. All my life I had experienced periods of vague, oppressive dread that could make entire weeks a misery, and in recent years, it had started to feel like the solution was only ever one more swipe away. My algorithm served up an endless well of gurus advocating journalling or diaphragmatic breathing or running in your underwear through the frozen tundras of Norway. I dabbled in all of it (OK, not the Norway one), figuring if I just landed on the perfectly optimised mental health routine, I’d banish my doom for good. The fact that no combination of these activities seemed to work made me quietly fear I might be broken, that anxiety was simply my lot in life.
In 1984, the American psychotherapist John Welwood coined the phrase “spiritual bypassing”. He used it to describe people in the hippie movement who used then-exotic practices like yoga and meditation as a substitute for working on deeper problems with their mental health. There is a “widespread tendency”, he warned, “to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues [and] psychological wounds”. Welwood believed psychology and spiritualism could complement each other, but said he saw too many people trying to shortcut their way to inner peace and “rise above the raw and messy side of [their] humanness before [they] have fully faced and made peace with it”.
Fifty years on, we are now living in an age of wellness bypassing. The global wellness industry is worth $5.6 trillion, buoyed by an endless tide of Instagram-friendly self-care tips often presented as quick fixes for low moods, depression or anxiety. In many cases, the science backing them is spurious at best. An investigation published by The Guardian last week found that more than 50 per cent of the top trending videos offering mental health advice on TikTok contain misinformation. These spanned misleading claims about the powers of saffron and magnesium glycinate to dubious methods promising to “heal trauma within an hour”. One theory posited that you can reduce anxiety by eating an orange in the shower (surely only true if you’re anxious about having sticky fingers while you eat fruit).
Jevin D West is the co-author of a book called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Date-Driven World and leads research teams attempting to fight back against misinformation online. Health and wellness, West tells me, is the biggest problem area of all. “Nothing comes even close to its ability to attract people’s attention and convince them to let their guard down,” he says. “There is the outright disinformation, of course, that has an intentional element. But a huge part of what we’ve seen is misleading content. Maybe it has some elements of truth. It might even be citing relevant science. But often, it’s about an area there isn’t much research on.” Take shilajit, for example, the tar-like supplement purported to boost testosterone.
West’s number one piece of advice for consuming online content is an oldie but a goodie: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Healing your decades-old family trauma by “cozymaxxing” is probably not going to cut it. But he acknowledges that, even for savvy social media users, this can be incredibly difficult to follow. “Because we want to be convinced,” he says. “We want that elixir that can fix this emotional issue we might have. We want to believe.”
We also want to belong. The other powerful allure of wellness trends is that they offer us something we crave even more fundamentally, according to the great psychologist Erich Fromm, than happiness itself: the feeling we are not alone. Believing the solution to your problem is a ready-made one that thousands or even millions of other people have already discovered is far less terrifying than confronting the alternative: that your individual problems might need an individual solution, one far too complex to capture in a 30-second video.
My own misadventures in wellness did not, at least, involve any oranges being eaten in the shower. I stuck to practices with proven science and, in some cases, thousands of years of efficacy behind them, such as yoga and meditation. The reason they didn’t cure my anxiety was not that they are a scam but that I had not yet done the deep, difficult emotional work that was underlying my mental state. In that sense, I was like one of Welwood’s hippies, closing my eyes and reaching for nirvana while secretly grinding my teeth.
Everything I tried was predicated on the simple and logical premise that the opposite of anxiety was relaxation. Find the right combination of techniques to “unwind”, and the dread would surely drift away. In truth, finally breaking free of generalised anxiety disorder owed itself to a key breakthrough in therapy, in which I realised that my mental health problems were actually being caused by decades of suppressing rage. It was anger, not bliss, that sat on the other side of my anxiety.
Discovering that behind my tendencies for people-pleasing and conflict avoidance was a whole heap of anger was a tough and sometimes frightening process, one that would be impossible to encapsulate in a TikTok video. Instead, I decided to write a book about it: the hidden role that suppressed anger plays in anxiety and depression, and how learning the difficult skill of expressing rage healthily can change our lives for the better.
One thing all the leading psychologists can agree on is that the answers we most need are usually hidden in the places we least want to look. Carl Jung called it confronting our “shadows”, meaning to finally deal with the memories or emotions we avoid or live in fear of. Sadly, even complex ideas like this one have been sucked into the #wellness vortex. The rise of “therapy speak” has meant concepts like trauma response, transference and attachment theory are now regularly misunderstood and misrepresented on TikTok.
Even when they are understood properly, there can be unrealistic expectations about how quickly therapy works. People often quit at the stage of intellectual understanding – I am like this because of that – and don’t stick around for the long, repetitive hours required to integrate ideas properly and make slow, gradual changes to their inner life. Such impatience is a logical consequence of an online culture that encourages personal growth as performance. We want to rush to social media to share our latest breakthroughs before they’ve really happened yet.
“Psychotherapy helps people understand themselves in a very pragmatic way,” Welwood wrote. “To attempt to skip over this area of our development in favour of some spiritual bliss beyond is asking for trouble.” As I discovered, you can’t shortcut your way to happiness any more than you can have a perfect day. Whatever your feed may be telling you, feeling “well” is the work of a lifetime.
Sam Parker is the author of ‘Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives’, out now, published by Green Tree
