How chasing ‘wellness’ is holding us back

I won’t lie, I’m stoked with my Garmin.

I had managed to go without a ‘real’ fitness watch for nearly my entire personal training career, until this year, when I decided to take running a bit more seriously and I thought that knowing my heart rate zones would take my training to the next level. 

Honestly, I’m now of the opinion that you can assess your relative effort without tracking your heart rate zones, so I wouldn’t say you neeeed a Garmin to get into running…

But what having a smart watch has done is make me acutely aware of how well I’m sleeping, how active (or inactive) I am across the day (3000 steps a day gang, where you at?), the effect that alcohol has on my body and the myriad of other factors influencing my heart rate variability - which seems to dictate how my entire day will pan out. 

This year, I’ve been more motivated than ever to get to bed early, go for walks, reduce my alcohol consumption, stick to my training goals, and stay consistent with my eating habits (less ‘girl dinners’, more ‘actually-eating-a-balanced-meal dinners’). 

And though I’ve managed to get my fitness age below my real age, this week I asked myself, why do I suddenly just feel so much older?

It’s not that I’ve noticed grey hairs crop up out of nowhere (although yes, that has happened, sad times),

Nor is it finding out that the movie Shrek will be 25 years old next year,

It’s the realisation that the more I’ve ‘protected my peace’, the more I’ve recreated a type of Groundhog Day existence.

I stopped wanting to do things with people on weeknights, because I don’t want to be home after 9 pm.

It began to spill over onto weekends as well. If social events weren’t a nice, sensible 2-hour catch-up early enough in the day that I could still squeeze in my meal prep, long run, and laundry at some point - then I’d either be anxious about getting tired, or I would get so tired that I wouldn’t be able to stay very long anyway. 

When I noticed that I was genuinely worried that going away for my friend’s birthday for the weekend was going to set me back for the week ahead because my Body Battery probably wouldn’t fully recharge, though my friends and I were able to make health-conscious jokes about being ‘such different people now that we’re in our 30s’ because we shared the same anxiety, I couldn’t help but carry a small amount of grief for the more social, spontaneous and adventurous life I used to have.

It made me wonder, what’s even the point of all this health stuff, if it’s just keeping us bound one way or another in routines, RPE ranges, and optimal recovery?

We love to aestheticise wellness. 

The ‘clean girl’ with the matching Lululemon set and iced matcha on her way to Pilates is but a 2025 re-hash of the 2010s ‘fitspo girl’, wearing Nike Pro micro-shorts for her HIIT workout and living off acai bowls and detox teas. 

The aesthetic tells a story; that wellness is a state of elation, transcendence and superiority. With wellness comes an unmatched sense of fulfilment, inner peace and contentment that only one free from the shackles of shitty sleep and a penchant for eating Biscoff spread straight from the jar could ever relate to.

I used to marvel in awe at the idea of people out there living such perfect lives. I’d imagine what life over the hill of sugar cravings and dreading your workouts actually looked like, to achieve such admirable discipline and consistency. 

But the closer I come to ‘optimal’, the further away I feel from my true self. 

A higher ‘sleep streak’ is only reflective of my life at its most boring. 

If the point of being healthy is so that we can live longer, but to do so, we have to live such monotonous lives, why would we want to prolong them so much anyway?

Are these really the memories that we hope to look back on in years to come? Of hitting step targets, protein grams and early bedtimes? 

Obviously, I’m not against caring about health, nor am I against wearable fitness devices. 

But I think we should see caring about our health as a way to allow for the more spontaneous, less planned, less ‘optimal’ choices we make as well. 

When I came back from my weekend away with my girlfriends, even though my Body Battery did indeed take a hit, I felt more recharged than I had in months, despite being on the back burner with my meal prep that week. 

I think there can be a tendency to chase the aesthetic of wellness because we’re seeking something deeper, a story about how we’d like our lives to feel. 

But what we think can be achieved through clean eating and closed activity rings might turn out to be even less fulfilling than the cauliflower rice and courgette noodles we ate to get there.

If true wellness also encompasses the higher tiers of our needs hierarchy- love, esteem and self-actualisation- then perhaps our health and fitness goals should be about getting to a point where we can focus on those things without our bodies being a distraction. Not to obsess so much about our physicality that we become deficient in having a purpose to our lives at all.