The first thing that wellness culture or an obsession with healing may encourage is perfectionism. In the relentless pursuit of feeling well and improving the self, there is a risk of turning into a harsh self-critic. There are myriad ways in which a perfectionist mindset can result from being overly focused on healing.
To begin with, there is a dizzying number of possible health, lifestyle, and healing choices one could make, which aim to tackle some physical, emotional, or spiritual problem. And these can fall under the umbrella of either mainstream or alternative approaches. An obsession with healing may motivate individuals to try out and pursue as many lifestyle choices and techniques as possible: meditation, yoga, diets, supplements, gong baths, tai chi, qi gong, psychedelics, retreats, reiki, chakra healing, ecstatic dance, fasting, cold plunge, and so on.
Of course, many of these activities are evidence-based and can genuinely enhance well-being, but trying to fill your life with classes, retreats, and positive habits in the name of healing – healing as well as possible – can get exhausting. Self-discipline plays a role in positive mental health, but when it’s excessive, it can leave you miserable. Feeling well should involve being able to relax and enjoy life without every decision you make being driven by the motive to feel well. That may sound counterintuitive, but this excessive motive of becoming a better person can turn life into a task, characterised by productivity, success, and failure. I do think this tendency of wellness culture to encourage self-competition is driven by a deeper cultural and political context, which places great value on individualism.
On the topic of wellness culture and perfectionism for Refinery 29, Sadhbh O’Sullivan writes:
[I]f your motivation towards self-improvement through wellness is not realistic, whether consciously or subconsciously it can slip into perfectionism. This is particularly pernicious given how the promise of wellness culture is that through your actions alone you can achieve your ‘best self’ (with the definition of ‘best’ veering from mildly out of reach to completely unattainable).
The social psychologist Tom Curran defines perfectionism as a personality trait with two main elements: “The first is an incessant striving or need to be perfect and flawless. And the second is a deep contempt or rage at the self when we haven’t lived up to those high expectations.” There is a risk that wellness culture can heighten perfectionism in people prone to it. However, perfectionists may be attracted to wellness culture for precisely this reason; it can seem to offer a path towards flawlessness and the highest achievement (the perfection of self) – it holds the promise of overcoming feelings of unworthiness. Yet getting obsessed with healing may not address the feeling of not being good enough if it’s driven by the need to be perfect.
Wellness culture may also lead to perfectionism by creating a false sense that it’s completely up to the individual to feel well (which I would argue again is a result of a deeper political and cultural climate of individualism). Yet as Curran points out in the article for Refinery 29:
When you put pressure on people to better themselves and don’t talk about the things around them that they can’t control, that leads to a lot of self-blame and a lot of self-criticism.
He adds:
The self-betterment movement puts the onus on individuals to push against things that they have no control over. But what good is self-betterment if at the end of all that effort to improve ourselves it’s still a hostile, competitive, individualistic, pressurised, insecure, precarious world outside, just waiting there when we’ve finished!
As a result of perfectionism, individuals can put too much blame on themselves if all their work and discipline don’t rid themselves of anxiety or depression; this can lead them to feel they’re not strong or good enough. This heightened self-criticism is associated with a range of mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, OCD, self-harm, and eating disorders.
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