Wellness overdose.

Are we a world gone mad on wellness?
Prioritizing self over all else?
Has vanity ruined our ability to truly connect?

The obsessive desire for vanity creates disordered dieting and excessive exercise routines.

Sometimes too healthy can be unhealthy!

I like to exercise sometimes, but I also like to have lazy days. I like to eat healthy sometimes, but mostly I just like to eat! When we don’t prioritize nourishment, rest, community and fun, we deprive ourselves from that connection to thrive. The individual is now encouraged to be the number one priority. More so with social media.

We are becoming the center of our universe. We are being taught by algorithms designed to make us believe that we should not bother with anything that does not bring us, the individual pure joy. Being positive is good, independence is good, discipline is good, and boundaries are good. But what if that means shutting ourselves completely off from the rest of the world? From people, from their suffering. If we refuse to acknowledge humans in real life, or in pain, or in need? Is our human experience really thriving when we choose ourselves? Or are we shutting down our emotions and ability to connect?

Dedication and discipline seem to be more important than listening to your body and your needs. We all need rest, to spend time with people, laughing, and simply being, without a time limit. Making sure we are constantly on the grind, busy with our own goals and not allowing real room in our lives for others actually harms us and those deep human connections that we should be nurturing. We as humans are tribal and need community and connection.

Real connection, not the fake, ego driven, dopamine desired connections we seek from social media.

in our search for “personal wellness” have we lost community wellness? Are we so distracted from 3D human life that we have forgotten how to be true to a human being? Are we so wrapped up in ourselves, the glow up, the views, the hustle, instant gratification, that we have lost the ability to pay true attention to someone’s needs as a human being? A friend, a partner?

Our patience is being reduced, our emotional capacity and processing skills been completely distorted and dis-regulated by excessive device use. Humans are hard to satisfy, we often seek more. When is it ever enough? It’s hard to imagine a world in which we will feel a reduced desire to put our own needs first and scroll binge. Will we enter the met-averse? It is a scary concept. (I wrote a “fictional” entry blog about this called What killed the humans? check it out above.)

Now, Im a lazy gal, so I can easily say all this, but I am not motivated to go to the gym every day, I have never once restricted any piece of food entering my mouth. I’m not very competitive, is it’s easy for me to say all this. But I do think perhaps we could find a balance. I could probably do with being more disciplined, but not too disciplined. we could adjust our sense of wellness to be more inclusive of fun and friends. We could put down the supplements, eat our food, not the protein bar filled with chemicals; and just re-connect. That means putting the phone down for a day or two. Reminding our brains what it is to feel alive. Reminding ourselves that “wellness” and all the other words (or abbreviations) of the times, are big money makers. That’s right; billion-dollar industries have always made money off our ability as humans to form addictions to pretty much anything.

Diet is out, and wellness is in.

But is this focus on wellness actually making us well? Or is it fueling this obsessive desire to be the most “well “of all the “wellness” people. Wellness is not spending hours slaving away in a gym or restricting ourselves, or not having a bloody scone… or any fun!

Wellness is enjoying ourselves with real life human beings.

This obsession with self will not lead to happiness, nothing will ever be good enough. When we do not include community into our sense of self, true happiness cannot last. When will our journey of the self-end? Or how does it end?

When will our insatiable need to be constantly stimulated suffice? Do we really need more wellness, or just more real life?

Do we really need to be clean eating, or just eating delicious, nutritious food with our loved ones, colleagues and friends without staring at a phone?

In my book Free published in 2018 I wrote about the human need for constant stimulation and approval rendering us incapable of sitting quietly in our own room. Philosopher Blaise Pascal, wrote;

“All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot sit quietly in their own chamber.”

I wrote then about how we cling to false impressions of people as reality. How our conditioned image- based curation of self is portrayed as who we are.

Even though we all know, this is not who we are.

I write “Trapped in our own thoughts, our minds will scatter from one desire to another, none of which will give us lasting happiness. Our desires will never be enough, even when fulfilled. We are always after the next thing, destroying our ability to be. As adults we want a quick fix for everything, the stimulation that comes from television, media, social media, fast food and porn. Everything these days comes quick and easy; we have an insatiable need to be constantly stimulated. A little is never enough; we always want more. More food, more money, more coffee, more pleasure” …and so on.

Is it a wonder that we really seek more wellness, whilst making ourselves less well by staring into our phones more and more. I wrote this book in 2017, and published in 2018, since then, community is deteriorating.

Seek friends out, join together, without the phones, sit down, eat and drink and laugh from your belly, for this is the biggest form of self-care.

Summer Brooks