Is the wellness culture fueling a health anxiety crisis? 27-year-old Cecily* has always struggled with poor health OCD. It will make me feel like I need constant reassurance all the time that I’m not going to die, she says. While Cecily has dealt with these feelings since she was diagnosed with a chronic illness at the age of 15, she feels like society’s growing obsession with wellness has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point it became obsessed with tracking all the health data available on the Apple Watch. I was constantly checking my heart rate, she recalls, explaining how on one occasion she went to A&E after her heart rate increased due to anxiety. In the end they said I was perfectly fine just very anxious.
From Cicero to Lord Byron to Charles Darwin, people have always been concerned about their health. IN A body made of glass: a story of hypochondria, author Caroline Crampton delves into the cultural history of health anxiety, or hypochondria, her preferred term for a mental condition characterized by persistent and often unwarranted fear that one has a serious illness. The condition has been on quite a journey over the past 2,500 years, she tells Dazed, explaining that physicians such as Hippocrates used the term hypochondria to refer to conditions thought to arise from an area of ​​the abdomen known as the hypochondrium, until advances scientific. in the 17th and 18th centuries it began to replace the dominance of the humoral theory. By the early 19th century, hypochondria had become entirely a condition of the mind, rather than the body, Crampton continues. This sense of her as a mental illness remains today.
While hypochondria is not a new condition, as Crampton points out, it is likely that the rise of the wellness culture has made hypochondria more widespread. In particular, a 2020 study found that the percentage of students at an American university who reported feelings of health anxiety increased exponentially from 8.67 percent in 1985 to 15.22 percent in 2017. Wellness culture encourages people to see their health as a permanent work in progress and to constantly monitor how they feel, two things that can increase anxiety and preoccupation with illness, she explains. Instead of being able to appreciate the health and abilities we have, we are encouraged to always strive for more, to constantly improve ourselves.
This sounds like 23-year-old Helena. Like Cecily, she has OCD and particularly struggles with obsessive thoughts about her health. I’ve always been prone to anxiety about my physical health, she says. But she adds that consuming wellness-related content on social media has made her anxiety worse. I felt like I was helping myself, but really all I was doing was throwing more money into the wellness industry and wasting my time on the internet instead of doing things that actually make me feel good.
Overall, wellness encourages prioritizing our health which sounds good in theory. But as the industry continues to thrive, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this obsession with being good can actually be bothering us. They were encouraged to constantly self-monitor, with new technologies enabling us to track how many steps we take, how many calories we burn, how many hours we sleep and how fast our hearts beat. At the same time, the definition of good health is changing. Today, good health no longer simply means not being sick: on the contrary, largely thanks to the spread of wellness, health is now commonly regarded as an ongoing project that must be constantly worked on.
Thesee the many parallels between the supplements, diets and regimens being pushed now with the joke medicine of the past Caroline Crampton
At one point I was taking handfuls of supplements every morning, listening to all these nutrition podcasts and watching tons of videos of what I eat in a day from personal trainers who were also models, Helena recalls, explaining that she would beat. [herself] if she didn’t stick to the strict routines or diets she saw promoted by health influencers and just became more anxious as a result. It was a vicious circle, she says. I think the wellness industry sells you a magic cure that only makes you sicker.
It is not irrational to worry about our health, especially as NHS funding cuts in the UK mean that the state healthcare system is not as reliable or robust as it should be. But it’s fair to point out that the wellness industry is increasingly obsessed with manufacturing consumer anxiety in order to sell snake oil-style solutions right back at us. A doctor I interviewed described a lot of wellness information and medicine as medicine from the 1750s, and I see a lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimens being pushed now with the medicines of the past, says Crampton.
It’s also worth noting that many of the products and services churned out by the wellness industry are only accessible to the wealthy given their high prices. We have now reached a stage where private clinics are charging 400 for a comprehensive profile of general well-being; companies like ZOE and Lingo are shillings continuous glucose monitor for non-diabetics; and in a recent episode of The Kardashians, family matriarch Kris underwent a preventative full-body MRI scan to check for potential health issues, a procedure which cost about $2,499. It’s certainly the case today that there are companies with business models based on the health anxieties of people with a lot of disposable income, says Crampton, noting that this echoes the historical view that hypochondria was largely a disease reserved for the wealthy.
The kind of ailments you suffered marked you as a member of a certain class as clearly as the kind of clothes you wore, Crampton writes in A body made of glass. Internal conditions, such as hypochondria and nervous diseases, were associated with refinement, imagination and intellectual activity. But although there has long been a link between social class and hypochondria, she points out that the condition does not discriminate. Recent research has actually suggested that lower socioeconomic status is associated with a higher risk of health anxiety, with the idea that a lack of regular access to good health care options and health education contributes to higher levels of insecurity and anxiety, she says.
Crampton, who suffers from hypochondria herself, points out that affordable treatment is available for hypochondriacs and that there are steps people can take to stop themselves from spiraling. Personally, I know I have to be really careful about the accounts and publications I follow, because if I see a lot of health content, I tend to fall into anxious thought patterns that I’ve worked hard to break myself out of, she says. Just having so much health information available, much of it non-evidence-based, can keep our minds from dwelling on aspects of our bodies that we might not otherwise think about very often.
Even Cecily says she’s re-evaluated her relationship with the more extreme side of wellness. I know what my limits are now, she says, adding that she no longer wears the Apple Watch. Similarly, Helena is trying to put less pressure on herself and has stopped trying to optimize her life for its own sake. I’m trying to see wellness as something different, a kind of satisfaction with my life on my own terms […] something that requires lies and nights out and scoops of ice cream instead of, or also, gym sessions and a healthy diet, because those are also things that make me feel good, grounded, satisfied, she says. Because can we really call it wellness if it makes so many of us feel so fundamentally bad?
wellness culture fueling
A Body Made of Glass: A Story of Hypochondria is available here.
Read more:Â Cultural differences in psychosis outcomes
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