How self-care became another source of stress and why your body needs far less than what you're told.
Valérie-Anne O'Callaghan
Being healthy never seemed so complicated
If you listen to what's circulating on social media, to be healthy you'd have to get up at five in the morning, follow a twelve-step routine before breakfast, apply four serums, stand under a red light, take a handful of supplements, do Pilates, meditate, write in a journal, count steps, measure calories, and record the quality of your sleep. All of that before nine.
And every voice you encounter asserts its opinion with absolute certainty and without any nuance. Sugar is the enemy—no, it's fat. You have to take 10,000 steps a day. You have to eliminate dairy. You have to do intermittent fasting. After you turn forty, ditch yoga and hit the weight room because your muscles are melting away.
Fear. Always fear.
They sell you gadgets, methods, expensive objects, endless routines. They bombard you with contradictory commands. They push you to consume instead of live. And they leave you with a very specific feeling: if you don't do all that, you'll end up badly. The underlying message hasn't changed. It's still the same. You're not enough.
What happens to your nervous system with all this
Dr. Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, documented that stress doesn't need to stem from a real threat to cause harm. It's enough for your nervous system to interpret something as needing urgent and sustained attention for the cortisol cascade to be triggered, leading to chronic muscle tension and the erosion of your regulatory capacity.
That's exactly what the wellness industry produces when it operates as a system of mandates. Every new recommendation you don't follow is recorded as an unfinished task. Every protocol you don't adhere to becomes a small warning sign that you're doing something wrong. Every new trend invalidates the previous one and leaves you feeling like you're always one step behind.
Your nervous system doesn't distinguish between stress from a real threat and stress from an endless list of things you're supposed to do to stay healthy. It processes them the same way. And the result is the exact opposite of what that self-care is supposed to produce.
The body as a project instead of as a place
The deeper problem isn't the amount of conflicting information. It's what that dynamic does to your relationship with your own body.
When well-being becomes a system of control, your body ceases to be a place you inhabit. It becomes a project to manage. Something to be constantly optimized, corrected, repaired, and improved. And you, instead of being in harmony with your body, are at war with it.
Dr. Arthur D. Craig, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, documented that the ability to perceive the body's internal state—interoception—is the foundation of emotional experience and the capacity for self-orientation. You know what you need when you can feel what's happening to you. But if your relationship with your body is mediated by external protocols—by what an influencer says, what an app indicates, or what the latest trend recommends—that internal signal gradually fades.
Not because it disappears. Because you stop listening to it. Because the outside voice sounds louder, more confident, more scientific. And because your nervous system, accustomed to the vertical axis, prefers someone to tell it what to do rather than having to feel what it needs.
The obsession with the visible body and the neglect of the feeling body
The world is obsessed with having a slim, muscular body instead of a mobile, vibrant one. Trends come and go with the same logic as fashions. It was yoga, now it's Pilates, tomorrow it will be something else. You go with the flow, pay the fee, and quit after a month. Not because you're undisciplined. Because it wasn't for you. It was something else.
When movement is chosen out of external pressure, out of fear of aging poorly, or from comparing yourself to a body you see on a screen, your nervous system registers it as an obligation. And obligation activates the exact opposite system to the one you need for movement to benefit you.
The movement that regulates you isn't the one you do because you're told to. It's the one you do because you enjoy it. Because your body craves it. Because when you finish you feel more alive, not more exhausted or more guilty for not having done enough.
The trap of measuring everything
You measure your sleep. You measure your steps. You measure your heart rate variability. You measure your macros. And the more you measure, the further you are from feeling.
Dr. Kelly Baron, PhD in clinical psychology and director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Utah, coined the term orthosomnia in 2017 to describe a phenomenon she was seeing with increasing frequency in her practice: people developing insomnia due to anxiety about achieving a perfect sleep score on their device. The technology designed to improve sleep was producing the exact opposite effect. Patients were placing more trust in what their wristband said than in what their doctor said or how they actually felt upon waking.
A study published in Brain Sciences in 2024 confirmed the pattern: people identified with orthosomnia consistently had higher insomnia scores than those without this pattern. The anxiety generated by the tracking was directly linked to worsening sleep. According to surveys by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, approximately one-third of adults in the United States use some type of sleep-tracking device, and a significant portion acknowledge that the app makes them more worried about their sleep rather than less.
What happens with sleep is an example of something broader. Constantly tracking your body is the opposite of listening to it. Every time you delegate to a number what your body already knows, you reinforce the disconnect between what you feel and what you think you should feel. Data replaces perception. Metrics replace interoception. And you, little by little, stop trusting yourself and start trusting a screen.
What disappeared from the equation
At some point, the pleasure disappeared from self-care. Everything became calculated, measured, tracked, optimized. Rest is measured with an app. Food is evaluated in macros. Movement is counted in steps.
And in that constant accounting, something your nervous system needs as much as oxygen was lost: connection. Connection with others, with play, with the joy of moving your body without purpose, with sharing food without guilt, with rest that doesn't need to be justified.
Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, documented that regulating the nervous system isn't something you can do alone. You need others. Coregulation—the ability to regulate yourself in the presence of someone you feel safe with—is a fundamental biological function, not an emotional luxury. We are beings of connection. And a wellness model focused exclusively on the individual, their routine, their supplements, their personal performance, ignores the very foundation of how your physiology works.
You are not regulated only by what you do. You are regulated by how you do it, with what intention, and with whom you share it.
The search circuit that never stops
Dr. Kent Berridge, PhD in psychology and professor at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Terry Robinson, PhD and professor at the same institution, demonstrated that dopamine does not code for pleasure. It codes for the drive to seek. You can keep searching for the next supplement, the next method, the next gadget, even though none of the previous ones have produced a real change in how you feel.
The wellness industry is designed to keep that cycle going. There's always a new product, an updated protocol, a trend that invalidates what you were doing yesterday. And you keep buying, not because it works, but because your search system needs the next promise to soothe itself.
But peace doesn't come from the next purchase. It comes from ceasing to look outside for what your body already knows.
Welfare as a class privilege
There's something that's rarely mentioned in this conversation: all of that costs money.
Supplements, gadgets, tracking devices, retreats, consultations with the trendiest specialist, online programs, meditation app subscriptions, organic food, cryo sessions, red light panels. Wellness, as presented by the industry, is a luxury item. And if you can't afford it, the implicit message is doubly toxic: not only are you not enough, but you also can't afford what you need to be.
This creates a class divide within the health discourse itself. Well-being becomes something you can either buy or not. And those who can't afford it are left with the feeling that their bodies are at a disadvantage not biologically, but economically.
But your body doesn't need things that cost money to function. It needs what it's always needed: light, movement, rest, food, contact. None of that is priceless. It's all available. What industry has managed to do is make you believe that it's not enough. That the basics are insufficient. That you need the premium version of what nature already offers you for free.
And what if the solution were to simplify?
Everything seems so complex. And yet, everything is so simple.
Expose yourself to natural light. Move your body with enjoyment. Eat when you're hungry. Spend time with people you care about. Connect with nature. Rest without making excuses.
None of that costs money. None of that needs an app. None of that requires a protocol. And all of that is what your physiology actually needs to function.
True self-care isn't like a to-do list. It's like a relationship. A relationship with your body where you listen before you act. Where you trust your feelings before consulting a screen. Where what you do stems from a genuine need of your own, not from an external mandate that someone else is monetizing.
And above all, don't forget that your body and your needs are unique. What works for someone else won't necessarily work for you. What you see on a screen won't necessarily apply to your life. The only real authority on what you need is the signal your body sends you when you stop long enough to listen to it.
Less is more. It's not a slogan. It's physiology.
Sources and references
Baron, KG, Abbott, S., Jao, N., Manalo, N. & Mullen, R. (2017). Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 13(2), 351-354. PhD in clinical psychology, University of Utah.
Berridge, K.C. & Robinson, T.E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward. Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309-369. PhD in psychology, University of Michigan.
Craig, A.D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655-666. Neuroscientist, Barrow Neurological Institute.
Fernandes Prata, M. et al. (2024). Prevalence of Orthosomnia in a General Population Sample. Brain Sciences, 14(11), 1123.
McEwen, B.S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171-179. Neuroendocrinologist, Rockefeller University.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W. W. Norton. PhD, neuroscientist, Indiana University.