Wellness culture is making us worried sick

27-year-old Cecily* has always struggled with “debilitating” health OCD. “It will make me feel like I constantly need reassurance all the time that I’m not going to die,” she says. While Cecily has grappled with these feelings since being diagnosed with a chronic illness at 15, she feels as though society’s mounting obsession with ‘wellness’ has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point she became fixated on tracking all the health data available on her 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 spiked due to anxiety. “In the end they said I was completely fine – just very anxious.”

From Cicero to Lord Byron to Charles Darwin, people have always worried about their health. In A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria, author Caroline Crampton delves into the cultural history of health anxiety – or ‘hypochondria’, her preferred term – a mental condition characterised by the 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 like Hippocrates used the term ‘hypochondria’ to refer to conditions which were thought to arise from an area of the abdomen known as the ‘hypochondrium’, until scientific advances in the 17th and 18th century began to supplant the dominance of humoral theory. “By the early 19th century, hypochondria had become entirely a condition of the mind, rather than the body,” Crampton continues. “That sense of it as a mental illness remains today.”

While hypochondria is not a ‘new’ condition, as Crampton also points out, it’s likely the rise of wellness culture has made hypochondria more prevalent. Notably, a 2020 study found that the proportion of students at a US university who reported feelings of health anxiety rose “exponentially” from 8.67 per cent in 1985 to 15.22 per cent in 2017. “Wellness culture encourages people to view their health as a perpetual work in progress and to be constantly monitoring how they feel — two things that can heighten anxiety and preoccupation with illness,” she explains. “Rather than being able to appreciate the health and capabilities that we have, we are encouraged to always strive for more, to be constantly tweaking and improving ourselves.”

This chimes with 23-year-old Helena. Like Cecily, she too has OCD and particularly struggles with obsessive thoughts about her health. “I’ve always been predisposed towards anxiety over my bodily health,” she says. But she adds that consuming content about wellness on social media has made her anxiety worse. “It felt like I was helping myself, but really all I was doing was throwing more money into the wellness industry and wasting my time online rather than doing things that actually make me feel good.”

Broadly speaking, wellness encourages prioritising our health – which sounds good in theory. But as the industry continues to boom, it’s becoming ever clearer that this obsession with being ‘well’ could actually be making us worried sick. We’re encouraged to constantly self-surveil, 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 shifting. Today, good health no longer merely constitutes ‘not being ill’: instead, largely thanks to the spread of wellness, health is now commonly regarded as an ongoing project to be continually worked on.

“I see a lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimes that are pushed now with the quack medicine of the past” – Caroline Crampton

“At one point I was taking handfuls of supplements every morning, listening to all these podcasts about nutrition, and watching tons of ‘what I eat in a day’ videos from personal trainers who also happened to be models,” Helena recalls, explaining that she would “beat [herself] up” if she didn’t stick to the strict routines or diets she saw promoted by wellness influencers and “just become more anxious” as a result. “It was a vicious cycle,” she says. “I think the wellness industry sells you a magic cure which only makes you more sick.”

It’s not irrational to worry about our health, especially as NHS funding cuts in the UK means 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 hellbent on manufacturing anxieties in consumers in order to sell snake oil-style ‘solutions’ right back to us. “One doctor I interviewed described a lot of wellness information and remedies as ‘1750s medicine’ and I do see a lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimes that are pushed now with the quack medicine of the past,” Crampton says.

It’s worth noting too that many of the products and services flogged by the wellness industry are only accessible to the wealthy given their high price points. We’ve now reached a stage where private clinics are charging £400 for “a comprehensive general wellbeing profile”; companies like ZOE and Lingo are shilling continuous glucose monitors to non-diabetics; and in a recent episode of The Kardashians, family matriarch Kris underwent a full-body ‘preventative’ MRI scan to screen for potential health issues, a procedure which cost an estimated $2,499. “It’s definitely the case today that there are companies with business models predicated on the health anxieties of people with plenty of disposable income,” Crampton says, highlighting that this chimes with the historical view that hypochondria was predominantly an illness reserved for the rich.

“The kind of ailments you suffered marked you out as a member of a particular class as clearly as the type of clothes you wore,” Crampton writes in A Body Made of Glass. “Conditions that came from within, like hypochondria and nervous illnesses, were associated with refinement, imagination and intellectual activity.” But although there has long been a link between social class and hypochondria, she stresses that the condition doesn’t 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 healthcare options and to health education contributes to higher levels of uncertainty and anxiety,” she says.

Crampton, who suffers from hypochondria herself, stresses that accessible treatment is available for hypochondriacs, and there are steps people can take to stop themselves from spiralling. “Personally, I know that I have to be really careful about the accounts and publications I follow, because if I see too much wellness content I am prone to fall into anxious thought patterns I've worked hard to remove myself from,” she says. “Just having so much information about health available, a lot of it not evidence-based, can keep our minds dwelling on aspects of our bodies that we would otherwise not think about very often.”

Cecily too says she has reevaluated her relationship with the more extreme side of wellness. “I know what my limits are now,” she says, adding that she has stopped wearing her Apple Watch. Similarly, Helena is trying to put less pressure on herself and has stopped trying to ‘optimise’ her life for the sake of it. “I am trying to come to see wellness as something different, a sort of satisfaction with my life on my terms [...] something which requires lie ins and night outs and bowls of ice cream rather than, or as well as, gym sessions and eating a healthy diet, because these are also things which make me feel well, grounded, content,” she says. “Because can we really call it ‘wellness’ if it makes so many of us feel so fundamentally unwell?”

*Name has been changed

A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria is available here.