Are you guilty of wellness bypassing? Probably

Sam Parker, The Independent

I once lived a perfect day. It started with sitting cross-legged by an open window for 30 minutes of meditation, with morning light beaming vitamin D directly into my face. After that, it was time to stretch: one, two, three sun salutations, timing the movement of my limbs to long, deep breaths. In the shower, I slowly turned the warm water to cold in order to flood my system with endorphins, before stepping out and repeating a round of positive affirmations into the mirror. In the evening, I chewed my dinner mindfully before switching on the TV. Then, two hours before bed, I put away all my screens and lit some candles. By the flickering flames, I wrote down all my worries in a journal and bullet-pointed how I’d tackle them the next day, before listing the multitudinous reasons I had in my life to be deeply, truly grateful. With eight full hours left before I needed to be up again, I lay down on my pillow, closed my eyes, took a round of deep, calming breaths and finally... panicked.

The lure of the wellness industry can be incredibly strong, particularly if you suffer from anxiety. All my life I had experienced periods of vague, oppressive dread that could make entire weeks a misery, and in recent years, it had started to feel like the solution was only ever one more swipe away. My algorithm served up an endless well of gurus advocating journalling or diaphragmatic breathing or running in your underwear through the frozen tundras of Norway. I dabbled in all of it (OK, not the Norway one), figuring if I just landed on the perfectly optimised mental health routine, I’d banish my doom for good. The fact that no combination of these activities seemed to work made me quietly fear I might be broken, that anxiety was simply my lot in life.

In 1984, the American psychotherapist John Welwood coined the phrase “spiritual bypassing”. He used it to describe people in the hippie movement who used then-exotic practices like yoga and meditation as a substitute for working on deeper problems with their mental health. There is a “widespread tendency”, he warned, “to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues (and) psychological wounds”. Welwood believed psychology and spiritualism could complement each other, but said he saw too many people trying to shortcut their way to inner peace and “rise above the raw and messy side of [their] humanness before (they) have fully faced and made peace with it”. Fifty years on, we are now living in an age of wellness bypassing. The global wellness industry is worth $5.6 trillion, buoyed by an endless tide of Instagram-friendly self-care tips often presented as quick fixes for low moods, depression or anxiety. In many cases, the science backing them is spurious at best. An investigation published by The Guardian last week found that more than 50 per cent of the top trending videos offering mental health advice on TikTok contain misinformation. These spanned misleading claims about the powers of saffron and magnesium glycinate to dubious methods promising to “heal trauma within an hour”. One theory posited that you can reduce anxiety by eating an orange in the shower (surely only true if you’re anxious about having sticky fingers while you eat fruit).

Jevin D West is the co-author of a book called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Date-Driven World and leads research teams attempting to fight back against misinformation online. Health and wellness, West tells me, is the biggest problem area of all. “Nothing comes even close to its ability to attract people’s attention and convince them to let their guard down,” he says. “There is the outright disinformation, of course, that has an intentional element. But a huge part of what we’ve seen is misleading content. Maybe it has some elements of truth. It might even be citing relevant science. But often, it’s about an area there isn’t much research on.” Take shilajit, for example, the tar-like supplement purported to boost testosterone.

West’s number one piece of advice for consuming online content is an oldie but a goodie: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Healing your decades-old family trauma by “cozymaxxing” is probably not going to cut it. But he acknowledges that, even for savvy social media users, this can be incredibly difficult to follow. “Because we want to be convinced,” he says. “We want that elixir that can fix this emotional issue we might have. We want to believe.” We also want to belong.