The New Wellness Workbook: How to Achieve Enduring Health and Vitality

"It’s a great book. It’s the source book for a lot of the thinking I’ve been talking about, and there’s a fascinating autobiographical narrative running all the way through. Travis uses the book to outline his ideas and to tell the story of how and why he left professional medicine to set up the first dedicated ‘Wellness Center,’ in California’s Marin County in 1975. It’s debatable whether Travis actually was the first. One can point to lots of similar, parallel examples that offered clients the same type of service, but Travis, I think, could argue he was the first to use the actual branding when calling his operation ‘The Wellness Resource Center’. The Wellness Workbook is a practical textbook. It contains most of the documents Travis would use in his consultations and it essentially takes the reader through a typical course offered by the centre. All these graphs and questionnaires provide a fascinating glimpse into what the pursuit of wellness meant in the 1970s. The book’s real value, though, lies in the autobiographical aspect. It’s an early example of what has now become a veritable subgenre of self-help books, the ‘wellness journey’. Travis is extremely candid about his own sense of professional and personal malaise—how he trained as a doctor, and in the early 1970s became incredibly disheartened with the fact that when faced with wards of terminal cancer patients he couldn’t do anything other than load them up with painkillers. At one point, Travis describes how he was pushed to the point of suicide through a combination of stress, disillusionment, and the weight of his own familial expectations. His father was a well-loved country doctor, and Travis realised his work was utterly at odds with the small town, long-term, personally focused work his father had done all his working life. Travis’ problem was thus two-fold: he was wrestling with the frustration that came from realising the limits of his work and he was struggling with all manner of psychological hang-ups regarding his father. He needed to deal with both challenges at once. He set about this by trying to develop a more holistic approach to medicine. He would try and attend to his patients’ mood and mindset as well as their physical ailments. If someone came to him with high blood pressure, rather than giving them a handful of drugs, he would talk to them about relaxation techniques. At the same time, he was trying to self-analyse his own life, what he had done well and what he had done wrong. This twin approach thus set the tone for what he would later term ‘wellness’: a detailed, comprehensive re-evaluation of all aspects of an individual’s life, oriented towards the task of helping them to develop towards long term mental and physical health. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other book along these lines is High Level Wellness (1977) by Donald Ardell. It’s another practical guidebook; but with a personal narrative of its own. Travis and Ardell knew each other and worked with each other. If you’re interested in The Wellness Workbook , I very much suggest you have a look at the Ardell too. It makes for a curious study to compare their ‘systems,’ their ‘journeys’ and their pages of questionnaires. Of course, there are problems. In both there’s a covert, quietly spoken but nonetheless detectable sense of patient-blaming: if these methods don’t work, if you fail to get well, then it’s your fault. But beyond that, there’s a very clear sense of what wellness used to mean. And what I argue in my book is that there’s a lot we can extrapolate from wellness, seventies style, that can help us through our own contemporary difficulties."