Wellmania: Extreme Misadventures in the Search for Wellness

"Yes, I liked this one. Very much. It’s a really good example of a personal journey through wellness culture and, in that sense—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—it’s a good example of the kind of book I didn’t want to write. I always had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with Well Beings . It was connected to a previous book I wrote about the end of the 1960s called The Bad Trip . I wanted to do something of a follow-up looking at the retreats, the meditation centres, the whole 1970s scene. But as I got into it, I realised that because wellness had such contemporary relevance, it seemed useful to focus on how wellness as a concept came to the fore during the decade. For the record, I have actually tried a lot of the methods and practices I write about in the book. I could have done a journey-through-wellness type of project. But instead, I wanted to write an engaging, narrative-focused cultural history. But I see the value of that more personal engagement, and this is a wonderful example of the form. It’s well-researched and very engaging. It really communicates a sense of curiosity and illustrates how curiosity can lead to commitment, and, how that effort can, in turn, lead to change. Practicing wellness is, invariably, a personal process. One thing that a lot of the practitioners say, and certainly what Travis often said, is that the pursuit of wellness is necessarily subjective. Part of the journey is working out what works for you. That can open you to the criticism that you are simply cherry-picking from lots of different traditions in a restless way, indicative of the way we might swipe and scroll our way through on-screen options. That off-the shelf attitude started in the 1980s with the rise of ‘lifestyle branding’: the tailoring of products to meet personal aspirations. What the practitioners of the 1970s argued, in contrast, was that wellness takes time, commitment and often an investment of money. Wellmania , I think, follows that line. It makes it clear that some things work, and some things don’t. What you need, throughout it all, is curiosity-led focus and a willingness to experiment. Well, yes, there was one book I came across which turned out to be very sobering: Is It Worth Dying For? (1984) by Robert Eliot, a study of work, stress and heart attacks. It drew on Eliot’s own experiences as an academic entering his forties. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, had no history of heart problems. He was interested, as a medical academic, in cardiovascular disease. He was driven, ambitious but he was also being overwhelmed with stress, constantly exhausted going from consultation to seminar to conference and back again with no rest or respite in between. His aim, as he explains, was career advancement. He wanted to be chief of cardiology by his early forties. Professional achievement and the status that came with it: that was his target. But this ambition was the very thing putting enormous pressure on him. He talks about things finally, inevitably, coming to a crisis point when he was at a conference, and he suddenly realised he was having a heart attack. Eliot describes how he made it to a hospital where he told the staff: ‘I know what’s happening, I’m having a heart attack, I’m about to pass out, this is what you need to do.’ He survived, and the rest of the book describes, along with this academic approach to cardiology, the changes he made in his life to deal with the aftermath of the attack and his experience of stress. I couldn’t help but identify with this fellow stressed-out academic. Work shouldn’t kill us, right? There’s no reason that it should. Eliot’s narrative, however, made me think through all the manifold pressures that come with the working life, all of which have got worse since he was writing in the mid-1980s: the presenteeism, the precarity, the demands for extreme commitment with no security in exchange; The idea that you, the worker, are the one who needs to be ever-more robust to deal with these problems. That all seems to me to be completely wrong, and utterly at odds with the idea of well-being. I was writing Well Beings in the thick of all this, entering the same life stage as Eliot. I was also writing it during lockdown, a period that came with its own extreme stresses. Once I came across Is it Worth Dying For? I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure if it would be dreadful or absolutely fabulous for the book, if I had an Eliot-like episode and died during the writing of it. Sensibly, thankfully, I realised I needed to be thinking about things differently. And what I ended up working through the kind of process that John Travis advocated: I slowly, comprehensively, rethought all the habits and routines that made up the way I was living my life. Much of this was on a small level. I like coffee, right? I love a cup first thing in the morning. It is as if I need it to get through the day. From a John Travis/wellness perspective the question here would not be how healthy the coffee is, it would be what’s so terrible about your day that you need a regular infusion of low-level stimulants just to deal with it? It’s a small detail, but examining it opens out a much bigger issue that likely needs attention. Lockdown was like a psychic acid bath that helped me get rid of a lot of things I’d been unknowingly unhappy about. It was only when I had that pocket of slow-time in which to finally think properly for the first time in years, that I realised, leading up to lockdown I’d been very unwell – most likely with anxiety and depression – thanks in part to things that suddenly didn’t exist anymore. The commute didn’t exist anymore, for one. That doesn’t sound like much. A First World problem, for sure. But I couldn’t deny the fact that it had been wearing me down in all kinds of ways. The pace, the grind, the head thumping difficulty of it all. My reaction to it was clearly symptomatic of problems elsewhere, and they needed work. I started to ask myself: What’s important? Who and what are my priorities? What constitutes living well? Hard to answer, but living well certainly has nothing to do with the atmosphere of the contemporary workplace, such as it is, more often than not an arena of perpetual precarity, overwork and terminal freelancing. So, I came out of writing the book thinking: I need to make changes. I need to think about what I’m actually doing and where I’m going. And I don’t mean I suddenly decided to give it all up and go to a meditation retreat. That’s a stereotypical seventies thing. I mean that I took a long hard look at how I was functioning in my role, as I saw it. So: big questions. And no matter how cynical you are about the wellness concept, you can’t get away from the basic value of those deep questions; of searching for an understanding the answers to them in the context of your own life."