Amy Green: Wellness has become another way women feel they’re failing

Eight years ago, I was doing everything right. I was waking at 5am, exercising, journalling, meditating, and exercising all before the work day began. On weekends I was meal prepping, studying, building a business, and still making time for yoga, massages and manicures, because, like many of us, I thought that’s what wellness looked like.

On the outside, I was the picture of a woman who had it together. I had a great career, perfect partner, a calendar filled with holidays to dream of. But, in reality, I was chronically stressed, burnt out and so exhausted that I was sleeping in my car at the end of the day.

If you’d asked me though, I would have said I was taking care of myself.

That’s the wellness trap that no one talks about. We’ve taken something that was supposed to help us feel better – rest, movement, nourishment, connection – and turned it into a performance. It’s merely another checklist and another measure by which we are either succeeding or falling short.

And for women, this isn’t new territory. We’ve spent generations being told to do more, be more, look a certain way, manage our emotions, manage our time, manage our bodies. Wellness culture didn’t free us from that, it repackaged it and made it even harder to keep up with. 

When self-care becomes an unsustainable goal

The wellness industry is worth trillions of dollars globally, and it knows exactly who its primary customer is. Every algorithm-optimised morning routine, every supplement stack, every breathwork protocol is delivered with the same message: if you’re not well, you’re not trying hard enough. And so we try harder.

Rest has become something to earn, movement has become something to track, sleep is now a metric to be optimised, and food has become a game of ‘should I or shouldn’t I’? 

The danger in all of this is we stopped connecting with how we actually feel and became obsessed with am I doing this right?

This is what I call the wellness paradox. The harder we chase wellbeing, the further it moves from us, because we’re not actually resting, we’re performing rest. We’re not nourishing ourselves, we’re auditing ourselves.

I speak with women all the time who constantly share some version of this: I know what I’m supposed to do, I’m just exhausted doing it all.

Breaking up with other people’s wellness

So, what does a different approach actually look like?

It starts with honesty. Not the curated, grateful-for-the-small-things approach. It’s where you look at your life and ask what is genuinely working and what is exhausting you in the name of health, wellbeing and success.

It means getting specific. Wellness is not one-size-fits-all, and it never was. What you need in this season of your life, with this body, this work, this family, these constraints, is different from what a wellness influencer with no children and a flexible schedule can have.

Your version of rest might be a long shower and 30 minutes of reading a book. It might be cancelling something. It might be radical, inconvenient nothingness. 

The most sustainable wellbeing practices aren’t impressive, that’s just what we have been led to believe they need to be like. They’re unglamorous, repetitive and, at times, unexciting. They’re simple and they don’t translate well to Instagram, which is probably why no one is selling them to you.

To truly be well, there’s something else that needs to be done too: releasing the idea that wellness is something you achieve. It isn’t a destination or a finished state, and that’s why it feels so exhausting. It’s a practice of returning, again and again, to what you actually need, rather than what you’ve been told you should want.

You’re not the problem

If wellness culture is making you feel like you’re failing, that’s not a reflection of your discipline or your commitment to yourself, it’s a reflection of an industry that profits from your dissatisfaction.

You were well before you had a morning routine. You were whole before you had a protocol. And the most meaningful thing you can do for your health right now might not be adding anything at all. It might be stopping, simplifying and asking what you actually need, and letting that be enough.