The Wellness [Journalism] Guru

This article is published in the Sickness & Health issue of The Mockingbird magazine, set to hit mailboxes later this week. Raphael will be a featured speaker at HELP, our conference in NYC this April. 

Meditation apps. Superfoods. Aromatherapy. Crystals. Charcoal skincare face masks. In recent years these products, and others of their ilk, have gone from hippy-dippy “alternatives” to commonplace; they are commodities in an ever-expanding multi-billion-dollar industry. Yet it’s hard to determine whether such products are as effective as they say they are, because what we want from them is immeasurable: a feeling of control and transcendence. In other words, “wellness.”

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If there is any sickness in the health industry, longtime journalist Rina Raphael has written about it. Her new book is called The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. But Raphael, though not without humor, isn’t approaching her subject as a superior skeptic; like many of us, she bought the organic superfood, the healing crystals, the $45 dollar exercise class. “We have become a self-care nation,” she writes, “though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of well-being.” Not only is The Gospel of Wellness research-based and timely but also, in its way, timeless: Raphael understands the legitimate human longing for wholeness, and the way marketers are now capitalizing on it.

Raphael’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, and Fast Company. Her newsletter, Well To Do, keeps subscribers up-to-date “on the latest, greatest, and oddest news in health and wellness.” To read Raphael’s work is to feel unshackled from the imperatives of the wellness industry: do more, work harder and, ultimately, buy a lot of products. But in Raphael’s own words, her research is about more than just debunking wellness myths. It’s “about American women’s search for a cure to all that ails them—and their journey to regain something they believe they’ve lost.” Below, we talk about the pseudo-religious framework underpinning this “gospel,” and what a wellness that doesn’t require a flush bank account might look like.

Mockingbird: When it comes to wellness, the language of, “Am I doing enough?” comes up a lot. Perhaps we can begin there — with that specter of individualism. You are responsible for your own wellness to the extent that it can start to feel like you’re failing if you’re not feeling well.

Rina Raphael: Yeah, you always have to be doing more. The goalposts keep moving, and they’re often paired with precise things you need to buy, which are generally quite expensive and cost-prohibitive to most groups.

You know, a lot of people take issue with the subtitle of my book (The False Promise of Self-Care). Often, people will say, “Well, what’s wrong with self-care? I thought self-care was good for us.” I don’t have an issue with real self-care; the problem is the way we’re being sold self-care in ways that distort the meaning of that term. We’re being told it’s all on you, the individual, to take care of yourself. When it’s all on you, the individual, that sets you up for self-blame: you’re not “healthy” enough, you’re not eating a “nutritious” enough diet. If you’re not Zen enough, then it’s because you did something wrong—when really it could be all these other systemic issues, right? Maybe you’re stressed out because your boss always emails you after 6 p.m. Maybe you have no vacation time. Maybe you didn’t get any maternity benefits. We’re constantly telling people to treat the symptoms — to put a Band-Aid over a seeping wound instead of actually looking at the root issues of why we’re so stressed, why we’re so unwell, and why we’re so lonely.

And that’s when wellness becomes a counterproductive cycle of stress. People are veering towards wellness, because they’re concerned about their health, but at the same time, it’s adding more pressure.

M: Right. There’s this great line in the book where you cite, “72 percent of moms are stressed about how stressed they are.” I’m not a mom, but I really relate to that.

RR: We have this perfectionist, performative idea of what wellness is, right? I recently did a story for the LA Times, where I was speaking to therapists who worked with teen girls. These girls were becoming stressed out about not having enough time to do skincare masks and take bubble baths. They were blaming themselves for being stressed, even though, you know, life can be very stressful for teens, but they had this idea that they needed to set aside more time for, basically, skincare rituals. It’s just absurd.

But when it comes to moms, especially moms of young kids, what you often hear is that they don’t have institutional or social support. And when you feel abandoned, then it’s up to you to take care of your health and your family. It’s all on your shoulders, and you feel incredibly overwhelmed.

Courtesy: Unsplash

M: In the book, you talk about “precautionary consumerism” — the fear typically laid at the feet of mothers who have a lot of concerns about buying things with “chemicals” and so-called toxins in them. Can you talk more about this, and the gendered aspects of the wellness industry more broadly?

RR: Women have been drawn to wellness for very specific reasons. That doesn’t mean this doesn’t overlap with men, just that it’s more prominent with women. 

So, if you were to believe the polls, women are more stressed than men, for obvious reasons — especially if you’re talking about working moms. They’re subject to the double shift: working a job and doing the chores and child-rearing at home. Women have more concerns about our food supply, and that’s because they prepare more of the meals for their families. And now it isn’t enough to prepare a nutritious meal. It has to be organic. It has to have trendy ingredients. In the book, I write about how parents would tell me they had broken down crying in a supermarket aisle, like, “What here is safe? What is good enough for my family?” Some of these are legitimate concerns. There have been rare pharmaceutical scandals and issues within America’s food supply chain that make women more concerned about these issues. The problem, however, is that too often this industry exaggerates the risk and how to deal with it.

Also, a lot of women are very dissatisfied with their medical care, or the lack of treatment for chronic conditions. Starting at a younger age, women interact with the medical industry more than men do. So they’re looking to wellness products for alternative support.

But all of that is in addition to how this industry preys on women and their vulnerabilities and desires. For example, because of body-image pressures, diet culture has snuck into wellness. You’ll see a bunch of supplements for “self-care” that are really about beauty or anti-aging.

M: This book, while often critical, comes from such a compassionate standpoint. You demonstrate a real respect for the motivations that draw people to this world.

RR: I wrote this book because I wanted a book that spoke to my experience and the experiences of my friends. I’m not the first to tackle these issues; plenty of skeptics have written about this stuff already. What I found, however, was that sometimes their takeaway would usually be, “I can’t believe people fall for these things.”

But I had fallen for these things. And I looked around, and all my friends had fallen for them, and we think we’re pretty smart. So I wanted to know, what’s really going on here?

I wanted to explain the issue in a very compassionate, empathetic way, because I went through it myself. I got disordered eating from clean eating. I bought all the supplements. I bought the “natural” wine. I felt like there wasn’t enough literature about why people are falling for this. What’s going on with American women that they’re seeking these types of solutions? And also, how does social media — and legacy media — contribute to all of this misinformation?

Oftentimes, there is a lot of criticism about influencers and social media, and most definitely you’ll find misinformation from those sources. But you’ll also find it in top outlets and in women’s media. I used to work for mainstream news outlets. We did a whole bunch of stories on fad diets, and then inevitably, a couple years later, it turned out these diets weren’t so great for you. That wasn’t easy for me to admit, in this book, that I had been a reporter who got stuff wrong. But it’s true. Oftentimes, I was just buying into what everyone else was saying.

And then people wonder why there’s such a lack of trust in the institutional media. That’s part of my plea in this book — media needs to do a better job of actually looking at the science of these health claims. But that doesn’t happen, partially because we treat wellness and health like fashion. It’s not being treated like science.

M: Can you say a little more about why that is?

RR: I think a lot of the ink that we used to spend on fashion and beauty is now being spent on wellness. The people who are writing about it often have little-to-no training in health or science reporting, and it’s rarely impressed on them that they should be looking under the hood. Women’s health magazines and other outlets are just looking to, you know, cater to their audience. Not to mention, many outlets now pump out stories or resort to clickbait to compete in what’s become a cutthroat media landscape.

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M: Early in your book, you explain that “wellness” is hard to define. Would you expound on the  implications of that?

RR: “Wellness” is such a huge category that has over a dozen sub-sectors — it’s physical, spiritual, mental. It includes prevention, maintenance, illness management; it can involve anything from nutrition to fitness to mental health.

And because there is no agreed upon definition, it can just as easily mean meditation as it does activated charcoal toothpaste or skincare masks. It can literally mean anything. If you go to your local Sephora, everything there is for “wellness.” I mean, is the skincare mask wellness? I don’t really know! What does it even mean to be “healthy”? But this is how it’s ballooned into this huge, commodified industrial complex.

M: When was the moment you were like, wellness is religious dogma? 

RR: To be clear, the book title is really tongue-in-cheek. I’m not saying that the pursuit of health today is literally a religion. What I’m saying is: it’s adopting a framework similar to religion in the sense that it’s regulatory and prescriptive. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the people most adoptive of wellness culture are also the ones moving further and further away from organized religion.

Now of course, wellness isn’t the only thing that’s become a kind of substitute for religion. We see it with politics, nationalism, and social justice causes. But this idea of becoming as healthy as you can really does offer people a sense of purpose, community, identity — the kind of things organized religion used to offer us. You see it all the time: people clad head-to-toe in athleisure wear, holding their aluminum water bottles like security blankets, wearing all the cool sneakers. It really is no different than the Harley Davidson motorcycle gang; it’s a way to identify someone else, to say, “Oh, that’s my kind of person.” It’s giving people an identity — and it’s an identity that’s also treasured, right? This is why you have people posting so many gym selfies. There’s millions and millions of gym selfies on Instagram, partially because we’ve set up a virtuous system of health, or “healthism.” It’s like, “Oh you’re so good. You worked out,” as if the people who are healthy are the better people; they’ve done the “right” thing; they’ve “taken care of themselves.”

Everything is now subject to a binary system of good or bad, healthy or toxic, clean or dirty. And so this is how we’ve kind of made it like a new religion — again, very tongue-in-cheek.

M: Speaking of gym selfies, can we talk about the gym-as-church chapter?

RR: Yeah, in that chapter I was investigating the way people look to their gym for social support and community but also for meaning and guidance. Listen, I’m not saying every person treats their gym literally as church. But during my research, I did speak to a lot of people who depended on their Peloton or SoulCycle instructors to be almost like their pastors or their therapists. After class they would get to know their instructor, who then helped them deal with a divorce, a breakup, losing their job, whatever it is. And I think that’s great. But obviously these instructors can’t really deal with bigger issues, like if someone has suicidal tendencies or deep depression. They’re not skilled in that regard, but sometimes they’re the next best thing.

In the book I include a really great quote by Wendy Simonds, who has a book called Woman and Self-Help Culture. She talks about how, decades and decades ago in America, if you needed guidance or advice, you went to a family member or someone in your village. We used to have bigger families — not just siblings, but you had a bunch of cousins, aunts, and uncles. And as American family life has become more isolated, and smaller — and women’s lives more hectic — we have professionalized the giving and taking of advice. If you need advice on what to do about your dumb boyfriend, now you have to go find a therapist, a professional or, better yet, your fitness instructor. And it’s not because women don’t have friends. It’s because women are so busy that they don’t have time to be there for one another.

This is why so much in my book is about communal and social support. So often I hear women say, “My plans to meet up with my friends fell through. I’m so relieved!” Now, they’re not saying, “I don’t want to see my friends.” What they’re saying is, “I’m so exhausted. I have no time for myself. I don’t have the energy for my friends.” This is the tragedy of American life right now — that there is not enough community and social support because we are so incredibly individualized. And that is making us further unwell.

Spot Illustration: Lucy Haslam

M: One part that I did find super moving comes at the end of this same chapter, when you talk about grief, and the passing of your father. I wondered if you’d be willing to speak about that for our readers, and how you related that to this topic. The contrast is very emotional, I think.

RR: I realized that no one from my gym was going to come to my house with a casserole after my dad died. And when people are looking to their gym or their fitness instructors for life lessons, oftentimes what they get are very generic platitudes that really lack substantial meaning and don’t necessarily apply to specific episodes in people’s lives — grief being one of them, right?

For me, the idea of going to my gym during grief was just absolutely absurd. The gym wasn’t going to offer any memorial rites or anything beyond essentially what whittled down to working on your body. And we all have to take care of our bodies, but this conflation of spiritual dogma with what is essentially a business can become conflicting.

M: I appreciated the parts in the book about actual religion. For example, when you went to a wellness-themed retreat, people kept asking what your meditation “practice” was. And your response was, “I don’t meditate. When I need to recenter myself, I open up a Jewish prayer book and recite the prayers I have repeated since childhood.” And people gave you this look like prayer was too “basic.”

RR: Ew, Judaism? Gross! Why would you do that?

M: Haha, yeah. I wondered if you could talk about this idea that religion has become too “basic,” and how more customizable faiths have become fashionable.

RR: Those are two different issues: there’s the elitism, and there’s the mixing and matching. In the book I give the jokey example of how I was treated for saying that I am involved in organized religion, namely Judaism, and how that was considered kind of uncool, especially in a more high-income liberal context. And there are a bunch of reasons for that, some of them legitimate. A lot of scandals have marred organized religion; or maybe the religion you grew up with is now identifying with a certain political group. 

But these trendier modalities — like manifestation, astrology, crystals — they don’t have scandals, primarily because they’re decentralized. You can’t point to a guru at the head of this spirituality who has done all these bad things.

Also, a lot of these — not all of them, but some, especially manifestation — promise to give you things that you very much want in American society. Riches, a good career, the right husband, the best house. It relates to this very consumerist idea of success, and that’s problematic, because people are seeking spirituality to get away from these consumerist, money-obsessed, neoliberal American issues — but then they just go back into the cycle of actually falling for those things again.

Also, I don’t think it’s a mystery why these groups target people who already have their basic needs met. I don’t see manifestation gurus going out to lower-income groups. They go to people who already have their basic needs met.

M: There was such a funny, incisive moment in the book where you ask a manifester whether “the Jews in the Holocaust lacked the right energy to escape Nazi Germany.” And you could hear a pin drop.

RR: Yeah — but see, I also want to maintain that sense of compassion, because these people are just trying to keep afloat, right? What I found in interviewing these manifestation followers is that they are not greedy people. These are millennials just trying to afford a home, to find a good job. They are absolutely concerned and terrified for their future, and if they find a faith that promises to propel them toward whatever it is they think they’re missing, then they’re going to be interested in it. So I have a lot of compassion for that.

But a lot of these New Age modalities are really inward-facing — they’re all about emotional soothing, or what the universe can do for you. So again, when you’re only focused on yourself, that leaves you very lonely, and leads back to being unwell.

You know, people often ask me, so what’s your wellness tip? What’s one thing you do? And I admit, honestly, I am not above this. I still go on Sephora shopping sprees. I still go to boutique gyms. I just don’t buy all-in on the marketing, and I take it with a grain of salt. But really what I most often look to are things I love from Judaism, like social support. And no one wants to hear it, because it’s not cool. It doesn’t have V.C. funding; it’s not out of Silicon Valley.

But I always say, “My one wellness tip? Shabbat dinner.” I have people over almost every Friday night. I have my community over, and we sit down for a meal, and that’s one of the best things. That is not my pitch that everyone has to join Judaism. I know not everyone is able to do Shabbat dinner, to cook, to have people over to their house. But definitely I could do better at trying to get off technology and really enjoying a day of rest with the people I love; there are things you can do that have nothing to do with a price tag. I’m just saying there’s a lot within our own cultures that we can mine, and we just don’t, because they don’t have the right marketing. 

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