Is the wellness culture fueling a health anxiety crisis?

27-year-old Cecily* has always struggled with “debilitating” health OCD. “It’s going to make me feel like I need constant reassurance all the time that I’m not going to die,” she says. While Cecily has dealt with these feelings since being diagnosed with a chronic illness at the age of 15, she feels as though society’s growing obsession with ‘wellness’ has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point it became obsessed with tracking all the health data available on the Apple Watch. “I was constantly checking my heart rate,” she recalls, explaining how she once went to A&E after her heart rate spiked due to anxiety. “In the end they said I was perfectly fine – just very anxious.”

From Cicero to Lord Byron to Charles Darwin, people have always been concerned about their health. IN A body made of glass: a story of hypochondria, author Caroline Crampton delves into the cultural history of health anxiety – or ‘hypochondria’, her preferred term – a mental condition characterized by the constant and often unwarranted fear that one has a serious illness. “The condition has been on quite a journey over the last 2,500 years,” she tells Dazed, explaining that physicians like Hippocrates used the term ‘hypochondria’ to refer to conditions thought to arise from an area of ​​the abdomen known as ‘ hypochondrium’, until scientific advances in the 17th and 18th centuries began to replace the dominance of the humoral theory. “By the early 19th century, hypochondria had become entirely a condition of the mind, rather than of the body,” Crampton continues. “That sense of it as a mental illness remains today.”

While hypochondria is not a ‘new’ condition, as Crampton points out, it is likely that the rise of the wellness culture has made hypochondria more widespread. In particular, a 2020 study found that the percentage of students at an American university who reported feelings of health anxiety increased “exponentially” from 8.67 percent in 1985 to 15.22 percent in 2017. “Wellness culture encourages people to see their health as a permanent work in progress and to constantly monitor how they feel – two things that can increase anxiety and preoccupation with the disease,” she. explains. “Instead of being able to appreciate the health and abilities we have, we are encouraged to always strive for more, to constantly change and improve ourselves.”

This sounds like 23-year-old Helena. Like Cecily, she has OCD and particularly struggles with obsessive thoughts about her health. “I’ve always been prone to anxiety about my physical health,” she says. But she adds that consuming wellness-related content on social media has made her anxiety worse. “I felt like I was helping myself, but really all I was doing was throwing more money into the wellness industry and wasting my time on the internet instead of doing things that actually make me feel good.”

In general, wellness encourages prioritizing our health – which sounds good in theory. But as the industry continues to thrive, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this obsession with being ‘good’ can actually be troubling us. We are encouraged to constantly monitor ourselves, with new technologies enabling us to track how many steps we take, how many calories we burn, how many hours we sleep and how fast our hearts beat. At the same time, the definition of ‘good health’ is changing. Today, good health is no longer simply about “not being sick”: on the contrary, largely thanks to the spread of wellness, health is now commonly regarded as an ongoing project that must be constantly worked on.

“I see many parallels between the supplements, diets and regimens now being pushed with the quack medicine of the past” – Caroline Crampton

“At one point I was taking handfuls of supplements every morning, listening to all these nutrition podcasts and watching a lot of ‘what I eat in a day’ videos from personal trainers who were also models,” recalls Helena, explaining that she would “beat [herself] up” if she didn’t stick to the strict routines or diets she saw promoted by health influencers and “just became more anxious” as a result. “It was a vicious cycle,” she says. “I think the wellness industry sells you a magic cure that only makes you sicker.”

It is not irrational to worry about our health, especially as NHS funding cuts in the UK mean that the state healthcare system is not as reliable or robust as it should be. But it’s fair to point out that the wellness industry is increasingly bent on manufacturing anxiety in consumers in order to sell us snake oil-style “solutions.” “One doctor I interviewed described a lot of health information and medicine as ‘the medicine of the 1750s,’ and I see a lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimens being pushed now with the medicines of the past,” says Crampton.

It’s also worth noting that many of the products and services flogged by the wellness industry are only accessible to the wealthy given their high prices. We have now reached a stage where private clinics are charging £400 for “a comprehensive profile of general well-being”; companies like ZOE and Lingo are shillings continuous glucose monitor for non-diabetics; and in a recent episode of The Kardashians, family matriarch Kris underwent a ‘preventive’ full-body MRI scan to check for potential health problems. a procedure which cost about $2,499. “It’s definitely the case today that there are companies with business models based on the health anxieties of people with a lot of disposable income,” says Crampton, noting that this resonates with the historical view that hypochondria was largely a disease reserved for the wealthy.

“The kind of ailments you suffered marked you as a member of a certain class as clearly as the kind of clothes you wore,” Crampton writes in A body made of glass. “Conditions originating from within, such as hypochondria and nervous diseases, were associated with refinement, imagination, and intellectual activity.” But although there has long been a link between social class and hypochondria, she points out that the condition does not discriminate. “Recent research has actually suggested that lower socioeconomic status is associated with a higher risk of health anxiety, with the idea that a lack of regular access to good health care options and health education contributes to higher levels of insecurity and anxiety,” she says.

Crampton, who suffers from hypochondria herself, points out that affordable treatment is available for hypochondriacs and that there are steps people can take to stop themselves from spiraling. “Personally, I know I have to be really careful about the accounts and publications I follow, because if I see a lot of health content, I tend to fall into anxious thought patterns that I’ve worked hard to break myself out of,” she says. . “Simply having so much health information available, much of it not evidence-based, can keep our minds from dwelling on aspects of our bodies that we might not otherwise think about very often.”

Even Cecily says she’s re-evaluated her relationship with the more extreme side of wellness. “I know what my limits are now,” she says, adding that she no longer wears the Apple Watch. Similarly, Helena is trying to put less pressure on herself and has stopped trying to ‘optimize’ her life for its own sake. “I’m trying to look at wellness as something different, kind of enjoying my life on my own terms. […] something that requires lie-ins and nights out and scoops of ice cream instead of, or also, gym sessions and healthy eating, because those are also things that make me feel good, grounded, satisfied,” she says. “Because can we really call it ‘welfare’ if it makes so many of us feel so fundamentally bad?”

*Name has been changed

A Body Made of Glass: A Story of Hypochondria is available here.