The Language of Wellness

Language has become one of the biggest barriers to talking about wellness.

How many times have you heard that word and rolled your eyes?

Before we go any further, let’s give it a definition.

Merriam-Webster says:  wellness, n.: the quality or state of being in good health especially as an actively sought goal.

The Global Wellness Institute says: wellness is the active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.

Even those “official” definitions made me roll my eyes a bit. Wellness is adjacent to a variety of similar words. Well-being, health, balance…all words that give a similar feeling to our original offending term.

What is it about these words? How should we describe the feeling of dislike, distaste, or disinterest that they give us? Why do we have this reaction to them?

We could make a laundry list of terms that fit this bill, that feel fake, overused, impractical, or just plain annoying. I asked for feedback on irritating wellness terms and received these responses of words or phrases that people I know find irritating: mindful, wellness, embody, bio-hacking, and self-care, among others.

Frankly, that list is just starting to scratch the surface. You might add lifestyle, yoga, embodiment, grounding, drop in, deep breaths, humanness, let it go, and so many more. It’s interesting to note that the name of many disciplines (yoga, mindfulness) and the goal itself (wellness) land on our list of ick-giving terms.

It was my husband that really got me thinking about the pervasive aversion to these words. I have a higher tolerance for wellness words, maybe only because I’m trained in wellness disciplines. Even so, I’ll catch myself checking out when someone starts employing too many “yoga” words, even if it’s in a yoga class.

But in a recent conversation with my husband I used the word “embodied,” at which point he actually rolled his eyes and told me not to use words that made me sound like “those internet people.”

This was problematic, since I do actually think that embodiment is a valid objective for all of us. So is it the practice or task, the way we’re thinking about it, or terrible messaging that’s the problem?

Wellness, like many of these words, holds important space in the place and time of its origin. Although, in the case of this specific word, the people teaching it weren’t naming it the way we do now. Wellness has its roots in many ancient practices, traceable back to traditions like Ayurveda (India, approx. 3000 B.C.), Traditional Chinese Medicine (around the same time period), and Ancient Greek and Roman medicine (500 B.C.).

In these ancient practices, the approach to well-being was equal parts body, spirit, and mind. In modern times we might also call this a “holistic approach.” The ancient Greeks and Romans insisted that lifestyle and environmental factors were significant in our overall health.

As science advanced, however, we reasoned holistic and wellness out of medicine. There was no place for things like spirit and lifestyle in modern medicine and science. We severed the two ways of thinking for good when we decided that the body and brain were two separate systems, determining that the mind and spirit had no place in our well-being.

Since the 1970’s, for a variety of reasons, we’ve begun to realize that separating our health from a broader sense of well-being doesn’t make as much sense as we originally thought. In fact, current science is starting to prove the ways the body and brain are intertwined, indicating that we might have had it wrong when we separated the two in the interest of modern medicine. It seems that the ancient wellness practices understood human nature on a deeper level after all.

As with most things, the internet has made wellness both better and worse. Or, it might be more appropriate to say the internet has made it both more available and more annoying. There are people selling snake oil, I mean, ahem…teaching wellness everywhere now. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook are loaded with influencers and teachers real and otherwise using these words rampantly. Worse yet, ads for real and fake businesses alike are everywhere promising embodiment, groundedness, and the fix-all solution to all your burnout.

Perhaps the reason we find these terms so grating is actually that they offer something we want. Lifestyle, groundedness, slowness, mindfulness, embodiment…these are things I believe we all want, at least to some degree, in our daily lives.

As it turns out then, one of our biggest points of friction with these words is that they offer something desirable. With people lobbing these terms at us around every turn, it certainly seems like it should be easy. But how do we get it? Because the usual delivery of these words lacks for solutions. Download a meditation app, take a YouTube yoga class, drink warm lemon water in the mornings and your life will be grounded.

You bought the supplement, took some hot yoga classes for a bit, and tried those guided meditations. You felt a little better, but it was hard to keep up with those habits, especially when the payout wasn’t as good as you hoped. You found that, despite the shiny packaging of your new wellness routine, you were still scrolling on your phone at night, drinking too much caffeine, and not sleeping.

This is where we truly experience frustration with wellness - done right, it isn’t shiny at all. In fact, it will probably feel an awful lot like work. Cooking more meals, sitting in silence and greeting the chaos in your thoughts, working a little each day for years at better balance in the body and brain. Wellness as it was prioritized in ancient practices was a very slow burn.

As musicians, our closest comparison to this type of time and depth investment is our performance skills. Compare where you are now to what you played like as a beginner. They are likely very different things, but without one defining moment of instant growth. Rather, you spent many, many hours over many, many years improving incrementally, with change happening slowly enough that you usually couldn’t see the evidence of it every day.

Patience, depth (another good wellness term), and incremental change do not sell well on the internet. Our culture prioritizes fast and flashy. How many videos and posts have you seen that offer a thirty second hack that will change your life? It’s true that we can do good things with thirty seconds, but I would argue that is a different category of wellness.

Interestingly, wellness has saturated everything from school to work to music. Why? I believe it’s because we genuinely need it. But what started as well-intentioned people sharing things that worked for them or teachers sharing things they have spent years studying has been overrun in many ways by those flashy internet voices. When we feel dissatisfied with the results or get the impression someone is behaving in a disingenuous way we blame wellness and the cycle begins again.

I have studied a variety of wellness modalities both formally and through dedicated personal practice. Even with hundreds upon hundreds of hours under my belt, I have barely scratched the surface. It amazes me how many people will speak from a stance of expertise when they have no formal training. It is not surprising how difficult it is to get academic institutions to take wellness seriously as an expertise or an offering.

Training matters for a variety of reasons. If we are teaching a movement modality, we need to keep people safe and teach them in a way that will not cause them to injure themselves. Because well-being should also involve the mind and the spirit, we enter into emotional territory with these disciplines. If you are going to teach them, you must be clear on what is appropriate and what is outside your scope of knowledge.

Vocabulary is free, but as we know because of our verbal aversions, any word used out of context enough will change meanings.

There is another aspect of this vocabulary that could be a discussion of its own, and that is the origin of these terms we find so easy to hate. Many of them have been around since their ancient origins. They come from languages much more nuanced than ours, like Sanskrit and Pali, with true meanings that are difficult to translate into English. Distilled over time, we lose the essence that was the root of their meaning.

These terms, in most cases, hold important space in their discipline and language of origin. It would be impossible to put the amount of context that has been lost back into place in one Instagram post, or this blog post. I’m looking forward to further debunking and defining some of my favorite least-favorite wellness words and getting to the root of their fall from grace.

We are often bothered by things that point out our flaws. For the most part, we are not mindful, grounded, embodied, or practiced in self-care. It is grating to see content day in and day out that implies it should be easy to be these things, but maybe on a deeper level it is grating because we desire it. It’s possible that, despite the massive campaign to undermine it, wellness might be the thing we all want most.