Feel The Burnout

Exhausted by the constant inundation of new health fads? You’ve got “wellness fatigue”, 

- Lottie Winter

If one more person talks about the benefits of mindfulness, I will throw fermented cabbage at them. Just kidding. But I do have a lot of fermented cabbage happily rotting away in my kitchen, thanks to yet another transient wellness obsession that failed to retain my attention. Next to said cabbage sits the blade from a dismantled Vitamix, an unopened handheld spiralizer and more rogue nuts than I care to count—all symptomatic of a phenomenon known in the Vogue offices as “wellness fatigue”, whereby slavery to relentless health trends has resulted in redundant household clutter as well as complete emotional exhaustion.

It’s not that I’m rejecting the notion of wellness in its raw form (the optimisation of physical and mental health), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t first in line for every superfood craze or new health check. In the last year alone I have given up sugar, gluten, grains and dairy (only to reintroduce three out of the four), and had everything from my DNA to my dreams analysed in the name of wellness. And I’m tired of it.

Despite my fatigue, wellness remains a seriously big business, with an estimated global worth of US$3.72 trillion (the world’s youngest trillion dollar industry) and a healthy annual growth of 14 percent. To satisfy this exponential consumption, brands generate multiple manifestations of what is ultimately one singular premise—health—resulting in throngs of fads, from the more mainstream trends (mindfulness, superfoods, supplements) to ones that border on quackery (“goat yoga” being the pinnacle).