Work, deadlines, managing a home and a young child; my life has always had its fair share of stress. So when I started hearing terms like cortisol cleanse, nervous system reset and mindfulness, I felt like this might be a turning point.
The instructions were everywhere: breathe deeply each time you need to ground yourself, meditate every morning, take a walk in nature to lower your cortisol, take magnesium for a good night’s sleep, journal your thoughts; and while I started doing all these to ease my stress, trying to keep up with them somehow ended up causing me more stress. I could practically hear my YouTube guru clucking his tongue in disappointment if I missed my morning meditation. Somehow, my emotions had become homework.
And as I spoke to more people about it, I realised that I was not the only one feeling this way. So, what’s changed? How have we suddenly become these cortisol-conscious, yoga-loving people who now need a checklist to relax?
When did wellness become work?
Judgement is embedded in today’s wellness culture, more so for women who are already conditioned to not be an inconvenience, recover quickly and hold families together without visible cracks. It’s turned into a monstrous contradiction: feel your feelings, but do it quietly. Heal, but efficiently. Process your trauma without disrupting the equilibrium of others. So instead of asking what we actually need, we ask, “What’s the fastest way to bounce back?”
Endocrinologist Dr Sona Abraham points out the issue with this culture of forced positivity, “We’ve confused appearing calm with actually being calm,” she says. She traces this back to early emotional conditioning: homes where difficult feelings weren’t welcomed or named. Children raised in emotionally unavailable environments often learn to hide discomfort rather than process it. “That suppression doesn’t disappear,” she says. “It shows up later as hormonal dysregulation, immunity problems, chronic pain.”
Dr Rita Mendonca, psychologist at My Mind Gains explains, “We’ve become afraid of negative emotions because we’ve been sold the idea that discomfort means something is wrong with us. We live in a world of constant comparison. Everyone online looks calm, healed, regulated. No one is posting their 2am spirals or their rage in traffic. So when you feel messy, you assume you’re the problem.”
What healthy coexistence with stress actually looks like
“It looks boring; that’s probably why no one sells it online,” says Dr Mendonca. “Healthy coexistence means you feel stress and still function, you’re tired and still show up, you’re anxious and still do your best to articulate, you’re overwhelmed and still make decisions. Stress isn’t meant to disappear. It’s meant to rise, peak and fall. A healthy system doesn’t say, ‘I should never feel stressed’. It says, ‘I can handle this’”.
What actually helps
Now, I’m not saying the answer is turning your guest room into a rage room (or is it?), but I did realise something from my failed attempts at practicing structured wellness: the body often wants expression, not optimisation. Sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is stomp around, ugly-cry, say the hard sentence out loud and let the moment pass without trying to turn it into a self-improvement task.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
