The Backlash Against Wellness Optimisation

By Lindsey Brookes | Brookes Therapies

Somewhere along the way, looking after yourself became another thing to get right.

There is a tracker for your sleep, a tracker for your steps, a tracker for your heart rate variability, and an app that will tell you, in a little coloured graph, whether yesterday counted as recovery or not. There are protocols for your morning, your cold exposure, your supplements, your breathing. There is a version of wellness now that looks suspiciously like a second job — one with metrics, targets, and a nagging sense that you are still, somehow, doing it wrong.

I have watched this build for years from the treatment room. Clients arrive with their watch still on, apologising for their sleep score before I have even asked. They know their exact heart rate variability. They could not tell me the last time they felt calm.

That gap is the thing I want to talk about.

When the data replaces the feeling

None of this is nothing. Data can be genuinely useful — it can catch a pattern you would otherwise miss, or give you language for something you already sensed. But somewhere in the last few years, a lot of people stopped asking themselves how they feel and started asking their phone instead. The tracker became the authority on their own body.

And the tracker cannot tell you the thing that actually matters, which is why you feel the way you do. It can tell you that you slept for six hours and eleven minutes. It cannot tell you that you lay awake for the first forty of them running through tomorrow's to-do list, jaw tight, unable to switch off — and it certainly will not tell you what to do about that.

This is where I think the wellness industry has quietly let people down. It has given them more to monitor and less to actually feel better. More optimisation, less rest. More protocol, less permission.

The real epidemic isn't burnout — it's the normalising of it

I don't think most people are in crisis. I think most people are just tired in a way that has become so ordinary they have stopped mentioning it. You don't need to be signed off work or lying on my treatment table in tears to be running on empty — although plenty of people are, and that matters too. Most of the people I see are coping. Managing. Getting through the week. They would never describe themselves as burnt out. They would say they are busy.

But there is a version of depletion that hides inside "busy" — the kind that doesn't announce itself, that just quietly reduces how much of yourself you have left to give by the time evening comes. It is not dramatic. It doesn't show up on a smartwatch as anything alarming. It is simply the slow erosion of feeling like yourself, one full day at a time.

I want to be honest about something: I am not writing this to tell you the answer is a new protocol, or a better tracker, or a more disciplined routine. I think that is exactly the trap. The nervous system does not respond well to being managed like a project. It responds to safety, rest, and being genuinely listened to — by you, first, before anyone else.

What actually helps is usually simpler than we've been sold

Fifteen years in this work has taught me that the things which genuinely help people feel human again are rarely complicated. A hand on a shoulder that is finally allowed to drop. Ten uninterrupted minutes with nowhere else to be. Breath that slows down because the body has decided, quietly, that it is safe enough to let it.

None of that needs a subscription. It needs attention, and it needs you to trust what your own body is telling you over what a screen says it should be telling you.

Over the next few weeks I want to write about this properly — what nervous system fatigue actually is, why rest doesn't always feel restful, and what genuinely helps versus what just adds another task to an already full list. Not because you are broken and need fixing, but because I think a lot of people are ready to put the trackers down and come back to something simpler.

You don't need to have hit a wall for any of this to be for you. You just need a body and a nervous system — which is, as it happens, everyone.