We Have Turned Wellbeing Into Another Thing to Fail At

Somewhere along the way, we managed to make wellbeing stressful.

Which, when you think about it, is quite an achievement.

Mindfulness was supposed to help us stop striving quite so much. It was supposed to teach us to notice our lives rather than constantly judge them. To breathe. To pay attention. To accept that not every moment needs improving, measuring, optimising or turning into a personal development project.

And then we got hold of it.

Now we have mindfulness apps.

Meditation streaks.

Sleep scores.

Readiness scores.

Recovery scores.

Breathing exercises that tell us whether we breathed successfully.

Watches congratulating us because we stood up.

Journals that need filling in every morning.

Cold-water plunges.

Red-light panels.

Supplements.

Retreats.

Courses.

Podcasts explaining how to listen to fewer podcasts.

Morning routines that appear to require getting out of bed at 4.37am, exposing yourself to sunlight, drinking something containing Himalayan salt and then writing down seventeen things you're grateful for before most normal people have located their trousers.

Wellbeing has become another arena in which we can look at everybody else and think:

I'm not doing enough.

And I think we've completely missed the point.

Because sometimes wellbeing doesn't look like meditation.

Sometimes it looks like making a pizza.

Sometimes it looks like digging a hole in the garden.

Sometimes it looks like kneading bread.

Sometimes it looks like cooking dinner for somebody.

Sometimes it is going for a run with a dog who has absolutely no interest whatsoever in your personal growth journey and would simply like to sniff that hedge for another four minutes.

Sometimes it is making something badly.

Sometimes it is doing something ordinary.

And sometimes it is simply getting on with your life.

I should probably make it clear that I'm not anti-mindfulness.

Quite the opposite.

Mindfulness changed my life.

My route into it wasn't particularly glamorous.

I didn't discover mindfulness on a beach in Bali while drinking coconut water beside a man called River.

I discovered it because my life went badly wrong.

In 2007, I had a skiing accident.

And like many of the genuinely important changes in our lives, what came afterwards wasn't something I had planned.

I began exploring mindfulness because I needed something.

Not because I wanted to become enlightened.

Not because I wanted an impressive morning routine.

Not because I thought sitting cross-legged would look good on Instagram.

I needed a practical way of dealing with my own mind.

And over time, mindfulness became deeply important to me.

Important enough that eventually it found its way into my work.

Into baking.

Into teaching.

Into The Mindful Baker.

Into the strange, winding collection of things I've attempted to create over the years.

But the longer I've been around the wellbeing world, the more I think we are in danger of turning something wonderfully simple into something absurdly complicated.

And, worse than that, something else people can fail at.

The wellbeing industry has discovered the achievement badge

Human beings love measurement.

I know this because I am one of them.

Put a number in front of me and I immediately want to improve it.

Running pace.

Peloton output.

Sales.

Amazon ranking.

Website traffic.

Calories.

Distance.

Conversion rate.

If my toaster gave me a Toast Performance Score every morning, I would almost certainly spend several weeks trying to get into the top 5%.

That's the problem.

Measurement can be incredibly useful.

But measurement also changes our relationship with things.

Running stops being running.

It becomes pace.

Sleeping stops being sleeping.

It becomes a sleep score.

Meditating stops being sitting quietly.

It becomes a streak.

You do 47 consecutive days of meditation and feel wonderful about yourself.

Then you miss Tuesday.

And somehow Wednesday morning begins with the bizarre thought: No Joke, I did over 10 years of 20 minute meditations every single day. I didn't miss a single day. Was that mindfulness or OCD???

I've failed at mindfulness.

Think about that sentence.

Failed.

At mindfulness.

At the practice whose entire philosophy includes accepting what is happening without endlessly judging yourself.

It's magnificently ridiculous.

We have essentially taken a philosophy that says, "You don't have to keep proving yourself," and added a leaderboard.

And I understand why.

Apps need engagement.

Businesses need customers.

Wearables need reasons for you to look at them.

Courses need progress markers.

There is nothing inherently sinister about any of that.

Many of these things genuinely help people.

Meditation apps have introduced millions of people to practices they might never otherwise have discovered.

Fitness watches motivate people to move.

Therapy apps increase access.

Sleep trackers can reveal useful patterns.

I'm not suggesting we throw everything into a giant wellness bonfire.

I'm suggesting we remember which way round the relationship is supposed to work.

The technology should serve us.

We shouldn't end up serving the technology.

Because the moment your wellbeing routine becomes another source of guilt, something has gone badly wrong.

You do not need another life to feel better in this one

A huge amount of modern wellbeing quietly sells us the same message:

Your current life isn't quite right.

But don't worry.

There's a better version available.

You just need the right routine.

The right product.

The right diet.

The right app.

The right habits.

The right retreat.

The right morning.

The right version of yourself.

And I think this can become incredibly corrosive.

Because what happens to Tuesday?

What happens to standing in the kitchen making dinner?

What happens to walking the dog?

What happens to gardening?

What happens to chopping an onion?

What happens to sitting with somebody you love?

What happens to the gigantic percentage of life that isn't transformation?

We keep waiting for life to become more profound.

And meanwhile, life keeps happening.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to make things happen.

Businesses.

Books.

Products.

Ideas.

Workshops.

Some have gone well.

Some haven't.

Some have looked promising and then gone nowhere.

Some have taken considerably longer than I imagined.

I have had ideas that I was convinced would work.

The public, rather rudely, did not always share my enthusiasm.

I've built things.

Changed things.

Restarted things.

Rebranded things.

Reduced prices.

Raised prices.

Tested adverts.

Changed adverts.

Created new products.

Sent emails.

Waited.

Sent more emails.

Waited again.

There have been plenty of moments when I've thought:

When exactly is one of these bloody things going to break through?

And perhaps strangely, that experience has taught me quite a lot about wellbeing.

Because when you spend years chasing outcomes, eventually you discover that your life cannot depend entirely on outcomes.

If it does, you're in trouble.

You need things that are valuable before you know how they turn out.

Baking can be like that.

Gardening can be like that.

Making things can be like that.

You put your hands into something real.

And for a while, the result isn't the point.

Dough doesn't care about your LinkedIn profile

This is one of the things I love about bread.

Dough is spectacularly unimpressed by you.

It doesn't care what you earn.

It doesn't care how many followers you have.

It doesn't care whether your business is smashing targets.

It doesn't care whether you've "crushed the week."

It doesn't care whether you completed your gratitude journal this morning.

You either paid attention to it or you didn't.

You feel whether it is too wet.

Too dry.

Too tight.

Ready.

Not ready.

You stretch it.

Fold it.

Shape it.

Wait.

There is something beautifully democratic about making food.

Your hands become occupied.

Your attention narrows.

You stop thinking entirely in abstractions.

There is flour on the table.

There is dough underneath your fingers.

There is something happening now.

And that, fundamentally, is mindfulness.

Not the branding of mindfulness.

Not the lifestyle.

Not the equipment.

The thing itself.

Attention.

Presence.

Contact with what is actually happening.

We sometimes talk about mindfulness as though it belongs in silence.

But it doesn't.

You can be mindful while kneading dough.

You can be mindful while washing up.

You can be mindful while planting potatoes.

You can be mindful while stirring a saucepan.

You can be mindful while making pizza with twelve noisy children while one of them has somehow managed to get flour up their nose.

Mindfulness does not require incense.

It requires attention.

The hands may be one of the most underrated routes into the mind

We spend an extraordinary amount of modern life inside our heads.

Emails.

Messages.

News.

Deadlines.

Opinions.

Notifications.

Decisions.

Comparisons.

Speculation.

Anxiety.

Planning.

Replaying.

Forecasting.

We're physically sitting in one room while mentally occupying seventeen others.

That is why working with your hands can feel so powerful.

When you cook, garden, bake, paint, mend, build or make, attention has somewhere physical to go.

You don't necessarily have to fight your thoughts.

You give them competition.

Your hands say:

Come over here.

This needs doing.

And there is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that.

A carrot does not need your five-year plan.

It needs planting.

Bread does not need you to resolve your existential uncertainty.

It needs shaping.

Dinner does not particularly care whether you have achieved your potential.

It will burn if you don't turn the hob down.

There is relief in this.

Not escape.

Relief.

And I think that's a distinction that matters.

Wellbeing doesn't always have to involve analysing ourselves.

Sometimes analysing ourselves is exactly what we need less of.

We have become obsessed with fixing ourselves

There is an entire vocabulary now built around personal optimisation.

Upgrade.

Transform.

Reset.

Hack.

Optimise.

Unlock.

Maximise.

Peak performance.

Best self.

I don't particularly object to any individual phrase.

But put them together and you begin to get a slightly unsettling picture of a human being as a badly configured iPhone.

Perhaps you don't need upgrading.

Perhaps you need lunch.

Perhaps you don't need to "unlock your potential."

Perhaps you need to go outside.

Perhaps the answer to an uncomfortable afternoon isn't a £2,000 retreat in Portugal.

Perhaps it's making soup.

This isn't me trivialising genuine difficulty.

Some problems need doctors.

Some need therapists.

Some need medication.

Some need professional support.

Some need enormous courage and sustained work.

But normal human discomfort has increasingly been dragged into the optimisation industry too.

Tired?

Optimise.

Uncertain?

Optimise.

Distracted?

Optimise.

Sad?

Optimise.

Unmotivated?

Here's an eleven-stage morning routine.

I'm not convinced that's always healthy.

There are seasons of life when perhaps you do not need fixing.

You need living.

My own version of mindfulness has become increasingly ordinary

The longer I've practised mindfulness, the less interested I am in appearing mindful.

I think that's probably progress.

I still believe in deliberate practice.

I still believe meditation can be enormously useful.

But the mindfulness I find most convincing now is woven into life.

Running.

Baking.

Cooking.

Gardening.

Teaching.

Making.

Talking to people.

Walking Bodhi.

Trying to solve some irritating practical problem involving a product I have decided the world definitely needs.

And yes, sometimes failing spectacularly to be mindful while doing all of those things.

Because that's important too.

I lose patience.

I obsess.

I overthink.

I get frustrated.

I want results yesterday.

I check things too often.

I can turn almost anything into a target if left unsupervised.

So I am absolutely not writing this from a mountaintop.

I'm writing it from inside the experiment.

But maybe that's why I care about this so much.

I don't think wellbeing should become another identity we perform.

We shouldn't need to become Wellbeing People.

We shouldn't need matching activewear.

We shouldn't need an app folder entitled "Wellness."

We shouldn't have to spend £400 a month becoming sufficiently relaxed.

The barrier to entry should be almost nothing.

Make something

If I could sneak one idea into the modern wellbeing conversation, it would be this:

Make something.

Anything.

Bake bread.

Cook dinner.

Plant herbs.

Build a shelf.

Make pasta.

Paint badly.

Repair something.

Grow tomatoes.

Make a birthday cake that looks absolutely nothing like the photograph you copied.

There is tremendous dignity in creating something tangible.

You begin with ingredients or materials.

You give them attention.

Something changes.

At the end, something exists that didn't exist before.

That tiny cycle can be immensely satisfying in a world where so much of our effort is invisible.

You can work all day answering emails and finish with nothing you can touch.

You can spend three hours in meetings and wonder what happened to Tuesday.

But make a loaf of bread and there it is.

A loaf.

Possibly a terrible loaf.

Still a loaf.

And the lovely thing about practical creativity is that perfection is usually unnecessary.

Dinner does not need a brand strategy.

A courgette does not require monetisation.

Your herb garden does not need to scale.

You don't have to turn your hobby into a side hustle.

You can just make something because making it feels good.

That idea now feels almost rebellious.

Please stop monetising every peaceful thing you enjoy

Modern culture has a slightly unhinged habit of turning hobbies into businesses.

You bake nice cakes?

Start a cake company.

You enjoy running?

Build a fitness brand.

You paint?

Open an Etsy shop.

You grow vegetables?

Have you considered creating content?

Can the tomatoes not just be tomatoes?

I say this with considerable self-awareness because I have managed to turn baking into an actual company.

But I think we need protected areas of life where there is no return on investment.

No analytics.

No audience.

No objective.

No conversion.

Things that are allowed to be useless in the commercial sense and enormously useful in the human sense.

A walk.

A garden.

A loaf.

A meal.

A conversation.

These are not gaps between important things.

These are important things.

Wellbeing is not always comfortable

This is another point I think we've blurred.

Wellbeing is often marketed as feeling better.

But living well and feeling good are not identical.

Going for a run can be uncomfortable.

Learning something is uncomfortable.

Starting a business can be brutal.

Making something that fails is disappointing.

Gardening involves mud, weeds and discovering that a slug has eaten the thing you've lovingly protected for eleven weeks.

Raising children, caring for people, building relationships and pursuing worthwhile work all involve discomfort.

A meaningful life is not necessarily a permanently calm life.

Mindfulness doesn't promise permanent calm either.

It teaches us to experience what is here more clearly.

Sometimes what is here is lovely.

Sometimes it's painful.

Sometimes it's boring.

Sometimes it's frightening.

Sometimes it's a pizza dough that has inexplicably attached itself to every surface in your kitchen.

Presence doesn't mean liking every moment.

It means being available for your life while it is happening.

That's a much more demanding idea than simply relaxing.

And also, I think, a much more hopeful one.

Because it means you don't have to wait until life is perfect before you can inhabit it.

Persistence may be a form of wellbeing too

This might sound odd.

Persistence doesn't usually appear in spa brochures.

But I think there is something psychologically healthy about continuing to create despite uncertainty.

I've had enough things not work to know the feeling.

The idea.

The enthusiasm.

The work.

The expectation.

And then…

Not much.

It can be painful.

Especially if you're somebody who believes enormously in what you're building.

You start wondering whether you're deluded.

Whether everybody else knows something you don't.

Whether perhaps the sensible thing would be to stop trying.

I've certainly wondered.

But I keep making things.

That matters to me.

Maybe one of my businesses eventually becomes the enormous breakthrough I've spent years chasing.

I hope so.

I intend to keep giving it every chance.

But I have also started to understand something important:

The years before the breakthrough are still my life.

I cannot mark them down as unsuccessful years merely because the graph didn't go where I wanted.

I created things.

I learnt.

I met people.

I taught people.

I made people laugh.

I baked.

I wrote.

I ran.

I planted.

I failed.

I started again.

There is life in that.

A great deal of it.

And perhaps wellbeing includes learning not to postpone your verdict on your existence until the final results are published.

You are allowed to have an ordinary Tuesday

I think we need to reclaim ordinary days.

Not every morning needs to begin with intention.

Not every evening needs reflection.

Not every meal needs perfect nutrition.

Not every walk needs 10,000 steps.

Not every hobby needs measurable progress.

Not every quiet moment needs filling with a guided meditation.

You are allowed to make toast.

You are allowed to wander around the garden.

You are allowed to make dinner while listening to nonsense.

You are allowed to sit with someone.

You are allowed to do something slowly.

You are even allowed to have an entire day without improving yourself.

Imagine that.

You could simply be alive.

So what does real wellbeing look like?

I don't think there is one answer.

For one person, it genuinely may be meditation every morning.

For somebody else, swimming.

For somebody else, therapy.

For somebody else, walking.

For somebody else, baking.

For somebody else, medication, sleep and a much-needed reduction in pressure.

But perhaps there are some useful questions.

Does this thing help me live my life?

Or has it become another thing I have to succeed at?

Does it make me more present?

Or more self-conscious?

Does it reduce pressure?

Or quietly create more?

Am I doing it because it nourishes me?

Or because I'm frightened that everybody else has discovered some secret to living correctly?

Those questions matter more to me than whether something carries the label "wellbeing."

Because wellbeing does not need to look like wellbeing.

It might look like flour all over the kitchen.

It might look like dirty fingernails.

It might look like running slowly with a Labrador.

It might look like cooking for your friends.

It might look like building an idea that still hasn't worked.

It might look like laughing at yourself and trying again tomorrow.

And maybe this is what I've gradually learnt through all the strange turns my own life has taken.

You don't necessarily find wellbeing by constructing a better life somewhere in the future.

You often find it by getting more involved with the life already underneath your hands.

Touch it.

Make something with it.

Cook something.

Plant something.

Walk somewhere.

Help somebody.

Try something.

Fail at something.

Laugh.

Begin again.

And if you happen to miss your meditation streak while doing all of that?

I think you'll survive.

In fact, you may have been practising mindfulness all along.

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