When Well-Being Becomes the Cause of Our Anxiety

This may sound slightly counter-intuitive. But it’s a conversation I found myself in recently with my wife —

It’s everywhere now. Everyone you meet is either on their own wellness journey or contemplating one. There are podcasts, reels, newsletters, fitness challenges, breathwork workshops, mushroom coffee substitutes, chakra-aligning retreats—you name it. The world, it seems, is obsessed with “feeling better.” And for good reason.

But here’s where it gets tricky.

In my home, I’m the poster child for this pursuit. I’ve got all the apps: Strava, Nike Run, Garmin, MyFitnessPal, Headspace. I track everything—sleep, steps, calories, moods. If I miss a workout in the morning, I’m visibly out of sorts for the rest of the day. If I’m nursing an injury, I’m less worried about healing and more preoccupied with when I can train again. Even my meditation app pings me with polite urgency: You haven’t meditated today. Keep your streak going. When did meditation—a tool meant to ground us—turn into something that adds to my already buzzing mind?

When did well-being become just another item on the to-do list?

When did we need to “earn” a slow Sunday with biryani and a movie?

Somewhere along the way, the idea of taking care of ourselves morphed into a performance. We started seeing ourselves as projects—things to fix, upgrade, fine-tune. Every step counted. Every meal logged. Every minute of rest measured. Wellness stopped being about how we feel and started being about how we’re doing.

There’s an entire industry that profits off this. The right shoes. The right supplement stack. The right aura-cleansing candle made from soy and whispers. It’s been beautifully packaged and sold back to us—peace of mind, for ₹499 a month. And while many of these tools have their place, they also bring with them an invisible pressure. That if you’re not tracking, you’re not serious. If you’re not improving, you’re slacking. If you’re not optimal, you’re off-track.

And the most insidious part? The tyranny of the “shoulds.”

You should meditate for twenty minutes. You should hit ten thousand steps. You should eat clean six days a week. You should prioritise rest but also lift weights and stretch and eat enough protein and get sunlight and reduce screen time and journal and call your parents and hydrate and try breathwork and— You get the picture.

Somewhere in this endless list of “shoulds,” well-being becomes less about being and more about doing. We feel guilty for resting, anxious about relaxing. We start stressing about de-stressing. It becomes a loop we don’t know how to get out of.

Here are just a few ways I’ve seen this show up—in my life and in others:

• Lying in bed, mentally calculating if it’s too late to still get eight hours of “quality” sleep—and losing sleep over it.
• Feeling like a failure because I couldn’t focus during meditation.
• Seeing a low “Readiness Score” on my tracker and feeling defeated before the day even begins.
• Realising that my “self-care Sunday” is so tightly planned it feels like a project deadline.
• Comparing your life to someone’s curated running post on Instagram—and suddenly feeling like my version of running isn’t good enough.

So what do we do with all of this?

Maybe nothing. Maybe we just notice it. Acknowledge that even the pursuit of well-being can sometimes pull us away from it. And that’s okay.

Maybe the point isn’t to optimise our lives to the last decimal but to stay curious about how we’re feeling. Maybe it’s okay if we miss a meditation session or forget to track a run or decide to sleep in. Maybe real well-being has more to do with kindness—towards ourselves—than with perfect metrics.

And maybe, just maybe, a good biryani and a bowl of popcorn on a lazy afternoon is exactly what wellness looks like too.