Wellness is the Way, Not the Destination

More and more people are talking about wellness. Mental health. Self-care. There are a myriad of apps to help with sleep, meditation, anxiety, and more. Services making therapy more accessible are constantly popping up. It seems like everyone of us has a friend who is now a coach offering their services.

Wellness has also entered many of our workplaces. Companies were seeing the cost of not supporting their employees' health. In the U.S.,?one in five adults suffer?from mental health challenges each year, costing companies?200 million lost workdays, along with?$200 billion. (Harvard Business Review)

Today more than 90% of organizations offer some kind of wellness benefits. (HBR) Ranging from yoga in the break room to reimbursements for gym memberships to access to counseling resources and meditation apps. These programs are designed to support the wellness of their employees.

But I think this has led to a subtle and dangerous idea, wellness is worth investing in so long as it increases our productivity.

This permeates even our personal ideas of wellness. We see wellness as a means to an end. We see wellness as a way to optimize our productivity. We see wellness as a transaction.

This reduces us as humans to our productivity. To our outputs.

What if wellness were not a means to increasing our productivity but to increasing the quality of our life? What if wellness was the path we followed, the path by which we lived our lives not a transaction we entered into with the guarantee of that promotion? What if wellness was worth it even if we never saw any increases in productivity our output?

Wellness absolutely matters. But it matters on its own rights. It matters because the quality of my life matters regardless of my productivity. It matters because it reduces each of our suffering.

This is not to say that there aren't tons of benefits to pursuing wellness. There are plenty of studies that do look at measurable outcomes and I've seen those in my own life as I've pursued wellness.

What I'm talking about is an energetic shift. A reclamation that wellness is about our humanity not our productivity. Wellness is a way of life, not a destination.