The wellness routine that means something is wrong
If you need four supplements, two apps, a breathing protocol, a cold plunge and a ninety-minute morning routine just to function, that isn’t self-care.
That’s a life-support machine.
I don’t say that to be unkind. I say it because I built one of those machines myself, ran it for years, and mistook the humming for health. And because every week someone describes theirs to me — the yoga, the Pilates, the guy on YouTube, the four supplements, the breathing-protocol-this and the ice-that — with a note of pride, as if the size of the routine were the measure of how well they’re doing.
Here’s what I’m thinking while they tell me: if you have to do all of this just to get through a normal day, something is wrong. Not with you. With the model.
A day on the machine
Let me describe a morning, and you tell me whether it’s yours.
The alarm goes at 5:30 because the routine needs ninety minutes and the day starts at seven. Cold shower — you’ve read it resets something. Ten minutes on the app, eyes closed, mind roaring, checking the timer. The journal: three things you’re grateful for, written fast. The supplements, lined up in a row like a small, expensive army. A breathing protocol from a video. Maybe a walk, tracked. By seven you’ve done more for your wellbeing than most people do in a month.
By ten past ten you’ve snapped at someone over nothing, your jaw has been clenched since the first email, and you’re wondering what you did wrong.
You didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything right, according to the model. That’s the problem with the model.
The morning was a performance of calm, staged before the day, in the hope that it would carry you through. It can’t. Ninety minutes of medicine doesn’t cure a life that spends the other twenty-two and a half hours braced. And the more it fails, the more you add, because adding is the only lever you’ve been shown.
Medicine or lifestyle?
Let me draw a line that the wellness world has quietly rubbed out.
Some things are medicine. You take them for a while, for a reason, and then you stop, because the point of medicine is that you shouldn’t need it forever. A course of treatment has an end.
Other things are lifestyle. You do them because they’re part of a good life — a walk, a meal with people you love, a sport you enjoy.
The practices I teach — the breathing, the guided journeys, the relaxation work — are medicine. They’re a short course, taken to remind your body of a state it knows naturally and has forgotten. They are not supposed to become a permanent fixture you have to perform every morning for the rest of your life in order to be okay.
The wellness industry has turned medicine into lifestyle, and then into identity. The routine becomes the point. You are now a person who does the routine. And if you skip it, you’re not just tired — you’ve failed.
That’s not health. That’s a job.
What the bag of stuff is actually for
I want to be fair to the practices, because they’re good, and I use them.
The breathing works. Ten minutes with your eyes closed, breathing out longer than you breathe in, and your body starts to stand down. The guided work works. Movement works. I’m not telling you to throw any of it away.
But understand what it’s doing. It’s giving your body a taste of calm — a reminder of what it feels like when nothing is bracing. That’s genuinely useful when you’ve forgotten. It is not a solution. It’s a sample.
The solution is the second half, the half nobody sells because it doesn’t fit in an app: the reasons your body is braced in the first place. The yeses that should be nos. The load you’re carrying that was never yours. The relationship with yourself that runs on criticism. The parts of you that went quiet decades ago and have been waiting.
Do that work and something strange happens. You need the practices less. Not because you’re disciplined about them — because your body, no longer under siege, comes back to calm on its own, the way it did when you were five and didn’t need a routine to be alright.
If your routine has been growing for years and you’re not needing it less, that’s your answer. You’ve been taking the medicine and skipping the treatment.
The life-support machine I built
I’ll tell you what mine looked like, because it looked impressive.
I meditated every day — sometimes twice. I’d tried more approaches than I can count: therapy, hypnosis, retreats, breathing methods, diets, supplements by the shelf. At one point my diet was a powder mixed with water, five times a day, and four “safe” foods, because I’d become reactive to everything else. I had protocols. I had a system.
And I was not well. I was housebound for a long stretch, running the most sophisticated wellness machine I’ve ever seen, and getting worse.
The machine wasn’t failing. It was doing exactly what machines like that do: keeping me just functional enough that I never had to look at why I needed it. Every new practice was a way of not asking the real question. Why is my body like this? What is it braced against? What would have to change — not in my routine, in my life — for it to stand down?
When I finally asked those questions, the answers weren’t in the bag. They were in a life built almost entirely around other people’s needs, a habit of saying yes to everything, a voice in my head that treated me like a suspect, and a body that had learned, very young, that it was never safe to relax.
No supplement touches that. No app does. That’s the work.
The five machines I see most
Everyone’s life-support machine looks a bit different, but after a few years of this work I can usually spot the model within ten minutes. See if you recognise yours.
- The optimiser. Tracks everything. Sleep score, heart-rate variability, step count. Has turned rest into a metric and now can’t rest without checking the number. The body’s actual signals — tired, hungry, sad — go unread because the app didn’t flag them.
- The seeker. Has done every retreat, tried every method, followed every teacher. Enormous knowledge, real sincerity, and a quiet dread that the next thing won’t work either. Because it won’t — not until the seeking itself is seen as one more way of not sitting still.
- The stack. Fifteen supplements, three protocols, a diet with rules. Has spent a fortune, and the spending itself feels like progress. Meanwhile the thing making the body reactive — years of swallowed feeling and a life built on other people’s needs — isn’t available in capsule form.
- The collector. A therapist, a coach, a bodyworker, a nutritionist, an acupuncturist. A team. Each one useful. All of them, together, a way of outsourcing the one thing that can’t be outsourced: being in your own body.
- The floater. Has gone the spiritual route — the practices, the language, the community. Feels lighter, speaks more calmly, and has quietly used the whole thing to rise above feelings rather than feel them. Peace as a way of not being here.
I’ve been most of these. The optimiser and the stack were mine for years. None of them is stupid. Every one is a sincere attempt to feel better with the tools on offer — and every one keeps the cup full while making you feel like you’re emptying it.
The routine as a way of not resting
Here’s a pattern I see in the most capable, driven people — the ones who arrive with the biggest routines.
They approached burnout the way they approach everything: with effort. More discipline. Optimise the sleep, track the recovery, stack the habits. When one thing didn’t work, add another. The routine grew and grew, and every addition felt like taking control.
But look at the shape of it. It’s more doing. It’s the exact approach that got them here, applied to getting out. You cannot work your way out of exhaustion caused by working. You cannot add your way to calm.
The dose I actually recommend to people goes the other way. Twice a day if that feels good. If that’s too much, once. If that’s too much, every other day. If your body is saying please, no, then no — forcing the practice is just the old habit of overriding your body, wearing a wellness t-shirt.
It’s not a case of “the more I do, the better.” It never was. It’s a case of “the more I listen, the better.” And listening sometimes says: skip it today. Sleep instead.
What happened when I switched mine off
I want to tell you what it was like to dismantle the machine, because it wasn’t the calm, wise decision it sounds like in hindsight. It was frightening.
For years my routine had been the only thing between me and the pit. So when I started letting parts of it go — stopping the endless supplements, dropping the protocols, meditating less rather than more — a part of me was certain I’d collapse. That part had a point. The machine had been holding me up.
But it had been holding me up in place. And what I’d finally understood was that the place was the problem. No amount of maintenance was going to make it a good place to be.
So I kept the little that mattered — the breathing, a short practice, movement — and I put my effort into the other half. I started saying no. I stopped managing everyone’s moods. I stopped treating my own body like a suspect. I met the parts of me that had been shut in a room since childhood. It was slow, and it was years, and it was often ugly.
And my body got better as my life got better — not as my routine got bigger. Somewhere along the way I noticed I’d gone weeks without needing the thing I’d once needed daily. Not through discipline. Through having less to be braced against.
I’m not telling you to bin your routine tomorrow. I’m telling you to notice what it’s for — and to notice if it’s got you sitting comfortably in a life that needs changing.
How to tell medicine from machine
A few honest questions. Sit with them rather than answering fast.
- Is the routine shrinking or growing? Medicine tapers. Machines expand.
- What happens on a day you skip it? If the answer is “I’m fine, I just missed it,” that’s lifestyle. If the answer is “I fall apart,” that’s dependence.
- Do you do it because it feels good, or because you’re afraid of what happens if you don’t? Be honest. Fear-driven practice is just anxiety with a mat.
- Has anything in your actual life changed? A yes that became a no. A load you put down. A relationship you stopped managing. If the routine is the only thing that’s changed, the routine is holding the old life in place.
- Are you calmer between the practices, or only during them? The point was never the ten minutes. It’s the other twenty-three hours and fifty.
If those questions sting, good. They stung me too. That sting is the beginning of the second half.
The questions people ask me about this
“So should I stop everything?” No. Stop treating it as the answer. Keep what genuinely helps your body stand down — for most people that’s the breathing and one short practice — and put the freed-up effort into the second half.
“But my routine is the only time I get to myself.” Then that’s worth knowing, because it means the problem is a life with no space in it, not a body that needs more protocols. Protect the time. Change what fills it — from performance to listening.
“I feel guilty when I skip it.” That guilt is the old voice — the one that treats rest as something to earn — wearing a yoga mat. Skipping a practice because your body asked for sleep isn’t failure. It’s the practice working.
“What if I get worse without it?” For a few days you might feel the loss of the crutch. Watch what comes up in that gap — it’s usually exactly what the routine was helping you not feel. That’s the material. That’s where the work starts.
“Isn’t this just telling people not to try?” It’s telling people to try the right thing. Effort isn’t the problem. Effort pointed at the wrong half is.
The smallest possible course
If you want a way to start dismantling without falling over, here’s the version I’d give a friend.
- Week one: keep everything, but add one question each morning before the routine starts: what does my body actually want right now? Sleep, food, a walk, nothing. Just ask. You don’t have to obey yet.
- Week two: drop the thing you do out of fear rather than because it helps. You’ll know which one. Notice what happens on the days you don’t do it. Usually: nothing.
- Week three: take the time you’ve freed and put one thing down from your life instead — one yes that should be a no, one mood you’ve been managing. This is the medicine doing its actual job: making room to change something real.
- Week four: look at the routine again. It’ll already be smaller, and you won’t have decided to shrink it. It shrank because you needed it less.
That’s the direction of travel. Not more. Less, on purpose, with the effort going where it can actually change something.
The question underneath the routine
Here’s the one question that cuts through all of it, and it’s worth sitting with before you read on.
If the routine vanished tomorrow — every supplement, every app, every protocol — what would you be left facing?
Not “what would you miss.” What would you be facing. Because whatever that is — the tiredness you’ve been managing, the sadness you’ve been outrunning, the life you’ve been making just bearable enough not to change — that’s the thing the routine has been standing between you and. And it’s the only thing worth working on.
What a real course of treatment looks like
Since I’ve been calling the practices medicine, let me lay it out like it — briefly, and with an end date.
A course, for most people, looks like this. A short daily practice — ten minutes, breathing and returning — for a few weeks, to give the body a taste of standing down and to make the inner noise quiet enough to hear what’s underneath. One longer guided journey a week, where the deeper material is allowed up: the parts that went quiet, the voice, the things you’ve been carrying. And alongside all of it, from the first week, one real change in the life outside the practice — a no, a load put down, a mood you stop managing.
Then the taper. As the life changes, the practice shrinks. Not because you’ve decided to be disciplined about doing less, but because you find yourself needing it less. The body that used to need reminding every morning starts to remember on its own.
Where does it end? Where all courses of medicine should: with you not needing it. A short practice you keep because you like it, the way you’d keep a walk. Not a machine you’re afraid to switch off.
What the second half looks like
I don’t want to leave you with a takedown and no door, so here’s what the work actually is, in plain words.
It’s using the practices — briefly, as a course — to get your body calm enough to hear what it’s been trying to tell you. And then acting on it.
That usually means learning to say no, badly at first, then better. Putting down the responsibilities that were never yours — other people’s moods, other people’s choices, other people’s happiness. Changing how you speak to yourself, one sentence at a time, until the old cruelty sounds absurd. Meeting the parts of you that went missing and inviting them back.
It’s slow. It’s years, not weeks, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But it’s the kind of slow where things actually change, and where the routine shrinks as you go — because a body that’s no longer braced doesn’t need a machine to stop bracing.
Nothing about the machine you built was foolish. You were trying to feel better with the tools you were given, and the tools were half the set. It’s not your fault. Nobody showed you the other half.
Everything I’ve described here is what The Way Home is for. Weekly live journeys to give the body its reminder — and the second half, done together: the boundaries, the voice, the parts, the letting go. A library of guided practices for the nights and days you need them, and a small community of capable people who’d built impressive machines and were ready to switch them off.
It’s £27 a month. Cancel any month, in two clicks.
— Adam
This is guided practice for wellbeing. It is not therapy or medical care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a doctor or a crisis line in your location today.