Gasping for air, I struggled to keep up with a fast succession of push-ups. This was after what felt like an eternity of jumping jacks. I took a five-second rest, which quickly drew the attention of the instructor. Dressed in a branded sweatshirt and sweatpants, he approached me with a booming voice.
“This isn’t SoulCycle!” he shouted, as I insecurely tugged at my leggings. “Get working!”
At CONBODY, a prison yard–themed boutique gym run by ex-convicts in New York, there is no rest for the weary. In this intense cardio class, I, and my fellow gym rats, worked diligently using only our body weight, just like prisoners do. It was all part of the theme: In the basement-level space, mugshot printouts of celebrities—O. J. Simpson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and three of Lindsay Lohan—lined the entrance hall. At the end of the hall, a metal gate featured a graphic of barbed wire. Further in, a cement wall fenced in the check-in desk. CONBODY offers an “inmate experience” for young professionals intrigued by prison. Their clients watched Orange Is the New Black or Prison Break and are, by the gym founder’s account, curious what lockup feels like.1
The trends only got tougher. I’ve also tried out trampoline cardio, aquacycling (like SoulCycle but in waist-deep water), and super cold HIIT workouts stationed in giant bespoke walk-in refrigerators. By early 2020, I found myself in a Tribeca fitness studio that specialized in electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). I took a high-impact cardio class where I had to wear a powersuit, much like a wet suit, that emitted electric shocks to cause involuntary muscle contractions. Throughout the workout, an instructor would press a button that sent electrical currents through my body, paralyzing me in my tracks as I tried to complete a burpee. Each time I was zapped, it felt as if I had suffered a heart attack.
I thought, This has all gotten insane. I’m getting nearly electrocuted or literally pretending to be so fit as to survive prison life. I can’t work this hard. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend at least 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity (brisk walking, pushing a lawn mower) or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity (running, swimming laps), with two days of muscle-strengthening activities (lifting weights, power yoga).
When did we decide that the average Joe needs to exercise like an American Gladiator? Why does it feel like everything requires so much effort? Or perhaps the better question is: Why do we feel the need to work so hard?
Fitness is important, yet it’s become increasingly demanding and performative. Among the trendiest of boutique studios across the country, you’ll find Rise Nation, which is pure stair climbing. Crunch Gym launched a class called X-Treme Firefighters Workout to train students as if they were first responders and firefighters (the goal is to become strong enough to carry an unconscious human being out of a burning building). Big cities are home to plenty of popularized boot camps that employ former marines who force paying customers to endure “punishing” exercises like barbed wire crawls. These are all workouts in which we’re told to “torch,” “burn,” or “crush,” as though we’re gripped in the clutches of war.
The trendiest of fitness regimens, it seems, run on good old American fuel: hard, hard work. When Peloton’s internal marketing documents were leaked in 2019, we learned that to differentiate itself from other fitness brands, Peloton suggested that the brand isn’t for everyone. It’s for the ambitious, those who put in the effort to achieve greatness. “[We’re] not a party on a bike,” read the materials.2
To be sure, there’s a market for this. For many, the appeal of a tough workout goes beyond body sculpture. They’re attracted to the intensity and the need for endurance—the sacrifice. Call it achievement, transformation, or mental resilience, but the discomfort and perseverance required to vanquish “weakness” offer a real high. Some say this paves the path to self-actualization. Others say pain is character-building—a metaphor for overcoming life’s many obstacles. And a few will readily acknowledge it as a tool for spiritual awakening.
This is not to suggest there isn’t value in becoming strong. Acquiring strength is valuable for obvious reasons: A woman might feel more confident, attractive, and capable. She might feel powerful. She might draw on her physical strength to accomplish more tasks at home or feel more at ease in the boardroom. And that’s all great.
But the perception of popularized fitness trends can backfire if it intimidates the average person. “Super high-intensity workouts inadvertently shame people into thinking that if they’re not doing high intensity, beat-your-body-up workouts, then you’re not really working out and you’re wasting your time,” says Carrie Myers Smith, a fitness industry expert and the author of Squeezing Your Size 14 Self into a Size 6 World. Experts instead offer the most commonsense advice: just go with what feels good to you. If people find walking boring or CrossFit too strenuous, they should find whatever will motivate them, be it tennis, jogging, or dancing in the dark to Robyn. “It’s unfortunate that as a society, we seem to feel that more is better, including with exercise,” says Heather Hausenblas, a professor of kinesiology at Jacksonville University and the co-author of The Truth About Exercise Addiction. “As a society, we really have a warped image of what health is.”
If the greater fitness industry isn’t pushing strenuous workouts, then they’re promoting the idea of optimal fitness—that you need to squeeze every last bit of sweat out of a class. Time is a scarce resource to be managed, and is best handled by fitness trackers or health apps to track “progress” and log weekly “streaks.” We keep score of our commitment to our bodies, tinkering with sleep stats and steps taken, guaranteeing we don’t fall off the given path. We’re besotted with data. By engaging in constant external monitoring, we surrender our own assessment. We let the machines judge, control, and optimize our actions.
HIIT workout franchise Orangetheory, for example, uses heart rate monitors to track your anaerobic threshold during cardio classes. Creator and co-founder Ellen Latham incorporated the idea after speaking with fitness enthusiasts who believed they were underperforming in comparison to those around them. Latham wanted to emphasize individual progress—backed by data. “I’m very much into the belief of competing against yourself,” she told me, “specifically your last best self.”3 The goal, therefore, is to strive for the next best you.
Goals are great, there’s no arguing that. Yet the quest for one-upmanship can taint our view of fitness, or worse. Lee, a mother of one in her late thirties, started running in her early twenties. Her mission, like that of many young women, was, as she describes it, to meet “the fitness standard.” She worried that a few extra pounds would jeopardize her ability to achieve the American dream. “I [thought] if I look like that, I will be happy. I’ll meet a man, I’ll get married and I’ll have all the things that I want to have and that society tells me I should have,” she explained.
In 2013, Lee bought a Fitbit. At the start, tracking the data was fun. Lee could analyze her runs and daily calorie intake, using the numbers to push herself further. But the new gizmo didn’t aid her runs as much as pinpoint all the ways she was falling short. Lee began to obsess over her stats. She punished herself if she underperformed or didn’t hit new goals. Lee started planning her meals the night before, calculating exactly how much she would burn off with any given cardio exercise. “So I have to go for a forty-minute run and this is my only food for the day and I can’t deviate from that because if I do then I’m probably gonna gain a pound and that’s going to make me slower,” she reasoned. If her then boyfriend asked her to go out for a meal, she would panic because she would need to schedule an activity to precisely cancel out the calories. “It’s rearranging your life to fit with your [fitness] plan.”
In time, exercise no longer served as a stress outlet, rather as a nerve-racking chore—an obligation. “It took all the joy away,” reflects Lee. The situation came to a head when her fertility shut down due to overexercising and doctors warned her she was headed for a health crisis. In 2018, she finally recognized that she was suffering from fitness OCD, and Lee deserted her Fitbit. “That’s when I started to dig into the actual damage that I’d done,” she says, “years of depriving myself.”
A quarter of American women use fitness trackers. Many indeed find them motivating. But for all the buzz, about half of users will tire of their shiny new tech toy and shove it into a drawer within six months.4 Some stick with it, though some research isn’t all that encouraging. One 2016 study found that while quantifying our every move might increase health consumers’ tendency to engage in an activity, it can also simultaneously reduce how much we actually enjoy that activity. “This occurs because measurement can undermine intrinsic motivation,” reads the study. “By drawing attention to output, measurement can make enjoyable activities feel more like work, which reduces their enjoyment.”5
Top-tier gyms, meanwhile, offer a suite of coaches, treatments, and services meant to remedy any issue that might be standing in the way of achieving Halle Berry’s body. In 2018, Equinox announced the debut of “sleep coaching,” where personal trainers solely focus on improving snooze habits to benefit exercise performance. While sleep coaching isn’t anything new, it’s often used by professional athletes. Now it is being rolled out to the general consumer to help them reach their “potential.”
Perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow explained this endless quest for self-improvement best when she exclaimed on her Netflix series, The Goop Lab, “It’s all laddering up to one thing: optimization of self. We’re here one time, one life. How can we milk the shit out of this?” And hence we need fitness trainers, gadgets, and strenuous workouts to reach this magically hidden but tappable perfection. Our enhanced self is all there, simmering under the surface, just waiting for us to unlock it.
Flashback: Productivity Through Pumping Iron
In mid-nineteenth-century England, a movement dubbed “muscular Christianity” propelled believers to pump iron in the name of heaven. At a time of a “crisis in masculinity,” society sought to uphold man’s supposed God-given nature in an overcivilized world. Exercise was performed in the service of a higher power: it was a way to build character, avoid immoral pursuits, and ultimately “protect the weak.” Physical prowess not only exemplified a commitment to God, it also made you more useful in service to others. Like a missionary He-Man.
The Protestant work ethic heavily influenced the popularity of fitness. As industrialization quickened, emerging middle and bourgeois classes found themselves with far more leisure time at their disposal. The idea of free time was so novel that they needed to find a purpose for it. Sports and outdoor activities were therefore encouraged as a means for righteous self-improvement, rather than pure amusement, which they deemed lazy and wasteful.
Up until that time, physical discipline—be it fasting or abstinence—was more or less delegated to the clergy. With this new era, the merger of sport and religiosity was touted to the masses as an expression of piety and servitude. This ethos evolved into team sports supported by local churches. Momentum hit a tipping point with the introduction of the first Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in London circa 1844, followed by New York City in 1869.
But such an emphasis on strength inherently maligned any form of perceived weakness, insinuating that the less fit were less than devoted to their creator. As one American pastor at the time wrote, “He who neglects his body, who calumniates his body, who misuses it, who allows it to grow up puny, frail, sickly, misshapen, homely, commits a sin against the Giver of the body … Round shoulders and narrow chests are states of criminality. The dyspepsia is heresy. The headache is infidelity. It is as truly a man’s moral duty to have a good digestion, and sweet breath, and strong arms, and stalwart legs, and an erect bearing, as it is to read his Bible, or say his prayers, or love his neighbor as himself.”6
You can hear echoes of this sentiment a century later in James Fixx’s 1977 manifesto, The Complete Book of Running. The jogging enthusiast detailed the need for mastery over ourselves: how exercise cultivates qualities such as “will power, the ability to apply effort during extreme fatigue, and the acceptance of pain.” Running takes work, and maybe we need more work, he proposed. “Too many of us live under-disciplined lives,” wrote Fixx. “By giving us something to struggle for and against, running provides an antidote to slackness.”7
From the nineteenth century to today, the fitness industry—like the diet industry—has glommed on to wellness to sell us an aesthetic ideal.
Publications like Shape and Women’s Health publish piece after piece promoting how to “drop two sizes” or achieve a “bikini body.” They imply that body modification in pursuit of the beauty ideal is the ultimate goal of getting active. Models’ and celebrities’ bodies are airbrushed to a flawless degree, projecting a surreal and sensual fantasy that consumes the reader. As one former Women’s Health editor told me, these magazines simply continue a long, complicated legacy of women’s aspirational (read: unrealistic) beauty standards because “that’s what people want,” whether they admit it or not. If magazines won’t deliver it, then Instagram or TikTok will. In fact, social media does deliver it—and better—which is why they’ve stolen the mantle from declining traditional outlets.
Social media networks have exploded with imagery of people working out, via brands but also just peers bragging how they beat their last record. (Far rarer are people posting about being too tired to exercise and resigning themselves to the couch.) On Instagram, the hashtag #fitness has been used nearly 500 million times, which is separate from the 230 million #gym posts. At the top of the heap, often generating those hashtags, are the social media fitness stars—also known as “fitfluencers.” The Tracy Flicks of exercise sell us on peak physicality: that hot, ripped body with zero percent body fat and chiseled abs. The most recognizable of this group is Kayla Itsines, “the Internet’s undisputed workout queen,” a fitness app founder with 14 million Instagram followers.
Just how big is fitfluencers’ reach? Forbes reported that the top ten combined have an audience of more than a hundred million people—and that was back in 2017. Fitfluencers are only gaining more traction online, with some able to earn up to $30,000 per Instagram post. Fitfluencing has evolved into a real industry: Equinox partnered with Hollywood agency William Morris Endeavor to launch a fitness talent management practice to develop personal brands and score large-scale sponsorship deals.
Most fitfluencers aren’t exactly pushing health, even if they look like it. “Be healthy” or “get strong,” fitfluencers parrot, understanding full well that “fit” has replaced the space once afforded to “thin.” They wear little clothing, ensuring that fans see perfectly sculpted body parts, as they stress workout plans that are more linked to fat reduction and visual appearance than cardiovascular health.
One study of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr found that “fitspiration” imagery overindexes thin, toned women. These women were far more likely than men to be under twenty-five, have their full body on display, “and to have their buttocks emphasized.”8 Other researchers discovered that while fitspiration posts were “less extreme” than thinspiration (imagery encouraging thinness), there were no differences “with regard to sexual suggestiveness, appearance comparison, and messages encouraging restrictive eating.”9
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of fitfluencers doubled down on the importance of a challenging daily exercise regimen, beating the drum that fans had better start sweating before they couldn’t pull up their sweatpants. Suddenly women had to contend with pangs of personal inadequacy while dealing with stay-at-home orders. They feared their peers would emerge from isolation “as the body beautiful” while they barely found the time to shower.
Is this fitspiration or more like fitpressure?
Even athleisure upholds a specific body type. Some women feel that the uniform of women’s fitness—the ubiquitous leggings and sports bra—mostly flatters the svelte and toned. Who else can wear skintight spandex and flash their midsection? Meanwhile, activewear brand marketing doesn’t rely on realistic imagery of an average-sized woman, save for a few images every so often. Bigger-sized models have entered the fold, but they’re still a minority that feels more like tokenism. Instead, we’re treated to a medley of beautiful twentysomethings—flat bellies and all—that we, in turn, expect in our local gym.
What this all means is that today we are saddled with two equally unrealistic depictions of the female body: lean fitfluencers and perfectly curvy celebrities such as Kim Kardashian. One shows up on your television screen, the other in your Instagram feed. In a way we have triple pressure riding on women today—we need to be thin, curvy, and toned. The goal is a big butt, a teensy waist, and feminine musculature. It almost makes you yearn for the days when we simply needed to starve ourselves.
It’s discouraging and relatively new, says Steven Loy, an exercise physiologist at the kinesiology department at Cal State Northridge. “Twenty years ago, a thin body was what was being pushed, but you didn’t see the muscle. Now you see the same thin body, but it’s got muscles that you can see.” So basically, society added new bells and whistles to the unachievable ideal. “They’ve raised the bar on you.” One health expert I spoke to reported a steady stream of young gym-goers with the same exact lower back pain, an ailment that usually afflicts an older segment of the population. The culprit? Too many booty-building exercises were performed with poor form.
Fitfluencers would have you believe that a rock-hard body (and booty) is just a matter of scheduling in a daily workout, of “committing to yourself.” The audience is not privy to the amount of work that goes on beyond the iPhone screen, where fitfluencers spend hours every day exercising. Not to mention, imagery might be airbrushed and the influencer’s poses manipulated to enhance their best angles. In comparison to traditional media, fitfluencers fuel more feelings of inadequacy because these individuals are not supermodels or Hollywood stars; they play up being real, “average” people, which then makes you feel worse for not rising to their bench-pressing level. It looks achievable. But fitfluencers fail to disclose that bodies react differently to specific exercises: genetic diversity cannot guarantee exact results.
On the surface level, #fitspo might seem like progress: Why shouldn’t we promote fitness? It’s healthy! But an onslaught of aesthetic fitness imagery isn’t motivating the average American to get moving. On the contrary, it’s intimidating them to the point of quitting before even starting. Carrie Myers Smith hears from self-conscious women who believe they need to lose weight and firm up before joining a gym. “We’re not inspiring [the majority of] people to be fit,” she told me. “We’re just continuing to support the ones that already are fit, and shaming the ones that aren’t.” By 2020, 56 percent of Americans experienced this “gymtimidation,” according to a Mindbody survey.10
The ones opting out of an unwinnable race aren’t wrong. The likelihood that anyone can achieve influencers’ level of fitness without time, money, and good genes is slim to none. The right kind of body is the product of the right classes, the right clothes, the right sneakers … the right effort. Our flesh is thereby an expensive project we must funnel more and more money into, forever iterating on Frankenstein’s buff monster.
Aesthetic fitness doesn’t necessarily equal health. Being fit looks like many different things. “The images that people are bombarded with are these hyperfit individuals, which I would tend to argue may not even be that healthy at the end of the day,” says Heather Hausenblas. “Individuals internalize that and say ‘that’s what I need to look like to be healthy and to be fit.’”
You don’t have to push it to the limits to be within health’s reach. But there’s no pride in gentleness, right? As with clean eating, extreme fitness yields extreme results—and maybe some respect. That’s because moderation isn’t prized in our culture.
Likewise, why do fitfluencers harp on rigid aesthetic ideals when science allows for far more body diversity? Because social media incentivizes it. Algorithms reward posts that garner the most likes (or controversy, for that matter), not those that align with medical advice. If someone wants to grow their following so that they can snag partnerships or get invited to live in a TikTok mansion, then they’ll follow suit. “[It’s] a vicious cycle, because when you’re promoting content, the stuff that performs the best is usually the least factual stuff or the terms that aren’t scientifically correct,” Charlee Atkins, founder of the fitness lifestyle brand Le Sweat, told Well+Good.11 “What sells is ‘toning,’ ‘lengthening,’ ‘burn,’ ‘booty’—all of these words that didn’t have definitions until the fitness industry created them … And so those of us who are in the fitness industry and promoting our products, for us to reach a larger market we’re almost forced to also use those terms.”
The algorithms don’t do any wonders for women’s self-esteem. In 2021, a leaked internal research report revealed that Facebook was made aware that Instagram (which it acquired in 2012) is harmful to girls’ body image. The company was warned that 32 percent of girls said Instagram worsened their insecurities, blaming the photo sharing app for increased anxiety and depression. As one eighteen-year-old told the Wall Street Journal, “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes.” Facebook, according to the report, made “minimal efforts” to address these mental health issues.
One study, though very small, further analyzed social media effects on young women. After twenty university students viewed fitspiration for one to four hours a day, they experienced greater body dissatisfaction and their self-confidence plummeted. These same individuals, however, had also spent years, like all of us, consuming advertising and traditional media. What was the difference, then? Fitspiration was potentially more potent because “perhaps women do not process fitspiration images as critically as they do thin-ideal images, or perhaps adding tone and strength to thinness cumulates to provide women with more ways in which to feel inadequate.”12
While men also face pressures brought forth by a shirtless Chris Hemsworth, it’s far more acute with women. Unsurprisingly, researchers found that women are more inclined to exercise for weight loss and toning, whereas men are more inclined to do it for enjoyment.13
Women are far more targeted in body culture, in part due to how gender intersects with social identity—and how it’s both constructed and enforced, explains the Body of Truth author Harriet Brown. Traditionally, men’s social power and reputation stemmed from the things they did, whereas women were typically prized for how they appeared. “It’s deeply, deeply baked into our culture,” says Brown. “I don’t think it’s possible to be a woman in this culture and not feel these things … We still seem to believe that so much of our value comes from how we look, how thin we are, and how sexy we are, whereas men have a lot of other avenues.”
In recent decades, social standings have shifted, but the blueprint remains intact. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that society differs over what it values in men versus women. The top traits revered in men were honesty and morality, followed by professional success. For women, it was physical attractiveness, followed by empathy and being nurturing.14 Women are told from multiple touchpoints that their body matters, that their physical attributes determine their success.
You can’t blame them when they simply give in.
It’s not just our fitness we need to crush. Nowadays, you also need to leisure better.
Vacations have shifted in recent years. Burned-out Americans popularized wellness travel, one of the leading trends in the hospitality sector. Vacationers seek getaways filled with fitness classes, yoga, surfing, and guided meditation—in that order. They’re not as interested in getting wasted in Vegas. (Although even Vegas is looking to reinvent itself as a wellness destination.) “When you have such little time off, you really can’t afford to come back from a vacation where you drank too much, stayed up all night, and ate really horrible food,” explained Beth McGroarty, the director of research at the Global Wellness Institute. “You can’t afford coming back feeling worse than you did when you left.”15
One poll found that 40 percent of millennials reported they’d rather go on a fitness retreat with their favorite instructor than attend a five-star relaxation resort.16 I am guilty of this. I will sign up for a surf camp or stay in a fitness-class-focused hotel before ever staying in a regular resort. I just can’t let that precious time go to “waste.” Heaven forbid I sit by the pool and order a steady stream of grilled cheese sandwiches, which is what I actually want to do.
Like me, women might also fear gaining weight on vacation, aware that one too many midday margaritas might undo all the pre-trip starvation endured to fit into that bikini. As the writer and eating disorder survivor Gina Susanna recounted, to prepare for memorable (that is, Instagrammable) moments, “We need to make sure we are thin enough to enjoy them.”17 Susanna had heard from women who were “terrified” of going on vacations because they feared being surrounded by unhealthful foods or without exercise access. “I was just so sick of the constant diet culture voices telling me I needed to ‘look perfect’ to enjoy myself,” she wrote.
Now, some people truly relax by exercising, and the idea of spending hours moving the body excites them, especially if they never get to be active during their sedentary day-to-day life. For them, hiking for six to eight hours a day is fun. They enjoy the exhaustion—“the good kind”—and clarity that comes from the end of an active day outdoors. Rigorous activities in nature are the ultimate reset for them.
But others feel that their vacations or any free moments require efficiency—a subtle pressure to always be improving. They need to maximize their time, no matter the occasion. Bodily obligations are not afforded a PTO reprieve. In an interview for The Cut, the Boulder-based physical therapist Nicole Haas said that an urgency to stay in shape on vacation is leading to an increase in injuries. One persistent client of hers blew out her back by attempting crunches in a compact hotel room, among other bad decisions: “I had someone do a thousand squats on that one hotel chair. Well, now your knee hurts! And I’m like, Seriously?”18
We also just respect hard effort more. There’s a hierarchy of relaxation activities, and certain ones get pushed to the top. For Fiona, a full-time elementary school teacher and married mom of two, exercising guarantees a short period of time when no one bothers her. It’s a mini-escape built into the workday. She wakes up an hour before the rest of her family to slip down to the basement and engage in a streaming cardio class. Fiona notices a massive difference in her mood if she doesn’t get this one sacred hour: a missed class unleashes the Irritable Hulk. “It’s definitely ‘me time,’” says Fiona. Everyone knows that should they rise early, they can’t ask for a snack or help in finding a misplaced sweater when she’s working out. “I don’t have any other time when I’m alone,” she sighs.
In some ways, self-care offers a cover for whatever a woman needs to do to feel sane. For example, if a wife tells her husband to watch the kids because she needs to apply a facial mask, he might roll his eyes. If, however, she changes her terminology, saying she needs to “engage in self-care,” she has invoked mental health, and therefore the activity is fully sanctioned. It’s much the same way men might train for a marathon “for charity.” As some men admitted to Jason Kelly in his book Sweat Equity, it’s an acceptable way to escape familial obligations. “When you’re riding your bike for five hours on a Saturday, it’s harder for anyone to argue with you when you say you’re helping cure cancer.”19
Fiona concedes that less active hobbies, like reading, don’t quite pan out in her household. To start, “you don’t look as productive to other people,” thereby inviting family members to interrupt whatever novel she’s engrossed in. Although she can’t fully blame those around her: she too will interrupt her reading to do some light cleaning. She just cannot convince herself that being immobile earns the same kind of deference as breaking an early morning sweat. Reading just doesn’t feel worthwhile enough. She was raised to be a high achiever who never slacks off or “takes it easy.” So why would her relaxation efforts be any different?
If you listen carefully to American media or scroll your Instagram feed, you will notice a hustle culture that dictates you should always be doing something even when that something should potentially be nothing. (Or, as Peloton’s Ally Love puts it: “Hustle never sleeps!”) We just can’t stop indulging our inner high-achiever. The productivity mandate stares down on you in every aspect of your life, requiring you to be more mindful with your kids, get more fit, or become more Zen. It’s easy to feel lazy if you’re not actively “bettering” yourself at all times. So much so that 54 percent of women feel guilty when they need to take a break or rest.20
There’s an actual term for this feeling, where you can’t ever fully relax because you feel pressured to be productive: “Sunday neurosis.” Believed to have been coined by Hungarian psychoanalyst (and friend of Freud) Sándor Ferenczi, it refers to the anxiety we feel when we attempt to be idle instead of, say, training for a marathon. It’s the restlessness that comes with being free of structure, duty, and work. Freedom might just feel like emptiness. Or guilt.
Workaholism pervades everything, including, oddly, fashion. Take the famous athleisure brand Outdoor Voices, which popularized overpriced color-blocked workout attire. The company’s motto is “doing things,” pushing the idea that it’s better to be doing things than not doing things—and somehow, these things should be done in $88 leggings. Outdoor Voices floods social media with this doctrine, encouraging young women to photograph themselves hiking, exercising, or buying smoothies with the hashtag #doingthings, thereby communicating, “Look at me! I invest in my health!” Fans’ attire, therefore, is not best suited for sitting on the couch watching TikTok. Outdoor Voices shoppers are doers; they’re more active than the rest. To date, more than 225,000 images include this productivity hashtag.
Fitness culture is also everywhere. Employers build onsite gyms to inspire healthier habits (or, more likely, to lower rising healthcare costs and boost productivity). Gyms are popping up where you least expect them, even inside the supermarket. Orangetheory, the fastest-growing fitness franchise, partnered with the Iowa-based grocery retailer Hy-Vee. ShopRite opened a fitness studio in New Jersey that offers yoga and Zumba classes. Some Whole Foods stores offer a range of workout classes on their premises. CVS Health is testing “health hubs” where customers take a yoga class as they wait for pharmacy refills.21 There is no escape. Our culture will remind you at every single turn that you should be in the gym.
It’s great to have so many opportunities to get moving, don’t get me wrong. But it’s starting to feel like perseverance and efficiency have invaded our personal lives: hard work, sacrifice, effort … these are what get our engine going in our overly ambitious, goal-oriented society. Here’s the thing about productivity: it’s always a means toward an end goal. It’s in service of something you want—or need.
Perhaps we feel compelled to constantly improve our bodies because we know full well what health (or more likely the appearance of health) signifies in our culture. We know we need to effectively compete in a cutthroat market. It seems practical: If you are up against dozens of women for a job, a partner—heck, any opportunity—in our society, you might consider anything that gives you a leg up. And that toned body might very well suggest that you are self-disciplined, hard-working, and fully in control, as it’s come to mean. It’s a survival mechanism to some degree because society upholds the body as a representation of ability.
We live in a culture that preaches you alone are responsible for your success, and that ethos spreads to more than just our career. Such a culture creates a lot of pressure, if not body-shaming. It’s also indicative of healthism—a concept connoting a moralized view of health that stresses the responsibility of the individual (“lifestyle choices”). This belief system holds that it’s your fault if you fall ill or embody what society considers unhealthy, like being bigger bodied. By this logic, certain people are better than others, with those falling behind likely “deserving” of whatever comes their way (despite extenuating circumstances like budget, access, ability, or genetics). So no wonder we’re trying to ensure that we never fail: No one wants to be the deviant. No one wants to be judged.
It sounds like we’re working so hard to be perfect.
Although, no matter how hard one tries—you can squat, down-dog, and stage beautifully positioned acai bowls on Instagram all you want—it won’t ever be good enough. Unattainability is the leading tenet of perfection. More than anything, perfectionism says a lot about what we crave—it is, at the end of the day, an anxious need for control over our lives.
“Six things mentally strong people do,” read Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram post. In bullet point format, the black-and-white text laid out precisely what constitutes the psychologically blessed: They don’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves, they “welcome” challenges, and they don’t exert energy on that which they can’t control. Most important, “they stay happy.”
It wasn’t long before a mob of women flooded the Goop guru’s comments section with critiques of such reductionist advice. “Real life adversities can be incredibly difficult to overcome,” wrote one follower. Others noted that though Paltrow had good intentions, the post minimized human adversity and ignored mental health issues. One angry woman wrote, “Feelings buried alive never die.” Another simply demanded, “You need to take this down.”
What Paltrow was really saying was this: You should work to make your brain right. Society constantly emits this kind of low-frequency messaging, but it’s turned up high in wellness culture. Herbal supplements allude to fixing your gut and your brain. Svelte social media influencers pose with functional beverages as they babble on about their inner peace, beckoning followers to follow their lead. Framed by idyllic backdrops, they promote “quieting the mind” and “choosing” to commit to contentment, repeating that sheer determination cures all ills. They ask us to overcome mental hurdles through gratitude or to imagine a laugh track scoring daily challenges.
It’s talking heads and celebrities but also average moms who repeatedly talk of calming themselves into states of bliss. It’s everyone on Instagram only uploading their highlight reel without proper disclaimers: these are filtered, calculated depictions. We’re led to believe that positive emotions are all under our own control, that happiness is but a “choice.” Never mind that many other cultures view happiness as a collective goal, a social endeavor that connects you with other people. Instead, we are asked to shoulder this lonesome burden in a Truman Show facade of mental health. And yet Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in fifty years: only 14 percent of adults say they’re “very happy.”22
Emma Anderson, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, has researched the gendered nature of self-help and finds several similarities to the current self-care discourse. Much like how self-help books bang the drum on how we are flawed and can always strive to be “better,” wellness posits that we are forever improvable. If historically women were expected to be demure, modest, and subservient, today they’re held to idealized femininity dictating constant positivity and resilience. Though self-help and wellness are quite different, “they have a similar impact in disallowing other ways of being—disallowing anger, for example,” says Anderson. “‘If I can just try to be more positive, practice gratitude, and be more mindful.’ These are all aimed at a kind of quiet, pacifying state of mind.”
Unsurprisingly, being commanded to be happy often sparks the opposite reaction. Journalist Ada Calhoun, the author of Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, spoke to hundreds of women across the country, and nearly all echoed the same sentiment: they are stressed and continually on edge, they are socially obligated to be calm, cool, collected, and they should always be giving and never demanding. “It’s the equivalent of being told to smile by somebody who is catcalling you on the street,” says Calhoun. “For a lot of women I talked to, it’s making them very, very angry.”
These expectations soon permeate how we express ourselves. Stacey Rosenfeld, a psychologist and the author of Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder?, finds that her female patients are socialized to suppress their negative emotions. We’re conditioned from a young age to be polite, agreeable, patient, serene, giving—a new anvil of ideals dropped on our head at every stage of life. “And so being angry doesn’t really fall into the expectations set forward for girls and for women,” says Rosenfeld. Our bad moods and (often justified) anger are simply personae non gratae. Basically: Put that shit away. You are expected to hide your dissatisfaction and instead figure out a way to lessen it for those around you.
Negative emotions are crucial to feeling better. A 2017 American Psychological Association research study found that people are much happier when they are given the freedom to express their emotions, even when those emotions are resentment, anger, or despair. Yes, we can practice gratitude—which has shown to be remarkably beneficial to mental health—but why not make more room for expressing what ails us?
Maybe because America has long emphasized rugged self-help, which is a decidedly American phenomenon, born of Puritan values. This idea of people venturing out to secure their own happiness rather than passively hoping for it goes as far back as the eighteenth century. (Indeed, a Russian adage attests that “a person who smiles a lot is either a fool or an American.”) We’re a country founded on meritocracy; she who works the hardest wins. Now we’ve applied that philosophy to our emotions.
In America, there’s this idea of this great happily ever after out there on the horizon, explains Ruth Whippman, the author of The Pursuit of Happiness and America the Anxious. “That if you just keep trying and keep doing another self-help class and another wellness program, you’ll eventually get to this glittering ideal.” And self-help targets more women than men. We have to improve ourselves to meet an unattainable standard or a default male ideal, says Whippman, who sees gendered expectations exemplified throughout modern society. For example, many women’s co-working spaces offer onsite amenities and programs which center on self-improvement: meditation sessions, fitness classes, vitamin shots, or nutrition lectures. Male-dominated clubs, on the other hand, get to have fun. They incorporate real leisure, with arcades or activities like ping-pong tournaments and whiskey tastings. There is simply not the same imperative for men to improve themselves in the same way.
“It’s kind of ironic because all of these things which are supposed to be about relaxing and taking the pressures off modern life just end up actually piling the pressures on,” says Whippman. “It’s just another thing that you have to do and be and achieve. It’s just an extra state that you have to get to.” These are not necessarily new trends, though they are amplified by social media, which trades on the currency of perfection.
The tides are shifting. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, women started to question these unsustainable pressures. They couldn’t do it anymore. There’s a desire to understand the underlying issues at play: Why does everyone seem so utterly depleted? Why are we forcing ourselves to feel better about it all? And what do we need to feel better that doesn’t add more pressure?
The pandemic pushed Americans to reassess their priorities and aspirations. Millions quit their stressful jobs, while 42 percent of workers in a LinkedIn survey said they were taking a break for their well-being or to spend more time with loved ones.23 More and more people recognized widespread suffering, with mental wellness growing into the dominant lens. There was a far greater honesty about stress, psychological woes, and day-to-day struggles spurring collective vulnerability. In fitness too: a 2021 survey of 16,000 Americans found that over a quarter of adults surveyed work out to reduce stress.24 It’s why, anecdotally, when you asked people why they exercised, you were more likely to hear them say it’s for their “sanity” than desiring Kayla Itsines’s physique.
A societal emphasis on mental health is moving the industry outside the framework of productivity and aesthetic goals, says Beth McGroarty of the Global Wellness Institute: “The new compass point is one of healing and forestalling crisis,” she says, noting that serious health management is overtaking the “bionic woman model.”
In her research, Whippman found that the single biggest factor affecting happiness across the board is social support. Calhoun, meanwhile, witnesses groups of women coming together to discuss long-avoided issues and reassess impossible ideals in a way that feels both constructive and therapeutic. She launched a monthly social club for women to be “in each other’s presence with no filters.” Attendees, she reports, find it far more healing than any spa or yoga class.
Progress is slow but growing. Young women protesting the deluge of toxic positivity on social media have turned to digital communities like Sad Girls Club, which counts more than a quarter million Instagram followers looking for authentic emotional support.25 Even who women have turned to for advice has changed: there are influencers who advocate compassion and moderation, not a six-pack and an emotional lobotomy.
One body positivity advocate changing the face (and shape) of fitfluencers is self-described “fat femme” Jessamyn Stanley. Stanley, who is Black, tries to widen the appeal of yoga by posting intricate poses and inspirational advice on Instagram for people who feel excluded from wellness. She’ll photograph herself doing the splits upside down while clothed in a sports bra, exposing her belly and stretch marks in an industry that’s generally exemplified, by Stanley’s account, by a “perfectly slender, usually White [woman who] obviously has some kind of money to afford all those leggings.”
Stanley’s repeated use of “fat” is to reclaim a word she believes undeserving of its negative connotations. “The only way you can let go of a weapon, especially in the form of a word, is to take the weapon back,” she told me. Stanley took her efforts beyond social media, launching her own fitness app, The Underbelly, where she invites yoga learners to access their feelings in an authentic way. “You don’t have to omit the sadness, the anger, and all of the other ‘ugly’ emotions that flavor our lives,”26 Stanley wrote in her book Every Body Yoga, meant as an amuse-bouche for intimidated yoga beginners who “don’t feel comfortable walking into a studio.”
The radical fitfluencer’s insistence to fight for the further inclusion of various body shapes struck a chord within the Instagram community. Fans learn, for example, how to tailor yoga poses for all body types, with tips on how to move around with larger thighs or breasts. A sweep of her account shows thousands of likes and hundreds of comments from followers comforted by her honest depictions of pursuing wellness activities in an idealized climate. Some cry watching her videos. “You are an inspiration to the ones that don’t look like the so-called ‘model type,’” wrote one fan.
Stanley wasn’t surprised. “[People] want to see another person that’s like them,” she said of her 470,000 followers. She believes a large swath of Americans want to exercise but feel put off by traditional instructors and the mainstream media’s unattainable depictions. “I was overwhelmed by people [who responded] ‘Wow, I didn’t know that fat Black people could practice yoga, I thought it was only skinny women,” she said, adding, “There were a lot of people who think that I’m a unicorn.”
Stanley does not consider herself any sort of mythical creature. If anything, she said, “I am the norm, I am not the minority.”
You can get sucked into the culture of it all. With wellness, you’ll see yourself on a constant quest of betterment, the ideal always on the horizon. We bow at the altar of excellence with our hard-earned effort, be it a meticulous meditation regimen or Olympian-level fitness classes. You would think everything should propel you to great new heights—to self-conquest—for there is no glory or virtue in the neutral. And people don’t always realize it’s work because of the way it’s been marketed—as a “lifestyle.”
But make no mistake, we are striving for perfection, not unlike our religious ancestors working toward salvation. We have an image of what perfection is in our head—it can be super fit, calm, or free of any ailment—and it is reinforced like propaganda even when built on shaky premises. I’m not against self-improvement, rather that we have internalized a silent imperative: that we must continually work to upgrade our bodies and brains.
The pressure, ironically, can have the opposite effect. Fitness enthusiasts can push themselves so hard that an entire industry sprouted in response to it. One of the leading industry trends, with double-digit growth, is that of recovery: big-box gyms have hired recovery coaches and set up dedicated areas with self-massage tools.27 One-on-one assisted stretching studios—like a spa for your overworked muscles—have opened across the country.28 This means that for some, salvation isn’t always promised as much as what eventually awaits us: burnout. Then the cycle starts all over again, reverting us through the rhythms of self-care. It’s one big reinforcing complex: work hard, fall apart, then buy some stuff so you can get back on the horse. A snake eating its own tail.
If it’s not mental upgrades and strenuous sweat—the productivity mandate—then it’s another powerful doctrine embedded into trendy wellness doctrines: level up your health with technological advances. With cutting-edge science at our fingertips, why wouldn’t you want to go further? These are two sides of the same coin, assuring us we can maximize just about everything.
But can we?