Yo Once he lived a perfect day. He started with his legs crossed through an open window for 30 minutes of meditation, with the morning light that lies vitamin D directly on my face. After that, it was time to stretch: one, two, three solar greetings, synchronize the movement of my limbs to long and deep breaths. In the shower, I slowly returned the warm water to the cold to flood my system with endorphins, before leaving and repeating a round of positive statements to the mirror.
At night, I chew my dinner consciously before lighting The TV. Then, two hours before bed, I kept all my screens and lit some candles. For the flashing flames, I wrote all my concerns in a newspaper and pointed out how I would address them the next day, before listing the multiple reasons I had in my life to be deeply, truly grateful. With eight full hours before I had to get up again, I go to bed on my pillow, I closed my eyes, I took a round of deep and calming breaths and finally … I panicked.
The attractiveness of the welfare industry can be incredibly strong, especially if it suffers anxiety. All my life had experienced periods of vague and oppressive fear that they could make of whole weeks a misery, and in recent years, I had begun to feel that the solution was only one more blow. My algorithm served an endless well of gurus that defends the newspaper or diaphragmatic breathing or running in underwear through the frozen tundras of Norway. I ventured it (okay, not in the Norway), thinking that if I just landed in the perfectly optimized mental health routine, I would banish my destiny forever. The fact that no combination of these activities seemed to work made me fear in silence that I could break, that anxiety was simply my luck in life.
In 1984, American psychotherapist John Welwood coined the phrase “spiritual omission.” He used it to describe people in the hippie movement that used exotic practices such as yoga and meditation as a substitute to work in deeper problems with their mental health. There is a “generalized trend,” he warned, “using spiritual ideas and practices to dodge or avoid facing unresolved emotional problems. [and] Psychological wounds. ”Welwood believed that psychology and spiritualism could complement each other, but said that he saw too many people trying to attack their path to inner peace and” rise above the raw and messy side of [their] humanity before [they] They have faced and made peace with that. ”
Fifty years later, we are now living in an era of well -being without passing. The global well -being industry is worth $ 5.6 billion, driven by an endless tide of autocuidated tips with Instagram, often presented as rapid solutions for low moods, depression or anxiety. In many cases, the science that supports them is spurious at best. An investigation published by He Guardian Last week he discovered that more than 50 percent of the main videos of trends that offer Mental Health Councils about Tiktok contain erroneous information. These deceptive statements about the powers of saffron and magnesium glycen to the dubious methods that promise to “cure trauma in an hour.” A theory postulated that it can reduce anxiety when eating an orange in the shower (surely it is true if you are eager to have sticky fingers while eats fruit).
Jevin d West is the co -author of a book called Call shit: the art of skepticism in a world driven by date and leads the research teams trying to fight against wrong online information. Health and well -being, West tells me, it is the area of greatest problem of all. “Nothing approaches even their ability to attract people's attention and convince them to lower their guard,” he says. “There is direct misinformation, of course, which has an intentional element. But a large part of what we have seen is misleading content. Maybe it has some elements of truth. It could even be citing relevant science. But often, it is an area in which there is not much research. “Take Shilajit, for example, the tar -shaped supplement intended to increase testosterone.
West number one council to consume online content is an old but a gift: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Currifying his family trauma for decades for “Cozymaxxing” will probably not cut it. But he acknowledges that, even for intelligent users of social networks, this can be incredibly difficult to follow. “Because we want Be convinced, “he says.” We want that elixir that can solve this emotional problem we could have. Us I want to believe. ”
We also want to belong. The other powerful charm of well -being trends is that they offer us something that we yearn to even more fundamentally, according to the great psychologist Erich Fromm, than happiness itself: the feeling that we are not alone. Believing that the solution to your problem is one ready that thousands or even millions of other people have already discovered is much less scary than confronting the alternative: that your individual problems may need an individual solution, a too complex to capture in a video of 30 seconds.
My own misadventures in well -being did not involve, at least, any orange to eat in the shower. I attached to practices with proven science and, in some cases, thousands of years of efficiency behind them, such as yoga and meditation. The reason why they did not heal my anxiety was not that they were a scam, but that I had not yet done the deep and difficult emotional work that underlies my mental state. In that sense, I was like one of Welwood's hippies, closing my eyes and reaching Nirvana as my teeth were secret.
All I tried was based on the simple and logical premise that the opposite of anxiety was relaxation. Find the correct combination of techniques to “relax”, and fear would surely move away. In truth, finally releasing generalized anxiety disorder was due to a key advance in therapy, in which I realized that my mental health problems were being caused by decades of repressing anger. Was angerNo happiness, that sat on my anxiety.
I was like one of Welwood's hippies, closing my eyes and reaching Nirvana as I secretly molded my teeth
Discovering that behind my trends for people who pleased people and the avoidance of conflicts was a lot of anger was a difficult process and sometimes terrifying, one that would be impossible to encapsulate in a Tiktok video. On the other hand, I decided to write a book about it: the hidden role that the anger repressed plays in anxiety and depression, and how to learn the difficult ability to express anger in a healthy way can change our lives for the better.
One thing in which all the main psychologists can agree is that the answers we most need are generally hidden in the places we least want to look. Carl Jung called him to confront our “shadows”, which means finally dealing with the memories or emotions that we avoid or live with fear. Unfortunately, even complex ideas such as this have been absorbed by the #Wellness vortex. The emergence of “Therapy Speak” has meant concepts such as the response to trauma, transfer and attachment theory are now regularly misunderstandings and misrepresented in Tiktok.
Even when they are Understood correctly, there may be unrealistic expectations about how fast the therapy works. People often renounce the stage of intellectual understanding – I am like that for that – And do not stay during the long and repetitive hours required to integrate ideas correctly and make slow and gradual changes in your inner life. Such impatience is a logical consequence of an online culture that encourages personal growth as performance. We want to hurry to social networks to share our latest advances before they have really happened.
“Psychotherapy helps people understand themselves in a very pragmatic way,” Welwood wrote. “Trying to jump on this area of our development in favor of spiritual happiness beyond is asking for problems.” As I discovered, you can't attack your path to happiness more than you can have a perfect day. Whatever your feed is saying, feeling “good” is the work of your life.
Sam Parker is the author of 'Good anger: How to rethink anger can change our lives'Now, published by Green Tree
