Sustainable wellbeing without compulsive optimization

There's an uncomfortable paradox in contemporary wellness culture: the harder we try to optimize wellbeing, the more anxiety it produces. Positive psychology research over the last two decades has begun documenting this, and the conclusions are less encouraging than the wellness industry admits.

The problem is structural. Once we turn sleep, hydration, steps, meditation, and relationships into variables to maximize, we activate a constant evaluative mode of thinking. And that evaluative mode is incompatible with most real wellbeing states, which require disengaging.