Introducing The Wellness Anarchist
A deceptively tidy phrase has emerged in recent months, the wellness anarchist, to describe someone who “trains seriously enough to complete marathons yet considers the afterparty equally important.” Somebody who treats their body like an F1 car Monday through Friday, before handing the keys to a designated driver for the weekend.
When Feeling Good Becomes a Full-Time Job
Wellness anarchists take inspiration from optimisation content and counterbalance it with occasional hedonism, rallying against the side of wellness culture that turns a set of habits designed to help you feel better into a laborious performance.
Research quietly supports the cultural unease here. Critiques of modern wellness consistently show how wellness has drifted into a form of work—tracking sleep, macros, lifts, runs, steps, blood sugar, gut health, mood—transforming rest and nourishment into tasks to be optimised. Like most things, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Sociologist Robert Crawford coined the term healthism back in 1980 to describe how health, for some, becomes a moral signifier.
The Space Between
Before we proceed it’s important to draw a line between wellness and wellbeing. They aren’t interchangeable. Wellness describes a state of health, having the energy and capacity to do what you want. Wellbeing is broader. It includes wellness, but also meaning, pleasure, connection, contradiction. A life that feels well-lived.
That definition is inherently subjective. One person’s well-lived life has no hangovers. Others include festivals, late nights and the odd rogue decision. As the pendulum of cultural capital has swung from overt hedonism in the 90s/00s to obsessive wellness in recent years, the description of a wellness anarchist aims to centre the focus somewhere between the two. They ring both ends of the bell curve: all in, all out.
There is value in saying no to a meal with your mates because you have goals, there’s also value in saying yes in spite of them. Christmas offers the annual case study. Gyms close early. Many people wind down. The Quality Street opens. Habits fall aside. January arrives. Restraint returns with force. The pendulum swings again.
Ideas for Indulgence
Interestingly, there seems to be a correlation between people who train and drink. A U.S. survey of over 40,000 adults found moderate drinkers were twice as likely to be physically active as abstainers, with stronger associations at higher activity intensities. Stronger evidence in terms of research method emerges from a 3-week longitudinal diary study, which showed that individuals drank more on days they were more physically active. Yet another analysis of over 30,000 U.S. adults found the activity–alcohol link strongest in those under 50 years old and particularly pronounced in men.
These studies highlight how the notion of a wellness anarchist holds water outside of theory. Whether it speaks to a streak of sensation seeking, stress relief or health guilt is up to you to decide. There is something called compensatory/counter-regulatory behaviour within physiological and psychological research. In short it describes how, after intense exertion or restriction, humans experience heightened desire for reward. That is to say, effort can license indulgence.
It would be irresponsible of us to suggest you head out, run a marathon and down six pints in celebration. Alcohol disrupts sleep and worsens recovery. That said, scientists have helpfully outlined where the line can be drawn. If alcohol is consumed post-exercise, doses around 0.5g of alcohol per kilo of bodyweight (roughly two pints for the average man and 1.5 pints for the average woman) are unlikely to meaningfully impair recovery, provided hydration is considered.
Celebrating your achievements with a few pals at the end of the goal might just do more for long-term motivation and overall wellbeing than bolting home to optimise recovery metrics and plan your next training block.
Polarity as a Purpose
If the trendline is to be believed, wellness culture is only set to grow. In tandem, how we understand wellbeing will develop as subcultures gain their own momentum. The Enhanced Games and psychedelic ultrarunners serve as early symbols for what is yet to come.
There is something that feels intrinsically human in connecting extreme discipline and structure with an escapist relinquishing of control. Work hard, play hard. Take the edge off.
The wellness anarchist understands this intuitively. They embrace the idea that a life of contradiction may have a suitable texture. As Barbara Ehrenreich put it: “Life is too short to forgo these pleasures, and would be far too long without them.”
Or, as Jack London wrote: “I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”
Maybe you like the idea. Maybe you hate it. One thing’s for sure, the direction of wellness is changing shape.
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