Lifestyle | Wellness
Has self-care become too much work?
By Tamara LamunièreJul 24, 2026
CoverWhat was once a matter of instinct, self-care has now become a matter of constant measurement (Photo: Getty Images)
Sleep scores, supplements, routines and retreats: when did looking after ourselves become a second job?
Has self-care become less about feeling better and more about proving that we are trying hard enough? Wellness today can look like an endless performance of discipline: the right sleep score, the right supplements, the right routine and the right retreat to recover from it all. People are even paying for permission to read, rest and disconnect
This International Self-Care Day, on 24 July, we ask a more uncomfortable question: have we forgotten how to recognise when enough is enough?
The origins of self-care
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines self-care broadly as the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote and maintain their health, prevent disease and cope with illness, with or without the support of a health or care worker
In this public-health framing, self-care means active participation in health, not lifestyle perfection. Its scope includes health promotion, disease prevention, caring for dependents, managing illness, rehabilitation and recognising when professional care is needed. WHO also makes clear that self-care should operate within a safe and supportive health system rather than disconnecting people from healthcare
As wellness developed into a vast consumer industry, self-care also acquired a more commercial meaning. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy doubled in size between 2013 and 2024. As the industry grew, so did the number of areas in which consumers were invited to intervene: sleep, stress, food, fitness, appearance, ageing, recovery and mental wellbeing
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How consumer self-care became work
AboveModern self-care includes systems that generate data. The more data generated, the more monitoring and managing it starts to look like a job of its own (Photo: Getty Images)
One way to understand the shift is that the earlier consumer wellness market largely sold products and experiences. The newer phase builds on those offerings by selling systems that gather, interpret and respond to personal data
As more data is generated, self-care can begin to resemble work: checking the information, deciding whether it matters, determining whether it is accurate, changing behaviour, monitoring the results and deciding whether to repeat or alter the process
Medical researchers use the term “treatment burden” to describe the workload involved in managing illness and its effect on a person’s functioning and wellbeing. That work can include attending appointments, taking medication, monitoring symptoms and reorganising daily life around care
Consumer wellness is not the same as managing chronic illness, but the concept raises a useful question: what happens when the workload of looking after our health begins to exceed the time, energy, money and support available?
Self-care became the individual answer to collective problems
Consumer self-care has also expanded amid persistent gaps in healthcare, workplace pressures and concerns about anxiety and trust in institutions. The wellness market offers action where institutions often offer ambiguity
A clinician may explain that symptoms are complex or that no clear answer yet exists. Wellness marketing is more likely to identify a cause, protocol or product. The risk is that social and organisational problems become translated into failures of personal management
Rina Raphael, journalist and author of the 2022 book The Gospel of Wellness, describes the central paradox: “We have become a self-care nation, though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of wellbeing.”
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Productivity culture and self-care have merged
AboveAs the lines of productivity and self-care become blurred, activities like yoga are now expected to offer a tangible outcome (Photo: Getty Images)
Self-care did not become work only because the wellness industry grew. It also absorbed many of the assumptions of productivity culture, intensified by smartphones, always-on working, social media and the popularisation of life-hacking, habit tracking and the quantified self
Everything began to require a return: sleep to perform better, meditation to focus, exercise to lead better, holidays to become more productive, hobbies to become more creative and recovery to sustain output. The activity is rarely allowed to be sufficient in itself
Author and journalist Oliver Burkeman, whose work examines productivity, mortality and the limits of conventional time management, argues that modern attitudes towards time make it difficult not to “value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal”.
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Health has become a moral obligation
Once health became increasingly measurable, almost every behaviour could generate a result: a sleep score, step count, glucose response, readiness rating or biological-age estimate
And while measurements can provide useful information, problems can begin to arise when a metric stops being descriptive and becomes a judgement
More than a decade before the current anti-optimisation backlash, organisation scholars Carl Cederström and André Spicer warned of what they called the “wellness syndrome”. In their 2015 book, The Wellness Syndrome, they argued that health and happiness were no longer merely desirable but were becoming moral obligations. Feeling good increasingly signified being good, while illness, unhappiness or an inability to keep improving risked being interpreted as failures of discipline or personal responsibility.
This moralisation is especially visible in language such as “clean” eating, “earning” rest, “falling off track” and becoming the “best” version of yourself. The implication is that a person is never finished because another, better version is always available
Their argument helps explain why self-care can generate guilt. Missing a meditation session is no longer merely missing an activity: it can feel like failing to manage oneself correctly
Has self-care made us more narcissistic or anxious?
AboveConstant self-monitoring may be crowding out community and quiet acceptance of life’s limits, blurring the line between caring for ourselves and being controlled by the routines meant to help us (Photo: Getty Images)
That raises several provocative questions. In our preoccupation with ourselves—our performance, bodies, scores and improvement—what happens to community, care for others and acceptance of ordinary human limits?
Does constant monitoring and intervention reduce trust in our ability to tolerate ordinary discomfort, uncertainty and bodily fluctuation?
Is wearing two wearable devices intelligent monitoring or compulsive checking? Is racing home from a social gathering to protect a prescribed sleep window a sensible boundary, or a sign that the routine has begun to control the life it was meant to support?
A 2026 scoping review led by Fei Liao et al and published in BMC Nursing examined 110 publications on wearable-device use in cardiovascular patients. It identified reports of health anxiety, excessive self-monitoring, repeated reassurance-seeking and device dependence among some patients. The review did not establish how common these effects are or prove that wearables caused them, but it supports asking when information stops serving a person and starts directing them
This is not to suggest that self-care is unimportant. It can preserve health, restore capacity and enable people to care for others. Helpful self-care can improve function, support recovery or make an important decision clearer
We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing
– Thich Nhat Hanh –
It becomes self-absorbed when the self is treated as the only cause of the problem, the only place where change can happen and the only intended beneficiary. Over-management treats every poor night, difficult emotion, appetite change or low-energy day as a problem requiring correction
As Vietnamese Zen master and author Thich Nhat Hanh observed in a 2010 interview with The Huffington Post: “We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing.”
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The over-optimisation backlash
After years of tracking sleep, food, movement, stress and recovery, a countertrend is emerging: people are looking for experiences that ask less of them
The Global Wellness Summit’s The Future of Wellness: 2026 Trends report describes what it calls “The Over-Optimisation Backlash”, following its identification of “Analog Wellness” as a major trend in its 2025 report. These are industry forecasts rather than independent evidence of a defined social movement, but they capture a visible reaction against constant measurement and self-improvement
Reading retreats, sleep tourism, digital detoxes and renewed interest in crafts, board games and other offline hobbies all reflect a growing desire to step away from measurement, connectivity and continuous self-improvement
The irony is that even our escape from optimisation is being optimised. We are paying for ordinary acts—reading, sleeping, making things and switching off—repackaged as luxury wellness experiences
The real measure of self-care may not be how closely we monitor ourselves, but what that care makes possible. Care should not end at the edge of the individual. It should restore enough capacity to support relationships, share responsibility and question the conditions that made recovery necessary in the first place. Self-care, after all, should give us more life, not more work
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Topics
International Self-Care DaySelf-careRecoveryHealth optimisation
Tamara Lamunière is the president of Tatler Asia Group.
