I’m going to be honest with you now but real wellness is kind of boring.
The wellness world has somehow made your wellbeing another thing to achieve, making it more performative and less about your actual wellbeing.
If you don’t understand your basic physiology, breathwork can create anxiety.
Cold water dips become a coping mechanism.
Sleep and tracking becomes an obsession and we end up becoming more hypervigilant on our wellbeing.
That’s stressful, mentally, physically and emotionally.
We’re often looking to add something new in order to make us feel better but we have forgotten the foundations underneath it.
If you really want to improve your wellbeing, sometimes you don’t need to add more.
You need to focus on the boring stuff.
Sleep, breathing, food, movement, rest, recovery.
Simple? Yes
Easy? – No
What actually improves your wellbeing?
I wish it was as easy as sending you a PDF of a great routine that will support you, but you are one unique human.
You have experienced a life. You have habits, behaviours, reactions, environments, breathing and your own physiology that will impact how you work with your wellbeing.
There are systems working together inside you and understanding these are the foundations of wellbeing..
(This is something I explore in more detail in my SCP Framework blog, where I explain how stress, capacity and performance interact.)
Sleep, breathing, food, movement, rest, recovery.
That’s not exactly going viral, is it?
Most of us have heard some version of this advice before.
I think that’s partly why it’s so easy to overlook.
We want the new thing.
The thing we haven’t tried yet.
The thing that might finally explain why we don’t feel quite as good as we’d like to…
Maybe that’s a supplement so it feels like we’re doing something.
A new morning routine feels like a fresh start.
A fancy piece of technology that gives us new information to look at and analyse.
Unfortunately, ‘get proper restorative sleep, eat enough, move your body and make sure there are actually periods in your week where nothing is being required from you’ doesn’t have quite the same sparkle.
But boring doesn’t mean unimportant.
Before you add something, look at what’s already happening
When someone comes to work with me, my first thought isn’t:
What can I give you to do?
It’s
What’s actually going on?
How are you sleeping?
How do you feel when you wake up?
What does your energy look like throughout the day?
Are you eating enough for what you’re asking your body to do?
Are you moving?
Are you getting outside?
How are you breathing throughout the day?
Are there periods where nothing is being demanded of you?
What does caffeine or alcohol look like?
And what does your actual week look like (not the imaginary perfect week social media tells you you should be having)
Sometimes, after looking at all of that, adding something absolutely makes sense.
I have an abundance of tools when the time is right.
But I don’t want to keep adding things to your life to compensate for foundations that aren’t supporting you.
Sometimes the answer isn’t another thing to do.
It’s figuring out what your body actually needs, what it might not currently be getting and starting there.
It’s making sure we’re not skipping the foundations looking for a more exciting answer.
Simple wellbeing advice isn’t always simple to implement
There is another side to this, though.
I’m aware telling someone to “just focus on the basics” when your anxiety comes from nowhere, you can’t catch a breath or you haven’t slept properly for weeks doesn’t help you either.
The foundations might be simple, but humans aren’t.
Knowing sleep is important doesn’t automatically help you understand why you’re waking up exhausted.
Knowing movement is good for you doesn’t tell you what kind of movement works for your body, your goals and your life.
Being told to manage your stress doesn’t help you understand what stress looks like for you or what might be contributing to it.
And knowing something is good for you doesn’t automatically mean it’s easy to do consistently.
We have jobs, children, relationships, social lives. We travel, get sick, have deadlines, finance worries and previous experiences that impact all of that. Some weeks everything goes beautifully and some weeks where everything goes completely tits up.
That’s why I don’t think wellbeing is about handing everyone the same checklist.
It’s about understanding the person in front of me and figuring out which foundations need attention, what will actually make a difference and how to make that work in their real life.
Sometimes that’s education.
Sometimes it’s guidance.
Sometimes it’s accountability.
Sometimes it’s making something simpler, rather than adding more.
You don’t need to be perfect at wellness
And maybe this is the bit I find most frustrating about where wellness has ended up.
Looking after yourself shouldn’t become another way to judge how well you’re doing at life.
You don’t need a perfect morning routine.
You don’t need to hit every metric.
You don’t need to eat perfectly, sleep perfectly, exercise perfectly and respond calmly to every mildly inconvenient thing that happens to you.
You are a human being, not a wellness robot.
Your foundations don’t need to be rules you follow perfectly.
They’re things you can come back to.
You can go on holiday, stay out until 2am, miss the gym, eat the takeaway and have a mad week at work.
You haven’t failed, you’re living.
What you need is to come back to the things that support.
The goal isn’t to build a perfect routine.
It’s to build foundations that work in a life that isn’t always going to be perfect.
I worked with a client on improving his HRV over eight weeks. In week six, he went on holiday and unsurprisingly, his HRV dropped.
That didn’t bother me.
I wasn’t interested in keeping his HRV perfectly high all the time. I was interested in what happened when he came home.
How quickly did it return towards his usual levels?
How well did his body respond to the change and recover afterwards?
The goal isn’t perfect numbers. It’s having foundations you can come back to – that’s the point.
(HRV (heart rate variability) is the tiny variation in time between each of your heartbeats. It can give us an indication of how your body is responding to things like stress, recovery, sleep and exercise.)
Real wellness can be boring
There will always be new wellness trends.
Some will be useful, some interesting and some will be absolute nonsense.
I’m not suggesting we should never explore any of them.
I’m suggesting that before we go searching for the next answer, we look at the foundations underneath us.
Because perhaps wellness doesn’t need to be another hobby, achievement or full time job.
Perhaps it can be much quieter than that.
Understand what your body needs.
Use additional tools when they’re actually useful.
Then LIVE your life.
Your wellness doesn’t need to be the most interesting thing about your life.
And that’s kind of the point.
If you want to get your foundations solid – take a look at UNBOUND my 1:1 coaching.
About Clare Pritchard
I’m Clare Pritchard and I help ambitious people improve their sleep, breathing, energy and ability to manage and recover from stress.
My work looks beyond one symptom or one practice. I look at the whole person and the foundations that influence how they feel and function including breathing, sleep, movement, recovery, habits, behaviours and nervous system health.
I combine breathing pattern analysis, science backed breathwork, somatic coaching, nervous system education and practical lifestyle support to help people better understand their body and make sustainable changes that work in real life.
My work is guided by my SCP Framework; Safety, Capacity and Performance and I work with people through 1:1 coaching, group programmes and workplace wellbeing.