What Is Anti-Wellness Wellness? (And What's With the Ducks?!)

Let's address the duck in the room. You're on a wellness website...🫣

You probably arrived here feeling slightly suspicious, possibly mid-eye-roll, definitely braced for someone to tell you to "romanticise your morning routine" or "breathe in abundance."

The good news is that we're not going to do that. Ever. In fact, we'd rather chew glass.

mindful(ish) is an anti-wellness wellness brand, which is a phrase that makes about as much sense as "jumbo shrimp" until you've spent even five minutes inside the actual wellness industry. So let's explain what it means, why we built a whole brand around it, and why there are ducks.

The wellness industry has a problem; spoiler: it's its whole personality

Modern wellness is a multi-trillion-dollar machine - the Global Wellness Institute puts it at $6.3 trillion and counting - and somewhere along the way it stopped being about feeling ok, and started being about performing serenity for an audience. It got expensive, and smug, and started selling you $90 candles, gratitude journals you'd abandon two months into the year after setting unachievable new year's resolutions, and the silent, yet persistent suggestion that if you're still anxious, it's because you're not trying hard enough.

Cue toxic positivity, the cheerful insistence that every bad feeling can be "affirmationed" into submission. "Good vibes only." "Just choose joy." "Everything happens for a reason." They all sound supportive, but really, they aren't. A 1997 study by Gross and Levenson asked people to suppress their emotional reactions while watching distressing footage. Fun fact: their heart rates and skin conductance went up, not down. What this demonstrated is that telling yourself to feel better doesn't make the stress go away, it just buries it somewhere it can fester and erupt on a random Tuesday afternoon during a Teams meeting.

Quite frankly, it's a bit cruel, so we call bullsh*t.

So WTF is anti-wellness wellness, then?

Anti-wellness wellness is self-care for people who find mainstream self-care alienating. It keeps the parts that actually work, and bins the parts that make you feel like a fraud.

Hear us out. We're against the wellness industry, not against your wellbeing. The breathing techniques, the grounding exercises, the journalling, putting your phone in another room so you can focus, these things can legitimately be good for you. The pan-pipes, the guilt, the exorbitant sound bath, and the implication that you're "doing healing wrong"? Less so...

Truthfully, some days are a total write-off, and sometimes the most mindful thing you can do is cry in the bathroom and eat a snack that would confuse a nutritionist. There is no need to pretend otherwise, and definitely no need to feel bad about it.

A lot of the low-grade, hard-to-name exhaustion that we lug around every day is the predictable result of a nervous system that never fully gets to switch off. Chronic, low-level stress keeps your body in a state of physiological readiness, with cortisol ticking along, threat-detection engaged, and proper rest perpetually deferred.

The wellness industry's response to this is, largely, to add more things to your to-do list, instructing you to meditate correctly, optimise your sleep hygiene, journal in the right format, the recommendations are endless. In so doing, the pressure to perform wellness becomes its own source of stress (Gross and Levenson, 1997)!

What does help, it turns out, is surprisingly anticlimactic. Kristin Neff's research at UT Austin on self-compassion, i.e., treating yourself with the same basic decency you'd extend to a friend, shows consistently lower anxiety, less depression, and more resilience compared to harsh self-criticism. This isn't a detox retreat, or a personality overhaul; it's literally just stopping being so relentlessly sh*t to yourself about your human experience.

The small, silly interventions add up too. Even brief moments of positive affect, such as laughter, lightness, or lol a stupid duck meme, activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the bit of your brain responsible for rest and recovery rather than fight-or-flight) and interrupt the stress cycle. This is how mindful(ish) delivers its practical tools, with humour and purposeful ridiculousness, not just to make light of difficult situations, but because laughter is, for real, the best medicine (Berk et al., 1989; Martin, 2001).

Same useful tools. None of the sanctimony. Approximately 0% bamboo viscose athleisure wear (unless that's your vibe, which is totally fine too).

Why the ducks, though?

Legit question.

Here's the logic (promise, there is some...) 🦆

Ducks are a little bit silly, a little bit soft, and relentlessly resilient. They glide along looking perfectly composed while paddling like absolute maniacs under the surface. They do not have their sh*t together, nor are they enlightened. They just keep floating.

That's the whole vibe. You don't need to become a serene, dewy person who meditates at dawn. Just keep floating, and have a giggle while you're at it.

Who TF is anti-wellness wellness actually for?

This is for the emotionally crispy. The over-caffeinated. The ones who've read every "10 habits of highly serene people" listicle and come away feeling worse. The people who want to feel a bit better but cannot, physically cannot, "live, laugh, or love."

If that's you, welcome! Pull up a metaphorical lily pad.

It's totally fine if the self-optimisation the wellness industry hurls at you doesn't resonate. It's an industry, and you are being marketed to, but know that you're not alone in feeling this way. If performatively aesthetic wellness feels as superficial as the $250 vitamin supplement being sold to cure your burnout, it's because it is. Feeling better shouldn't require a personality transplant, or the ability to suppress your entirely reasonable feelings about the trials and tribulations of life. Maybe you can try laughing through it instead. It worked for us - tried, tested, duck-approved 🦆

Read more

• Global Wellness Institute. (2024). 2024 global wellness economy monitor. https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2024-global-wellness-economy-monitor/
• Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.
• Martin, R. A. (2001). Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 127(4), 504–519.
• Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.
• Berk, L. S., Tan, S. A., Fry, W. F., Napier, B. J., Lee, J. W., Hubbard, R. W., Lewis, J. E., & Eby, W. C. (1989). Neuroendocrine and stress hormone changes during mirthful laughter. The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 298(6), 390–396.