Well Beings: The Cultural Evolution of Wellness

I sit down with Dr James Riley, Associate Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University, and author of "Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves"

👋🏼 Hey, I’m Joanna! I’m a communications consultant sharing insights and ideas relating to democracy, wellbeing, AI, culture, spiritualism and the human condition…read on if this has piqued your interest.

In the past couple of years, I’ve become fascinated with the idea of what it means to be well and wellness. What does it mean to you to be well? What is the collective definition of wellness? Why has wellness become so mainstream in recent years, particularly in regard to products, treatments and how much time we dedicate to it? What is the status of the collective application of wellness in the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Needs sense? What does it mean to be socially and politically well?

These are all questions I’ve pondered and written about here in The Breakout Room and I’m on a quest to indulge in this topic as much as I can because I’m curious to find out to what extent “wellness” benefits us, and what does this tell us about the state of how we live today? What does it tell us about how we value and see ourselves and others?

With these questions in mind, I of course had to read Dr James Riley’s new book, Well Beings, a book which journeys the cultural history of wellness from the 1970s and the emergence of what it means to be collectively well – something which we should all be more curious about in the age of Main Character Energy. The idea of living a good, meaningful life rather than just merely existing is important. But if some people can’t do this simply because they can’t afford to, what trickle effect does this have in the rest of society? What does this say and suggest about our relationship to our fellow humans, and why does this matter?

James’ book raises and pokes at these questions in a brilliantly informed and analytical way by navigating the moments which laid the foundations for what we now know as the modern wellness industry, a market which is projected to grow to $8.5 trillion by 2027, marking an annual economic growth of 8.6%. But beyond the economic growth, what is the real time value, actual rather than perceived? As someone who loves the wellness space and who embraces its growth (to a certain extent) I was curious to ask James what he thought about the subject and how he saw it evolving in the decades ahead. Enjoy!

---

Joanna: Hi James! How has the language of wellness changed since the 1950s? How did wellness as a word emerge and why?

James: It was the physician and biostatistician Halbert A. Dunn who coined the term in a series of articles written towards the end of the 1950s and then via his book High-Level Wellness (1961). ‘Wellness’ itself is a very old word but for the majority of its history it essentially meant ‘not-ill’. Dunn gave the word a more specific meaning relating to an aspirational model of health, an ‘integrated model of functioning’ which was oriented towards ‘maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable’.

Dunn’s view was that the human being – with all its plasticity and adaptability – was able to achieve much more than a general, neutral level somewhere between being ‘sick’ and ‘not-sick’. It was possible, he counselled, to live in a fully charged state, ‘radiant, with energy to burn’. To do this, particularly in the post-war world of growing cities, longer lives and new pressures upon the human community, one had to cultivate a holistic approach to well-being, one that appealed equally to the ‘mind’, the ‘body’ and the ‘spirit’. In order to be well in the way he thought possible, one had to work towards a simultaneous state of good mental and physical health as well as maintaining a sense of life purpose. What he meant by ‘spirit’ was a sense of animating force. In other words, Dunn was interested in helping people to live rather than merely exist.  

The signification of a phrase like ‘mind, body and spirit’ is arguably one of the key changes in the discourse surrounding wellness since the 1950s. Where Dunn was outlining an image of the human as an intersection of complimentary systems, ‘mind, body and spirit’ has now become the holy trinity of modern wellness, and it’s a phrase that more readily brings to mind a form of secular spirituality. One might go to the ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ section of a bookstore, for example, to find a title on dream interpretation or energy healing. This is not to criticise such publications, of course, rather its merely to point out the clear differences between this more recent branding and Dunn’s earlier concept.

Joanna: You discuss the post-war shift in British government policy from a medicalised focus on illness to a broader idea of “wellbeing” aka physical, mental and social health as a definition of health. What moment initiated this?

James: In 1946 the World Health Organisation ratified their constitutional definition of ‘health’ to mean ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity’. This was part of the policy that influenced Halbert Dunn, who had professional links to the WHO.

At the same time, Britain was transitioning from a warfare to a welfare state, via the recommendations of the 1942 Beveridge Report that paved the way for the ‘cradle to grave’ care of the NHS. Both shifts demonstrated a policy-based intention to use the wartime logistics and infrastructure within the context of post-war reconstruction. Equally, though, they demonstrated a re-theorisation of precisely what ‘ill-health’ meant.

The emphasis on social factors drew in material and economic variables and the importance of community involvement, that’s to say health was increasingly understood in post-war political terms as a measure of one’s social well-being. Much of this thinking was prompted by the sense of possibility opened-up by the post-war period. It was reflective of a semi-utopian view to re-build in a beneficial manner. One can certainly question the extent to which such projects have proved to be successful.

We are variously (i.e. socially and culturally) haunted by the promises of the post-war welfare state, not least because much of it has been dismantled. At a base level, though, the thinking spoke of an intention to improve individual health by attending to a wider field of social health.

Joanna: You reference many different characters within the wellness space over the last few decades. In your opinion, who is the most significant and why?

James: Well Beings was intentionally written to include a large cast of characters. I wanted to take a panoramic view over the period with the idea of well-being as a central theme. Part of my methodology with this book and the previous, The Bad Trip (a study of the late-1960s), was to gather a wide range of material and multiple storylines, to construct an engaging narrative that compliments the sections of cultural-criticism. I was keen to bring in examples and incidents that didn’t initially seem to work together and weave them into a larger and insightful whole. Hence the passages involving wellness projects and 70s British sitcoms.

Within this frame, I’d offer John Travis and Donald Ardell as the most significant figures in the book. They are the practitioners who arguably did the most to develop and enact Halbert Dunn’s ideas in the 1970s. They both championed his book, High Level Wellness when it had largely fallen from view. Ardell’s own book, High-Level Wellness (1976) intentionally used the title as a way of re-circulating Dunn’s volume. In 1975 Travis started one of the earliest dedicated wellness centres, the Wellness Resource Center in Marin County and then went onto publish The Wellness Workbook (1977) with Regina Sara Ryan. Ardell had a background in urban planning, while Travis was a former physician. Both saw drug-dependent approaches to well-being as problematic and sought to offer alternatives that could do more than merely ‘patch-up’.

Joanna: In your book, the key thing that I took away was that in the 1970s “wellness” was more practical, accessible and political. Could you expand on this?

James: This practicality is the key to Travis and Ardell’s work. As Travis put it, he wanted to help his clients find out why they were sick. His approach – following on from but also developing Dunn’s work – looked at diet, nutrition, fitness but also one’s sense of self. He offered his clients a comprehensive model of personal re-evaluation that was intended to help with their physical health but also with their mental health by building that crucial sense of purpose. Wellness, for Travis, was about understanding one’s life as a progression and plotting it in such a way to maximise a sense of potential. It was not about retreating from the world into a solipsistic space of ‘me-time’, but about subjecting one’s routines, habits, assumptions and aspirations to a thorough examination.

Ardell thought similar but he also wrote about workplaces practices, about the value of volunteering and being involved in one’s community. They both placed considerable emphasis on stress. Their work was thus practical because it was about making changes in one’s life and in society overall; it was accessible because they were offering their ideas to everyone, and it was also political because it was oriented towards engaging with the negative effects of what we would now see as a neo-liberal capitalist world.  

Joanna: I’m fascinated by the idea of social-wellbeing and what makes us collectively well. At what point did wellness become more commercialised and why?

James: The late-1970s and into the 1980s. The pursuit of wellness was always a commercial enterprise in the sense that projects such as Travis’ Wellness Resource Center needed to generate an income in order to operate as independent entities. Beyond this, however, the 1980s saw the rise of lifestyle marketing which used the concept of well-being as a marketing tool.

Commercial products - be that sports equipment, soft drinks, domestic appliances, cars and any number of additional commodities were sold via campaigns that offered an aura of well-being, or at least promised to improve your life in ways that far outstretched the capabilities of the objects in question.

Such commercialization, one might argue set the tone for the likes of Goop. Although much more oriented towards the promotion of individual well-being, its products are linked to the image of a high-net-worth lifestyle. One needs to be doing well financially and materially in order to be well via these celebrity branded products. Each of these models is dependent on personal purchasing power and thus speaks to the idea that it will be the affluent individual who will benefit, rather than the wider social sphere.

Joanna: I’m curious about the political implementation aspect of wellness and how this applies now when governments in the West are experiencing high amounts of debt and are largely in reaction mode to problems which arise.

Where do you envisage wellbeing in a collective sense going? Do you think that as we become more visibly aware and feel the effects of the climate, economic and social crisis wellness will revert back to a state similar to the 1970s?

James: It would be useful if it did, but in terms of the current environmental drive – at least at a policy level – it seems as if we remain in thrall to some of the stereotypes of the 1970s.

While there’s a lot of powerful ground level activism at play, it sometimes seems as if the resistance to the roll-out of a large-scale environmentally oriented agenda at a macro level (I’m thinking here of the ineffectuality of previous COP Climate Change conferences) is indicative of an unwillingness to entertain a left-wing, residually ‘hippie’ world view. This is a problem, because it was the counterculture, so to speak, which supercharged the eco-movement in the 1970s and the ideas of this period remain extremely relevant.

The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968-1972) as well as The Limits to Growth (1972) should be required reading for all current sitting politicians. With a nod to Anthony Galluzzo’s recent book on 70s culture and the degrowth movement, Against the Vortex (2023), I’d also be inclined to provocatively include John Boorman’s recently republished novel Zardoz (1974) to that reading list.

Joanna: You say that “If the 1960s were all about changing the world, the 1970s was all about changing yourself” and that this has extended out to the phone-obsessed, selfie era. The 1970s was the “quintessentially ‘Me’ decade”, something which could apply to the 2010’s with the emergence of selfies and the cultural boom and mainstream mania in wellness.

Based on your research over the generations, how would you describe the era of the 2020s?

James: I certainly feel an overwhelming sense of crisis, which unfortunately does not seem to be an exceptional view.

Crisis – material, economic, political, personal – has become something of the norm. On reflection, ‘crisis’ is probably the wrong term for the current situation, because the word etymologically carries with it the possibility of change, a crisis being a turning point in an existing narrative.

The problem with the first few decades of the 21^st century is that an overwhelming sense of crisis has become so habituated into our psychic lives that the foreboding is there, the feeling of inevitable doom is there, as is the sense that things are over before they have begun, but no change arrives to take us through this phase into another. In other words, we’ve come to expect things not to work and for physical and mental ill-health to be merely an accepted condition of everyday life. We’ve come to expect that governments will not be on our side, that all employers will be exploitative, and that the vast majority of people will be systemically and inevitably denied access to ‘normal’ services and facilities.

When surveying such conditions and when particularly making references to the recent wave of strikes and public discontent, the media narrative is that we risk returning to the 1970s, as if that’s some kind of threat. I’d argue that the present circumstances have arisen because the socio-political warning signs which first became apparent in the 1970s such as rising debt, rising house prices and the personal effects of neoliberal working practices went unheeded. Or rather, such issues were systemically amplified into standard operating procedures underpinning much of our social sphere.

We’re often presented with the relentless privatization (and privation) of public services, widespread personal information surveillance, grinding precarity and an overheated property market as if they are things to be grateful for: signs of a buoyant economy dedicated to perpetual growth and smooth, fluid convenience.

The result, however, is an enormous amount of socio-political collateral which only shores up an economically fortunate and opportunistic minority. The emergent wellness sector of the 1970s went some way to engage with these difficulties. It encouraged clients to think about changing their circumstances. Currently, however, it’s almost unthinkable that there could be any other way of life. How would things even function without the smartphone? How could we even exist without social media?

Joanna: Bearing in mind the drastic changes of the last few years since the pandemic, how would you describe the current state of wellness?

James: From the perspective of public mental health, you don’t have to be a medical professional to see that things are bad. Depression and anxiety are so prevalent they’ve become practically invisible. The COVID context and the lockdown periods of the pandemic brought much of this to the fore. It revealed the value of community links and an associated, functional social structure. It also demonstrated just how easy it is to slip into isolation.

In one sense it’s good that there’s widespread awareness and many therapeutic opportunities, but the social factors informing and exacerbating such conditions continue to be unaddressed. Mental health is a matter of public concern and rightly so, but when it comes to bad mental health understood as a symptom of inadequate social support, there’s less in the way of political will to deal with it. Private individuals paying over the odds for private therapy is one thing, but improving living and working conditions for the purposes of generating such non-quantifiable (i.e. truly priceless) outcomes as ‘happiness’ is, shamefully, quite another.

As a thinking experiment to test this state of affairs, consider the word ‘fulfillment’. What does it immediately signify? Satisfaction? contentment? Or the type of work done by low-paid, warehouse operatives at a large online company’s Fulfillment Centre?

Joanna: As a constitutional law academic, I’m enthusiastic about putting social rights which enhances wellbeing into constitutional texts. Do you ever think it possible to implement in practice?

James: Yes, it is possible, but it would require large scale political buy-in and a fundamental paradigm shift in the understanding of society. It would be necessary to move from the competitive, combative modality that seems currently prevalent – society being a conglomeration of sole agents each responsible for their own well-being as a condition of their participation in an inevitably hostile environment – to an understanding of society as a collective of mutual interest in which top-down support and reciprocal, convivial care is beneficial for the operation of the group overall.   

Specifically, we need a roll-out of a universal basic income; an end to zero hours contracts; an end to no fault evictions; the introduction of 3-year minimum rental tenancies and significantly more accountability on the part of landlords to maintain liveable properties.

There also needs to be significant state intervention into the production and sale of a reliable, and affordable private housing stock.  In terms of work, there needs to be detailed workplace well-being check-ins as standard and a proper triage system in place when help is needed. Much of this architecture is already in place, if we think about the infrastructure of 360-degree performance reviews, and could be productively adapted. In the education sector there needs to be more focus on civil practice and the meaning of good citizenship.

Again, one could argue that with PREVENT training, there’s a reflective community policy already in circulation, but the problem is that much of its equipment is directed towards a defensive posture. How might we reverse this mutual surveillance into something more positive as regards community building?

Further, higher education also needs to return to grant, rather than loan-funding. With this, one could re-build the understanding of university education as an experiential phase of personal development rather than a debt-producing pressure cooker. The main effect of the latter form of aggressive marketization has been the progressive de-valuation of non-vocational subjects (i.e. the Humanities) which are precisely those which so typically tell us how to live and what a good life is.

And, of course, there needs to be a properly funded NHS and a corresponding National Mental Health system. How could we fund all of this? By taxing the rich, for a start. Who among us, solely and singularly needs more than a billion pounds, anyway?

Joanna: As someone who enjoys a wellness practice or two, I read in one of your interviews that you tried out self-experimentation. What did you learn from this research?

James: That in the terms outlined by Dunn and Travis et al I was, most likely, very unwell.

Among the practices I tried, I found the use of floatation tanks to be the most interesting and rewarding. Some of the experiences I had floating in the dark were not relaxing, per se, but more disturbing and hallucinatory, so I came away with a lot to process (and use!). The most practical insight, though, came from trying to fit this into my working routine. I remember talking to a friend about how I was going to a floatation centre to relax, and he raised the very sensible point as to what that said about my stress levels in general. Why did I have to go into a dark chamber full of salt water to calm down?

Later, after having studied John Travis’ work, I found that this type of self-examination was a classic wellness question. Beyond the interest and enjoyment I was getting from floatation, it also made me think hard about just how stressed I was getting on a regular basis. Same with mindfulness techniques.

After looking into Jon Kabat Zinn and Full Catastrophe Living (1990) as part of my research, I used a lot of the techniques to hold off migraines which would sometime occur at the end (or worse) at the start of the day. It was great to have a tool kit ready for such eventualities, but at the same time the obvious two-part question arose: what was it about the workplace that caused such neurological events and why should we put up with them? Analysing these more systemic issues is, I believe, the real task of wellness. This is what the practitioners of the 1970s aimed towards. What I was trying to argue in Well Beings is that contemporary wellness has all but lost this sense of social mission.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed it, let me know with a heart ❤️ above or below. I would also love to hear what you think in the comments below!