After more than twenty years immersed in wellness, I’ve stopped chasing perfection and started trusting my own intuition and using discernment.
When people ask what I do, the easy answer is that I work in the radio and music biz writing for morning radio shows throughout the United States, and I’m a yoga teacher, fitness instructor, mindset coach, and podcast host.
The more honest answer is that I’ve spent more than twenty years watching wellness evolve—from something women quietly practiced in their own homes to a multi-trillion-dollar industry built around algorithms, optimization, bio-hacks, and the constant promise that the next thing will finally fix us.
I’ve lived through nearly every version of it. Long before social media turned healthy living into content, I was already the woman reading nutrition books for fun. I wasn’t trying to become an expert or build a business. I was fascinated by how our bodies work, how our minds work, and why some habits seemed to make people feel better while others left them exhausted.
When my oldest was a baby I was out the door and at spinning class at 5:30am, I was even pregnant with my youngest and still going up until the day before I had her. Then when both of my daughters were little, my mornings were 5:30 a.m. Pure Barre class, come home, load my toddler and baby into a double jogging stroller, and run five miles through the neighborhood, then go to work. I made homemade baby food because I genuinely enjoyed it. I experimented with homemade cleaning products years before they became trendy. Years before a Whole Foods came to my area we had little tiny health food stores that I wandered the aisles.
The funny thing is that almost nobody knew, there wasn’t an audience, there wasn’t a camera sitting on my kitchen counter. I never had MySpace, I wasn’t on Facebook, and Instagram had just launched in 2010 when I had a toddler and a baby, and I didn’t even join IG until about a year later. My account was private (and my personal account is STILL private) because, like so many people back then, I thought it was a fun way to share photos with grandparents, cousins, family, and friends who lived out of town.
No one was filming every workout, no one was creating content from every meal, no one was trying to turn ordinary life into a personal brand. We were just living and looking back, I miss that.
I want to be clear, I do not think social media is all bad. My career today wouldn’t exist without it. I’ve connected with incredible people, learned from brilliant teachers, and built a community I never would have met otherwise, but somewhere along the way, wellness changed. Fitness became metrics, rest became something to optimize, meditation became a streak to maintain, healthy meals became content, every new week seemed to bring another list of rules, another protocol, another supplement, another expert telling us we were doing it wrong, and then the last few years on top of all of this we were told to fear everything, and don’t trust doctors or scientist and it seemed like everyone online was now an “expert.”
Over the years I started noticing something.
The women I met didn’t need more information, they were drowning in it. They already knew vegetables were healthy, they knew movement mattered, they knew sleep was important, they didn’t need another list of things they “should” be doing, they didn’t want a 20 step morning routine or an hour long “self-care” program to do. They wanted things taken off their plates, they wanted a list of less things that they needed to do, they wanted permission to stop believing they were failing because they couldn’t keep up with an impossible standard.
The more I studied, the less interested I became in finding the perfect routine. Instead, I became fascinated by why so many smart, capable women were exhausted from trying so hard to be healthy.
That question changed everything. It also made me look honestly at my own life. For years, I thought discipline meant doing more. Looking back at the woman who went to Pure Barre before sunrise and then ran five miles pushing a double jogging stroller, I don’t see someone who just loved fitness. I see someone who believed that doing more made her more worthy. Those are not the same thing.
Today I joke that I’m fully in my scrunchy mom era.
I’ve experienced enough, studied enough, and honestly made enough mistakes to stop believing there’s one “right” way to be healthy. I don’t need every wellness trend to become my personality, I don’t think health has to be all organic or all conventional, all holistic or all medical, I believe in lifting weights because I want to be strong enough to carry groceries, travel, and hopefully play with my future grandchildren one day. I believe in walking because it’s one of the best things I can do for both my body and my mind. I believe in yoga because it reminds me to slow down, I meditate because I’ve experienced what it can do for an anxious, overwhelmed nervous system.
I eat mostly whole foods and yes I am a vegan ( I have been a vegetarian since I was around 4 or 5 years old and vegan now for 15 years,) and I also believe that life includes birthday cake, pizza nights, candy when I want it, cocktails in moderation if I feel like it, and vacations where the goal is making memories, not counting macros.
I believe in science and holistic health, I also believe that chronic stress, loneliness, and the stories we tell ourselves have a profound impact on our health. Those beliefs don’t compete with each other, they work together. To me, being a scrunchy mom isn’t about following another trend, it’s about letting go of extremes. It’s trusting your own intuition and using discernment instead of outsourcing every decision to the internet.
Wellness should support your life, not become your entire life. My go to saying is, if it stresses you out, that’s not wellness.
After spending more than twenty years immersed in this world, that’s the lesson I keep coming back to. The healthiest people I know aren’t the ones with the most supplements or the most disciplined morning routines. They’re the people who move because it feels good, they nourish themselves without obsessing, they rest without guilt, they laugh a lot, they spend time with people they love, they know when to ask for help, and they leave room in their lives for fun and joy.
If my years in wellness have taught me anything, it’s this:
Health isn’t something you achieve, it’s a relationship you build with yourself over a lifetime, and I think that’s a much more interesting conversation than chasing the next bio-hack trend.
Nikki Lanigan
Nikki Lanigan is a yoga, HIIT, and Barre instructor, she is also a Holistic Health Coach through Institute of Integrative Nutrition. Nikki is trained in Yoga Shred, Yoga Psychology, meditation, chakra balancing, and EFT/Tapping. She has done trainings with Sadie Nardini and Ashley Turner. She got her 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2017 at the Carrie Treister School Of Yoga. Nikki takes a holistic view of health, helping her students and clients reach a place of self-love not just through movement, but with mindset and lifestyle guidance as well. Nikki is also show prep writer for The McVay Media Show Prep and host of the podcast Fit, Fun, and Frazzled. Connect with Nikki on Instagram. www.instagram.com/nikkilanigan.yogaandwellness www.instagram.com/fitfunandfrazzledpodcast
