Apparently, we’re maxing everything now. Protein maxing, fiber maxing, sleep maxing, strength maxing, longevity maxing. I recently saw “hobby maxing,” and that may have been my breaking point. Can we please leave hobbies alone? I thought the entire point of a hobby was that you could be mediocre at something and still enjoy doing it. I love making matcha, the whole process of it, sifting the tea powder, learning the proper way to whisk it, figuring out the right ice-to-dairy-free-milk-to-matcha-and-water ratio. I look forward to this little work break almost every weekday, but I would never call it matcha maxing.
I don’t need to maximize my reading either, I would just like to read a book. I love my daily walks, but I wouldn’t say I need to maximize my walk. I say all of this as someone who works in wellness and has spent more than 20 years in the fitness and wellness world. I teach yoga and fitness, I’m a health and mindset coach, and I genuinely love this stuff. Wellness is a huge part of my life, which might be exactly why I’m starting to feel so exhausted by what we’ve turned it into.
I believe strength training matters, I believe exercise matters, I meditate, I practice yoga and I pay attention to nutrition. I’m not anti-wellness, but I’m starting to become anti-making-wellness-another-full-time-job. There is a point where taking care of yourself starts to feel less like taking care of yourself and more like managing a very demanding employee. There is always something else to track, improve, increase, decrease or optimize, and somehow even the things we used to do to feel better have become things we can apparently do wrong.
There has always been a certain amount of optimization in the fitness world. We counted calories, then macros, then steps, and now it’s your sleep score, recovery score, heart rate variability and whatever else your watch decided to tell you this morning. Our watches can tell us how recovered we are before we’ve even decided how we actually feel. I’m not saying that information can’t be useful, sometimes it absolutely can be, but I do wonder when information stopped being information and started becoming another set of instructions. At some point, we stopped using wellness tools and started letting the tools grade us.
Social media has taken all of this to another level because now it seems like nothing can simply be good for you, it has to be optimized. You can’t just eat vegetables, you need to hit your fiber target, and breakfast isn’t breakfast anymore unless you’ve managed to hit a specific amount of protein before a certain time. You can’t lift weights because you enjoy feeling strong, you need to maximize muscle for longevity, and apparently you can’t take a walk because the leaves are pretty without wondering whether it counts as Zone 2 cardio. Even going to bed because you’re tired has somehow become less important than what your sleep score says the next morning. At some point, taking care of ourselves became another performance metric, and I think a lot of us are exhausted by it.
This feels ridiculous to me as a woman in midlife because women in their 40s and 50s are currently being handed approximately 700 wellness rules before breakfast. We’re supposed to lift heavy, but recover enough, eat more protein, get enough fiber, walk after meals, take creatine, do intervals and make sure we aren’t doing too much cardio. We need to protect our bones, build muscle, prioritize sleep, get morning sunlight, meditate and regulate our nervous systems. We’re also supposed to manage our stress while remembering that being stressed about managing our stress is probably raising our cortisol. Excellent, no pressure at all.
Meanwhile, actual life is happening. Women in this stage of life may be working, building businesses, parenting teenagers, sending kids to college, caring for aging parents, managing households and navigating bodies that suddenly seem to have rewritten the instruction manual without telling us. There are appointments to make, dinners to figure out, bills to pay, group texts we forgot to answer and approximately 47 tabs open in our brains at any given moment. Then we open Instagram and someone tells us we aren’t getting enough protein at breakfast. I’m sorry, but sometimes breakfast itself feels like an accomplishment.
None of this means the recommendations themselves are necessarily bad. Strength matters, bone health matters, nutrition matters, cardiovascular health matters and sleep absolutely matters. What I think gets lost is that wellness advice doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it lands on actual human beings who already have full lives. There is a difference between giving women useful information and making women feel like there are 14 more things they need to add to their daily checklist. We don’t need wellness to become another place where we feel like we’re failing.
This is the part I wish we talked about more because there is a very big difference between enough and maximum. More exercise isn’t always better than enough exercise, more protein isn’t infinitely better than adequate protein, and more supplements don’t automatically equal better health. Even something that is good for you doesn’t necessarily become better for you simply because you do more of it. Yet wellness culture has become very good at convincing us that if something is beneficial, surely maximizing it must be even more beneficial.
There is also something strange about squeezing every possible health benefit out of every minute of the day. Your walk needs to improve your cardiovascular fitness, your breakfast needs to hit your macros, your coffee needs collagen or protein or supplements, your shower needs to end cold and your bedtime apparently requires a multistep routine worthy of a skincare commercial. You can absolutely enjoy some of those things, I do plenty of them myself, but I don’t think every moment of our lives needs to earn its keep. Sometimes a walk can just be a walk, and sometimes you can eat something because you like it.
I know how easy it is to fall into this because I have absolutely been the person who turned wellness into another thing to perfect. I love goals, I love routines, and give me a new planner and a fresh Monday and I can reinvent my entire existence by 8:15 a.m. There is a part of my brain that loves having a plan and checking the boxes, which is exactly why I have to be careful about how many boxes I create. There will always be another metric to chase, another number to improve and another thing someone on the internet tells me I should be doing better. Enough is a much harder concept for some of us than more.
Please Don’t Optimize Your Hobby
Which brings me back to hobby maxing because this is where I would really like us to draw the line. Your hobby does not need a growth strategy, a productivity goal or a monetization plan. You are allowed to knit an ugly scarf, paint something nobody will ever buy, grow tomatoes without becoming an expert in regenerative gardening or run without signing up for a marathon. You can practice yoga for 20 years and still have absolutely no interest in mastering a handstand. You can be average at something and still love doing it.
You can bake bread without starting a sourdough account, read 12 books this year instead of 100 and take pictures without figuring out how to monetize them. You can make pottery that comes out a little lopsided and keep it anyway. You can take a dance class without tracking how many calories you burned, and you can learn something new without immediately asking yourself whether you could turn it into a side hustle. Somewhere along the way, we started believing that if we enjoy something, we should get really good at it, document it, optimize it or make money from it. Maybe enjoying it was already enough.
I actually think there is something incredibly healthy about doing something that produces absolutely nothing except enjoyment. There is no metric, no before-and-after picture, no streak to maintain and no reason to prove that you’re getting better at it. You do it because you lose track of time, because it makes you laugh, because your hands are busy and your brain gets quiet, or simply because you like it. In a culture constantly asking us to produce, improve and perform, maybe being mediocre at something you love is its own tiny act of rebellion.
I still care about my health, and none of this means I’m going to stop doing the things I know make me feel good. I’m still going to strength train, practice yoga, walk, meditate, eat plants, prioritize sleep and pay attention to what my body needs. I’ll probably still read wellness research and try new things because I genuinely find this world interesting. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life squeezing another two percent out of everything I do. At some point, I want to actually enjoy the life I’m supposedly trying so hard to make healthier.
I don’t want my morning to become a protocol, my workout to become a spreadsheet or my food to become math. I don’t want my sleep to become a grade that determines how I’m allowed to feel that day. I don’t want every walk, meal, workout, meditation and hobby evaluated according to whether I’m doing it in the most optimal way possible. Most of all, I don’t want taking care of myself to become another accomplishment I have to earn. I want wellness to support my life, not become my life.
I’m going to try and make the next wellness trend be enough-maxing, where we all compete to see who can be the most satisfied with doing a reasonable amount of something. Actually, no, I take that back because within three weeks someone would have an Enough Maxing Protocol, a $97 course and a podcast explaining the optimal way to do less. There would probably be an app to track how well we weren’t tracking things. We would ruin it immediately.
So forget the maxing. Let’s just call it enough.
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
