When Self-Care Becomes Disconnection

I've been thinking a lot lately about how wellness culture has shifted.

When I first started working with the body, people barely spoke about feelings. Trauma wasn’t language everyone used. Most people were rewarded for overriding themselves—performing, producing, coping—while losing connection to their inner world.

So learning how to slow down, feel, rest, and listen inward mattered. A lot.

In that cultural context, therapy, somatics, nervous system work, and emotional awareness acted as a counterbalance to a world obsessed with productivity, pushing through, and functioning at all costs.

The inside world needed to come forward.

But techniques, therapies, and modalities don’t exist outside culture. They interact with where we already are—individually and collectively. What creates balance in one era can create imbalance in another.

And honestly, I think we are in that territory now.

What began as a much-needed return to the body has, at times, turned into an industry of self-monitoring, self-optimization, self-soothing, and self-analysis. Somewhere along the way, healing became confused with constantly tending to ourselves.

Meanwhile, many of the things that actually make humans feel alive—relationships, challenge, building things, moving our bodies with purpose, being needed, making art, cooking, community, nature, awkward conversations, effort, play—are slowly being replaced by content about living.

I’m not anti-therapy.
I’m not anti-rest.
I’m certainly not anti-body.

But I do think we need to ask what happens when an already isolated culture becomes increasingly organized around the self.

Because our bodies are not just places to heal in.

They are meant to be lived in.

So much of modern wellness revolves around the word self: self-care, self-development, self-regulation, self-healing, self-optimization. And yet, alongside this explosion of inward focus, we are also facing a loneliness and mental health crisis across multiple fronts.

That feels worth paying attention to.

Post-Covid, the wellness landscape feels different.

I see an industry that has learned how to profit from people’s pain. Existential angst, burnout, heartbreak, uncertainty, mid-life transitions—so much of it is now filtered through the language of trauma and nervous systems. Somatics has become a catch-all explanation and, often, a promise: tune into your body and you’ll finally regulate, heal, succeed, maybe even make more money while you’re at it.

To be clear, many of these practices are helpful. Therapy, bodywork, movement, nervous system education, self-development—all of these can support genuine healing and growth.

But I also notice something else happening.

Many self-care regimes seem to be isolating people. Encouraging them to fixate on trauma narratives. Turning the body into a new authority figure that will supposedly save us.

The regulated nervous system is becoming the new diet.

Who we are is increasingly conflated with our wounds, our patterns, our somatic stories. As though understanding ourselves is the same thing as endlessly analyzing ourselves.

Here’s the thing:

The body does not hold the truth.
It holds everything.

The body contains wisdom, yes. But it also contains conditioning, habit, fear, fantasy, memory, stress, social programming, avoidance, and noise. The body is not a clean oracle delivering pure answers.

You feel tired.
Does that mean you need rest?
Or movement?
Food?
Sleep?
Challenge?
Connection?

Your nervous system feels activated.
Are you unsafe?
Excited?
Overwhelmed?
Inspired?
Anticipating something meaningful?

Somewhere along the way, we closed the gap between listening to the body and assigning enormous meaning to every bodily sensation. That can be useful. But sometimes I think we are losing the plot.

Not every sensation is a message.
Not every discomfort is trauma.
Not every hard feeling needs immediate soothing.

The work I’m interested in is not about self-care. It is about helping people reconnect to vitality.

Vitality is not always calming. It can be uncomfortable. Stretching. Demanding. Sometimes dysregulating. Sometimes deeply inconvenient.

Because growth often requires learning new skills—physically, emotionally, relationally.

That is training, not self-care.

Our bodies regulate in relationship to life:
people,
nature,
animals,
music,
art,
writing,
conversation,
cooking,
work,
play,
community.

Yet increasingly we are doing fewer real, embodied things while spending more time analyzing ourselves on couches, on Zoom, or through curated wellness content.

Technology is shaping us profoundly, and the counter-response has become an explosion of somatic language and nervous system discourse.

Historically, humans have a tendency to elevate one aspect of ourselves as the answer: the mind, the spirit, productivity, now the body.

And while I’m genuinely glad the body is no longer sitting in the backseat, I don’t think it should be driving the car alone.

The body experiences our whole life—not just our healing moments.

We were sold hustle culture for years.
Now I think we are also being sold “do-less culture,” thinly veiled as self-care.

Overwork.
Crash.
Retreat.
Repeat.

Push beyond feeling.
Ignore signals.
Hit exhaustion.
Escape into self-soothing.

Netflix. Baths. Isolation. Therapy. More content. More regulation.

This cycle mirrors many other addictive patterns: dieting, debt, love addiction, overconsumption. The assumption is always that the opposite extreme will save us.

But what if neither extreme is the answer?

What if the point is capacity?

A body practice, ideally, is exactly that: a practice.

Not merely a balm.
Not escape.
Not recovery from life.

Training for life.

A good practice develops a wide range of human capacities. It helps us meet life more fully, not withdraw from it. Yes, restoration matters. But so do strength, endurance, adaptability, and pacing.

Modern life—especially internet life—is quietly atrophying essential human skills:
attention,
physical literacy,
frustration tolerance,
depth,
presence,
nuance,
the capacity to stay with challenge without immediately speeding up, collapsing, or checking out.

I don’t necessarily believe people in the modern West are facing more hardship than previous generations. But I do think our collective ability to metabolize difficulty may be weakening.

“Wired and tired” may simply be another way of saying overstimulated and undernourished.

And nourishment is interesting.

What is the difference between consumption and nourishment?

It’s worth asking in every area of life:
What are you consuming?
And is it actually nourishing you?

Nourishment works on a different timeline. It must be digested, metabolized, integrated, and often worked for.

Vitality and nourishment are partners.

Nourishment is the soil.
Vitality is the expression.

Because life is not found in endlessly pushing ourselves.
But neither is it found in endlessly tending to ourselves.

A body practice, ideally, is not about escaping life or constantly recovering from it.

It is training for participation.

Our bodies are not just places to heal in.

They are places to live from.