A decade of covering the wellness beat has taught journalist Calin Van Paris one thing: the trends that promise to 'optimise' your life often end up making it worse. In a piece for Outside Online, she singles out five habits that started as sensible self-care and mutated into sources of stress — and her advice travels well, whether you're at home or halfway through a holiday.
First up is 'sleepmaxxing', the social-media-driven quest for perfect sleep. Rest matters — clinical psychologist Nicole Moshfegh, author of The Book of Sleep, notes that poor sleep affects physical health, cognition and mood — but obsessing over the numbers can tip into orthosomnia, an actual obsession with achieving an optimal sleep score. If you're lying awake calculating lost minutes of rest, the routine has become the problem. Calming habits like breathwork, evening yoga and less screen time are fine; gadget-driven anxiety is not.
Cold plunging gets a more sceptical verdict. The Nordic tradition is credited with mental clarity and resilience, and some find it genuinely refreshing. But one analysis suggests cold baths may do little more for muscle recovery than a placebo, and some research hints that regular cold-water exposure can negatively affect the female reproductive system, with no proven recovery benefit for women.
Wearables come in for a nuanced take. Devices like the Oura Ring or the Pulse Mindfulness Ring can genuinely help with breathing, meditation and focus. The trouble is over-reliance: constant monitoring can heighten anxiety and rigidity around otherwise healthy habits, and can be a particular trigger for people with eating or health disorders. Her suggestion is refreshingly simple — take the gadget off now and then and see how you feel.
The supplement industry draws fire too. It's projected to be worth $300 billion globally by 2028, yet many products never receive FDA approval, and studies show that pills can create a false sense of invulnerability that actually leads to poorer diet and exercise choices. Supplements only make sense when they support an already healthy lifestyle — not replace one.
The final trend is performative wellness: treating self-care as content. When your routine becomes about brand deals, audience perception and optics rather than things that genuinely bring you peace, it has stopped doing its job.
Why should travellers care? Because holidays are exactly when these habits tend to go haywire. You pack the ring, chase the ice bath at the hotel spa, and stress over sleep scores in an unfamiliar bed — turning the one week designed for rest into another optimisation project. The takeaway for your next trip: keep the calming rituals that actually work, leave the tracking and the extremes at home, and let a holiday be a holiday.
Original story: Outside Online
