TUESDAY 20 AUGUST 2019GET WELLNESS SOON
While self-help doctrines espouse radical personal change, self-care is
softer, gentler, more forgiving and is all about cultivating the you that
already exists, writes Kate Carraway
No need for organising rules – just be kind to yourself (Getty)
“Wellness” is a word that has come to encompass our latest dominant sociocultural obsession – how to take
care of ourselves in the world. It may, at one point, have been popularly understood as an extension of self-
help, a category of literature and speaker circuits that is devoted to personal optimisation (and often,
productivity). But more recently, under the potent influence of millennial values, wellness has been
positioned and marketed as self-care. This wellness is softer, gentler, more forgiving than its self-flagellating
forebear. Definitely more fun.
Maybe the new wellness is – to borrow from Democratic primary candidate and self-help author Marianne