Maybe your wellness routine doesn’t need another supplement. Maybe it just needs a dinner party, a holiday, a great playlist and a little more time doing exactly what makes you happy.
Modern wellness can feel a bit exhausting. Everywhere you look, someone is telling you how to be better, healthier, fitter, calmer, younger, or more productive. There are sleep scores, step counts, smart rings, cold plunges, morning and evening routines, supplements for your supplements, and enough powders to fill a small lab.
Even relaxing has become competitive. Somewhere between tracking our REM cycles and counting our protein, we’ve forgotten one rather important part of wellbeing: having a bloody good time.
And maybe that’s why pleasure is having something of a wellness moment.
The conversation is shifting away from the idea that being healthy means being relentlessly disciplined and towards something altogether more enjoyable. Friendship. Creativity. Music. Travel. Good food. Dancing. Laughter. Intimacy. Sex. Doing things simply because they make us happy.
Not as rewards. Not as guilty pleasures. Not because our watch told us we needed more joy before 6 pm. Just because they feel good.
YOUR FRIENDS ARE BASICALLY A WELLNESS RETREAT
Consider the humble dinner with friends. Nobody is measuring their heart rate. Nobody is doing breathwork between courses. Nobody is asking whether the tiramisu contains enough protein. And yet you leave feeling better. You’ve laughed. You’ve talked. You’ve probably complained about the same person for the 47th time. You’ve eaten something delicious. You’ve stayed out later than planned.
There is something deeply restorative about being with people who know you properly. As adults, friendship can become another casualty of busy lives. We are excellent at saying, “We must do this more often,” and spectacularly bad at actually putting something in the diary.
Maybe it’s time to stop treating friendship as the thing we get around to once work, family and everything else has been dealt with. Call the friend. Book the table. Open the wine. Stay for dessert.
DO SOMETHING YOU’RE TERRIBLE AT
When did everything become about being good at something?
We exercise to improve. We cook to perfect. We create content. We learn skills that can be monetised. We turn hobbies into side hustles. Maybe the most deliciously rebellious thing you can do is make something completely useless.
Paint a terrible picture. Take a pottery class. Arrange flowers badly. Learn three chords on a guitar. Make something nobody will ever see. Write something nobody will ever read.
Creativity isn’t necessarily about producing something beautiful. Sometimes it’s simply about switching off the part of your brain that wants everything to have a purpose.
YES, WE’RE GOING THERE: SEX
We can talk about cortisol over breakfast. Discuss gut health over lunch. Debate collagen at dinner. But mention sex, and suddenly everyone becomes very interested in their water glass.
It’s strange, really, because sexual wellbeing is part of wellbeing too, yet it remains one of the least openly discussed aspects of looking after ourselves.
And sexual pleasure doesn’t require a partner. That might be one of the most important things to say.
There is a tendency to frame intimacy through relationships, as though pleasure begins when you meet someone and disappears when you’re alone. But feeling connected to your own body, understanding what you enjoy and being comfortable with your own sexuality are not dependent on another person.
You don’t need to be coupled up to feel whole. You don’t need someone else to validate your desirability. And you certainly don’t need to put your own pleasure on hold while waiting for the right relationship to come along. There is something wonderfully empowering about knowing your own body and experiencing sensuality on your own terms. Sensuality isn’t only about sex; it can be as simple as wearing something that makes you feel beautiful, putting on a favourite fragrance, moving to music, enjoying the feel of sunlight on your skin, or simply feeling completely at home in your own body.
And that’s probably where the conversation around sexual wellness needs to go next, away from performance and partnership as the default, and towards self-discovery.
EAT THE CAKE. SERIOUSLY.
Wellness has had a complicated relationship with food. One minute we’re told to eat clean. The next we’re encouraged to fast, track, weigh and measure everything that goes into our mouths.
Meanwhile, some of life’s greatest pleasures are sitting on the sidelines looking increasingly suspicious. Fresh bread. Pasta. Cheese. Chocolate. A long lunch. A delicious dessert.
Food is nourishment, obviously. But it is also culture, celebration, memory and pleasure. There is a reason holidays are remembered through meals: the restaurant in Paris, the pasta in Rome, the fish by the sea, the Sunday roast, the cake your grandmother made.
A healthy relationship with food doesn’t mean never eating anything delicious. It means being able to enjoy it without the accompanying courtroom drama.
BOOK THE HOLIDAY
We spend an extraordinary amount of time waiting. Waiting for Friday. Waiting for payday. Waiting for summer. Waiting until work calms down. Waiting until we’ve lost the weight. Waiting until we have more money. But what if life is always going to be a little busy?
Travel has a wonderful way of interrupting the routine. Suddenly you’re walking somewhere you’ve never been, eating something you’ve never tried and spending an afternoon doing absolutely nothing that was on the itinerary.
There is something wonderfully life-affirming about having a trip in the diary. A little escape to look forward to can make an ordinary Tuesday a lot more exciting.
DANCE AND SING LIKE NOBODY’S WATCHING
Music may be one of the quickest ways to change a mood.
The right song can transport you somewhere instantly. It can remind you of a person, a place, a summer, a first kiss or a version of yourself you haven’t seen in years.
And then there is dancing. Not exercise disguised as dancing. Actual dancing. The kind where nobody is watching, and you don’t care if you look ridiculous.
Put on the song. Turn it up. Move.
WHEN DID JOY BECOME SO UNPRODUCTIVE?
I think this is the real issue. We have become obsessed with making everything count. If we walk, we want the steps. If we sleep, we want the score. If we exercise, we want the results. If we travel, we want the photographs. If we have a hobby, we wonder whether we could turn it into a business.
But pleasure doesn’t always produce anything. Sometimes it just feels good. And maybe that is enough.
A beautiful afternoon with no agenda. A glass of wine with a friend. A swim in the sea. A ridiculous amount of laughter. A great book. A road trip. A song played too loudly. Making something with your hands. Staying up too late because you don’t want the evening to end.
These are not distractions from a healthy life. They are the stuff of one.
YOUR NEW WELLNESS GOAL? ENJOY YOURSELF
This isn’t an argument for abandoning everything we know about health. Sleep still matters. Movement matters. Eating well matters. Looking after our bodies matters.
But sometimes wellness needs to stop being quite so serious. Because what is the point of living longer if we’re spending all those extra years worrying about whether we’re doing it correctly?
The pleasure principle is wonderfully simple. Do more of what makes you feel alive.
Make space for the people who make you laugh. Follow your curiosity. Say yes to the things that bring you joy. Give yourself permission to be frivolous, spontaneous, sensual, creative and occasionally gloriously unproductive. Because perhaps the ultimate wellness hack isn’t another thing to add to your morning routine. It’s remembering what all that wellness is supposed to be in service of in the first place.
A life you actually enjoy living.