In my last essay, I wrote that despite the attitude among certain scientific skeptics, people who fall for wellness misinformation1 aren’t fools. On the contrary, being smart and inquisitive might actually make us more susceptible to wellness culture. In my view, there are three main ways intellect can increase people’s vulnerability to false claims and pseudoscience.
The first is through the portal of mind-body practices like yoga and meditation, which many people (including me) have found essential for balancing out our overactive minds, helping us shift out of our intellects and into different modes of being. Yoga and meditation themselves are evidence-based, but they can also act as a gateway into the more out-there parts of wellness culture, where we get exposed to ideas and protocols that are lacking evidence and riddled with pseudoscience.
So today, I want to talk about all that—and share a few thoughts on how we might avoid falling into these traps.
