Rethinking Wellness
Rethinking Wellness
Sometimes You Need a Break from Your Brain
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Sometimes You Need a Break from Your Brain

Why Smart People Fall for Wellness Misinformation, Part 2
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Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash+

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.

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Rethinking Wellness
Rethinking Wellness
Rethinking Wellness offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. We explore the science (or lack thereof) behind popular wellness diets, the role of influencers and social-media algorithms in spreading wellness misinformation, problematic practices in the alternative- and integrative-medicine space, how wellness culture often drives disordered eating, the truth about trending topics like gut health, how to avoid getting taken advantage of when you’re desperate for help and healing, and how to care for yourself in a deeply flawed healthcare system without falling into wellness traps.
**This podcast feed shares generous previews and very occasional full-length episodes. To hear everything, become a paid subscriber at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.**