How Do You Avoid Wellness Rabbit Holes?
Share your ideas for steering clear of online diet and wellness traps
Lately I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about why we fall for online wellness misinformation, and how to avoid getting hooked by it.
In this week’s podcast episode, author/journalist Rennie Dyball and I shared how we still occasionally get pulled in by promises of wellness, even despite being vocal critics of diet and wellness culture. We’re up against such powerful forces—social media algorithms, the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry, cultural conditioning that goes back generations—that it would probably be impossible to resist every single trend that claims to offer the key to key to symptom relief and better health. We’re all vulnerable at some level. Yet we can try our best to get out quickly when we do stumble into a wellness trap. I loved this quote from Rennie:
We are fighting something that can be stronger than us and sneakier than us. So I try to give myself grace. If I go down a rabbit hole with something even now, you get that flash of, ‘oh wait, no, this is it. This is outside of wellness culture. This is a real thing. This is going to make me feel better.’ But being at a place where you can stop and not follow the trap and not spend the money on the plan again, is where the victory lies.
In this week’s bonus episode for paid subscribers, she and I each offer some strategies we use to avoid falling down those rabbit holes—and get out quickly when we do fall in.
And in last week’s essay, I explored how the new crop of AI chatbots are poised to spread health misinformation on a massive scale, and what we can do as individuals and as a society to help stop them. For now, it’s still fairly easy for most of us to avoid interacting with these bots in a health/wellness context—but that won’t be the case for long. The robots are coming, and they’re likely to lead even more of us down harmful paths paved with false health claims, dubious diagnoses, and spurious cures.
So I’m curious to know: how do YOU avoid wellness rabbit holes?
When you see some diet plan or wellness trend that promises to cure all your ills, what do you do?
What does your inner monologue say? Is there a part of you that’s skeptical, even if another part believes the claims?
Are you able to take a pause before diving in deeper? Or does it sometimes feel like there’s no space at all between thought and action?
If you do tumble down a rabbit hole, how do you recognize that you’re in one?
And how do you get out?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments.