Wellness Burnout Is Real—And We’re Tired of Trying to Be Better

—A Love Letter to the Version of Me That’s Already Enough

There was a time when I thought wellness meant becoming my best self. She meditated at sunrise. She drank celery juice. She dry brushed her skin, journaled before bed, and wore matching activewear like a second skin.

I wanted to be her. So I tried.

And then I tried harder.
Until one day I realized…
I was exhausted.

Not from a workout. Not from a detox. But from something no one warned me about: wellness burnout.

It started innocently enough.

A podcast here, a wellness tip there. A friend swore by infrared saunas. Another was off caffeine. My Instagram turned into a stream of women in beige linen talking about magnesium and boundaries and oat milk.

I thought: I should be doing that too.

I bought the supplements. The meal plans. The apps that counted my sleep cycles. But somewhere between tracking my steps and tracking my mood, I stopped feeling better—and started feeling broken.

Because the more I chased wellness, the more I realized I was quietly slipping into wellness burnout.

I was optimizing myself into oblivion.

If I wasn’t glowing, I was failing.
If I didn’t do a hot girl walk, was I even walking?
If I wasn’t “healing,” was I even human?

There was no finish line, only a moving goalpost.

Self-improvement stopped feeling like self-love.
It started feeling like a job—one I could never clock out of.

And the harder I tried to escape this cycle, the more I noticed that wellness burnout had nothing to do with health—and everything to do with performance.

And then came the burnout.

Not dramatic. Just slow.
A kind of soul-deep fatigue that even eight hours of sleep couldn’t fix.
A weariness that whispered, What if you stopped trying so hard?

What if I let my body be a home instead of a project?
What if I stopped chasing every wellness hack and simply let myself be?

So I started doing less.

I stopped trying to stretch my morning into a ritual.
I quit five different apps.
I unfollowed the girl who drinks chlorophyll water at 6 a.m.
I replaced her with a woman who eats pancakes and posts pictures of her dog.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt like me.
Not the improved version. Just the real one.

That’s when I realized the cure for wellness burnout isn’t another routine—it’s giving yourself permission to stop chasing perfection.

Here’s what I know now:

You don’t need to earn your rest.
You don’t need to fix what was never broken.
And you don’t owe the world a better version of yourself every single day.

Sometimes, enough is enough.
Sometimes, healing is simply letting go of the pressure to heal.

So if you’re feeling the slow creep of wellness burnout, sit down. Take a breath.
Eat the cookie. Ignore the mantra.

You don’t have to be your best self right now.
You can just be.

And that, somehow, might be the most radical wellness practice of all.