By According to the internet, the ideal morning begins at 5 am.
You wake naturally, drink lemon water, write three pages in a gratitude journal, meditate, exercise, dry-brush your entire body, complete a 12-step skincare routine and eat a high-protein breakfast from a handmade ceramic bowl.
By the time your children wake, you are glowing, grounded and ready to greet their first argument about whose turn it is to sit near the cereal.
There is just one problem: you went to bed at midnight after remembering the washing in the machine, filling out a school form and searching “Is this rash normal?” Your child woke at 2.13 am because their blanket felt wrong. At 5 am, the only thing you want to manifest is another two hours of sleep.
Welcome to the anti-wellness era, where self-care is allowed to make your life easier instead of becoming another bloody job.
When did looking after ourselves get so exhausting?
Self-care used to mean doing something kind or restorative for yourself. Now it can feel like a performance review.
Did you move your body? Hit your protein target? Get morning sunlight? Take your supplements? Regulate your nervous system? Avoid screens? Practise mindfulness? Complete your evening routine? Track your sleep quality while somehow not worrying about your sleep quality?
None of these things is inherently bad. Exercise is good for us. Sleep matters. Nutritious food matters. A skincare routine can be a lovely little ritual.
But when wellness becomes a collection of rules you are failing to follow, it stops creating wellbeing. It becomes admin with activewear.
Mums do not need another standard to fall short of
Mothers are already surrounded by impossible instructions.
Feed the children healthy food, but do not create food anxiety. Limit screens, but make sure they develop digital skills. Encourage independence, but remain emotionally available. Build a career, maintain friendships, keep the house functioning and preserve a meaningful relationship with your partner.
Also, apparently, wake before everyone else to “fill your cup.”
Except the cup has been missing since 2019 and somebody has used it to store LEGO.
When self-care is presented as one more thing a good mum should successfully achieve, it places the responsibility for exhaustion back onto the exhausted person. If you are still depleted, perhaps you did not meditate correctly. Maybe your evening routine needs optimising. Have you tried purchasing a more expensive magnesium powder?
Sometimes you are not tired because you have failed at wellness. You are tired because you need more sleep, less work, fewer demands and another capable person to take responsibility for something.
What anti-wellness actually means
Anti-wellness does not mean giving up on your health, living entirely on iced coffee or refusing to attend a medical appointment out of principle.
It means rejecting the idea that wellbeing must be aesthetic, productive, expensive or impressive.
It means asking one useful question: Does this genuinely help me feel better, or is it another thing I think I should be doing?
A six-step morning routine may feel wonderful for one woman. Another may experience more benefit from staying in bed until the last responsible minute. One mum may love a group fitness class. Another may need to cancel every optional commitment and sit alone in a parked car.
Neither is morally superior.
Self-care can be ridiculously ordinary
Real self-care may look like:
- going to bed instead of folding the laundry;
- eating something before you become shaky and furious;
- making a medical appointment you have postponed for months;
- saying no without constructing a legally defensible case;
- muting a group chat;
- buying the pre-cut vegetables;
- letting the kids watch a movie so you can sit down;
- asking your partner to take over without first preparing everything for them;
- wearing the comfortable underwear;
- spending money on help instead of another product promising to help;
- admitting that an activity everyone supposedly enjoys creates three hours of work for you;
- taking twenty minutes alone without using it to complete an errand.
It might not photograph well beside a candle and a eucalyptus branch. It still counts.
Rest is not a reward for completing everything
One of motherhood’s cruelest practical jokes is that the work is never finished.
There will always be another load of washing, email, appointment, permission slip, meal or object sitting on the stairs waiting for someone to take it up. If rest is only permitted once everything is done, you will be eligible sometime around never.
Rest is a basic human need, not a performance bonus.
You do not have to earn it by reaching a state of domestic completion that has never existed in recorded history. Sometimes you stop because you need to stop. The unfinished task survives. The household adapts. The world continues rotating.
Beware of self-care that creates more work
Some forms of self-care come with suspicious amounts of preparation and cleanup.
A relaxing bath is less relaxing when you must first remove six plastic toys, scrub the tub and answer repeated questions through the door. A girls’ weekend may be wonderful, but not if you spend two days preparing the family to function without you and another two catching up when you return.
Before saying yes to something “for you,” count the entire cost: the planning, travel, money, emotional energy and work waiting afterwards.
You are allowed to decide that the wellness retreat is too much effort and what you actually want is takeaway in bed.
Choose relief over improvement
The wellness industry often asks how you can improve yourself. A more useful question for an overwhelmed mum may be: What would bring me a little relief today?
Not transform your life. Not unlock your potential. Not make you more patient, attractive, productive or spiritually aligned.
Just relief.
Maybe it is ten quiet minutes, a proper meal, a walk, an early night, a laugh with a friend or handing one responsibility back to the person it belongs to.
Small relief is not lazy or insignificant. It gives your overloaded body and brain somewhere to land.
You are allowed to be a person, not a project
There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel stronger, healthier or more energised. But you do not need to spend every spare moment becoming a better version of yourself.
You are allowed to exist without optimising the experience.
Skip the cold plunge if you hate being cold. Keep the skincare product you actually enjoy and abandon the seven that make your bathroom look like a chemistry lab. Exercise in ways that do not make you miserable. Eat food that nourishes you without requiring a spreadsheet.
And if your ideal morning routine is sleeping until somebody urgently needs a clean school shirt, that is fine too.
You do not need a sunrise, a journal or a matching activewear set.
Sometimes wellness is simply closing the door and announcing: “Not Mum Today. Try again in twenty minutes.”