When Wellness Flies Too Close to the Sun

What if becoming well isn't about adding another practice to your routine, but learning how to stop doing?

Last week, I read a New York Times story about Bryan Johnson, the longevity entrepreneur who has spent millions of dollars trying to optimize his health and extend his life.

Johnson tracks an extraordinary number of metrics about his body. He has experimented with more than 100 supplements a day, follows an intensely controlled diet, exercises daily, and has built an entire philosophy around what he calls "healthmaxxing."

Then he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis.

The diagnosis itself isn't the point. Illness can happen to anyone, including people who eat well, exercise, sleep enough, and take meticulous care of themselves. Johnson himself pushed back on the idea that his regimen caused his condition.

What caught my attention was something else.

The article left me wondering whether, in trying so hard to stay alive, we can sometimes leave too little room to actually live.

It made me think about what happens when wellness itself becomes another optimization project.

We have somehow turned the pursuit of feeling better into another thing to be good at: a nine-step skincare ritual, a pile of supplements with a side of journaling, a cold plunge followed by a sauna followed by breathwork, a 6 a.m. workout before work, or a meditation app reminding you that you haven't meditated today.

Wellness was supposed to be an escape from the pressure to do more.

Instead, in many ways, we've industrialized rest itself.

At what point does trying to become healthier start making us feel less well?

The problem isn't that these tools are inherently bad. Yoga is a wonderful practice. Movement matters. Meditation can be restorative. Cold exposure can feel invigorating. The problem is what happens when we approach all of them with the same mindset that may be contributing to our exhaustion in the first place: there is always something else we could be doing.

When wellness becomes another task

I once coached a woman in banking in New York City who decided she would manage her stress by going to a 6:30 a.m. yoga class before work.

On paper, it sounded like the perfect start to the day. In reality, she rushed out of bed to make it on time, arrived late and spent the class moving through the poses with one eye on the clock. Afterward, she hurried through an overcrowded locker room filled with dangerously hot hair tools, sharp elbows, and scowling faces before rushing to the office and sitting down at her desk.

At some point, she realized something almost absurd: she had gone to yoga to decompress, and the whole experience had made her more stressed.

This is what I think of as optimized wellness: the attempt to optimize every part of our lives in the name of feeling better, often without noticing that optimization itself has become another source of pressure. We track our sleep, count our steps, monitor our recovery, measure our readiness, and schedule our meditation. Even rest can start to feel like a performance.

And underneath it all is the same question: Am I doing enough?

The Frequency Gap

Our nervous systems are extraordinarily adaptive. They are constantly scanning our environment, interpreting signals of safety and threat, and adjusting the body accordingly. When we perceive a threat, the sympathetic nervous system helps mobilize us for action: our heart rate and breathing can increase, attention narrows, digestion becomes less of a priority, and our muscles prepare to move. It is an incredibly useful response when we actually need it.

The challenge is that modern life can provide an almost endless supply of smaller signals demanding our attention: the email from your boss, the traffic, the endless notifications on your phone, the unfinished project, the news alert, the family obligation, or the thought about what you forgot to do yesterday.

Our bodies are built to respond to challenge, but they're also built to recover from it. Recovery requires meaningful opportunities to come back down, and that's something modern life doesn't always give us.

I think of this mismatch as the “Frequency Gap”: the gap between how frequently we activate our stress response and how infrequently we intentionally give ourselves opportunities to recover.

The goal isn't to eliminate stress. Stress is part of being alive, and some stress is useful. The goal is to create enough opportunities for recovery that activation doesn't become our only familiar state. Over time, repeated or prolonged stress can contribute to what researchers call allostatic load, the cumulative physiological burden associated with repeatedly adapting to stress.

There are two ways to begin closing the Frequency Gap: reduce some of the stressors in our lives, or create more opportunities for the body and mind to recover. For many high-achieving people, reducing the stressors isn't immediately realistic, so we reach for the second.

But here we encounter the same problem again: what if the things we're doing to recover still feel like things we have to accomplish?

The permission to do nothing

This isn't a new idea. Long before wellness became an industry, contemplative traditions were exploring the value of stillness, presence, silence, and simply being. The challenge of sitting quietly with ourselves has existed for centuries; the modern difference is that we've found countless ways to turn even that into a task.

We sit down to meditate and wonder whether we're doing it correctly. We become frustrated when our minds aren't still. We approach rest with an expectation that we should emerge calmer, clearer, or somehow better than when we began.

Perhaps the practice isn't about becoming better at resting. Perhaps it's about becoming more comfortable with receiving.

The signal of sound

This is where sound meditation enters my work.

Sound has a remarkable ability to capture our attention and affect how we feel. A sudden siren can make us tense before we've consciously processed what we're hearing, while a familiar song can bring back a memory almost instantly. Sound meditation uses that same quality in a different direction: rather than asking us to concentrate harder, it gives our attention somewhere to land.

The sustained tones of singing bowls can become an anchor for awareness—something to listen to, feel, and return to. Research on singing-bowl meditation is still emerging, but early studies suggest benefits for mood, anxiety, and physiological measures including heart rate and heart-rate variability. The evidence is promising.

I don't believe we need to turn sound into another thing to optimize. I use crystal singing bowls tuned to 432 Hz because I love the grounding, warmth, and resonance they bring to my sessions. There are many traditions and theories around different tunings, but for me, the more interesting question is simpler: What happens when we stop trying so hard to make something happen?

Sound gives us an opportunity to practice receiving rather than producing. We don't have to direct it or make anything happen. We listen, notice what we're experiencing, and allow the body to respond in its own way.

That can feel surprisingly unfamiliar. We've been so thoroughly trained in the logic of output that receiving something without producing anything in return can feel almost uncomfortable. We lie down and wait for the guilt to arrive. We assume relaxation should require effort. We expect healing to demand a plan.

The same instinct shows up in what people expect of their own minds. They arrive believing the goal is complete stillness and silence, and they take the first stray thought as evidence they've failed. But a blank mind isn't realistic, and it isn't the point.

The return is the practice

One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter in sound meditation is that the goal is to completely quiet the mind. It isn't. Your mind will wander. You'll think about your to-do list, remember an email you forgot to send, wonder what's for dinner, or find yourself planning tomorrow's schedule in the middle of a sound bath. None of that means you're doing it wrong.

In fact, the return is the practice.

When you notice that you've drifted, you simply come back to your body, your breath, or the sound of the bowls. Rather than judging yourself for not being relaxed or focused enough, you can become curious about what you're noticing: My mind is really active today. My shoulders are holding a lot. I'm having trouble slowing down. I'm tired.

That awareness matters. It gives us an opportunity to listen without immediately trying to fix what we find.

Before I begin a sound meditation, I often tell people to think of their thoughts like waves. They can wash into the mind, and they can just as easily wash away. You don't have to chase them, fight them, or follow them. You can notice them and return.

And that is part of what I love most about sound meditation: it invites us to reconsider what it means to listen. We tend to think of listening as something we do with our ears, but we can also listen inwardly—to the sensations in our bodies, the rhythm of our breath, our emotional state, the difference between tension and ease.

Sometimes, when we become quiet enough to notice, there is a lot there: tension, grief, exhaustion, relief, creativity, or a feeling we haven't had space to experience. The sound doesn't have to fix any of it. It simply creates space to notice, and sometimes that space is enough for something to soften.

I'll never forget this woman

I'll never forget a woman who came to my sound bath at the Golden Door, a retreat spa north of San Diego. Throughout the day, she had seemed quiet, composed, and difficult to read. When the sound meditation ended, she walked over to me without saying a word, hugged me, stepped back, and then hugged me again.

"You tapped into something I haven't felt in a very long time," she said. Her eyes were full of tears as she walked away.

I think about her often, not because I believe the bowls had somehow performed a miracle, but because she reminded me of something I believe deeply: sometimes the most meaningful thing we can offer the body isn't another protocol to follow. It is permission—to stop, to feel, to receive, and to be where we are without immediately trying to improve it.

I keep thinking about Bryan Johnson's question: Have I taken this whole longevity thing too far?

It's easy to look at an extreme example like healthmaxxing and assume the problem is simply that someone has gone too far. But I think the more interesting question is where the line begins for the rest of us.

When does a morning routine become a checklist?

When does movement become punishment?

When does meditation become another metric?

When does rest become something we have to earn?

And when does the desire to feel better become so consuming that we forget to actually experience our lives?

I don't think the answer is to stop caring about our health. Maybe it's to stop treating our bodies like to-do lists that are never accomplished.

There will always be another metric to improve, another protocol to try, another supplement to research, another habit to optimize.

At some point, we have to ask: What are we optimizing for?

What if wellness isn't something we achieve?

That is the idea behind Grata Wellness.

Grata is an Italian word associated with gratitude, but it also carries a sense of grace. For me, that points to a different definition of wellness: not another set of metrics, but a relationship with ourselves that includes the ability to receive.

Maybe wellness isn't always something we achieve. Maybe sometimes, it's something we're given—a gift we receive by listening not just with our ears, but with our whole body, mind, and heart.

My goal isn't to optimize every moment of my life, but to be present to experience it.