Wellness of Weirdness? Who gets to be 'well'?
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Recently, we talked about how wellness has become performative. How it was more about looking serene than actually feeling or being it.
This week, I’m taking that idea further. Because wellness isn’t just performative, I think it has become exclusive. It’s a club with an unspoken dress code, a price tag, and a very specific aesthetic.
From £300 yoga mats to Alo tracksuits and the sacred Stanley cup, the modern wellness world isn’t about health, it’s about belonging. We’ll talk about:
- Why 'inclusive' wellness is often just clever marketing
- The new uniform of wellbeing (and why trainer socks are apparently an indicator of age/being out of fashion)
- How thin privilege and class still shape who gets to be 'well'
- Why you never see wellness marketed to men - and what that says about who the industry’s really serving
- And how ancient cultural practices became content for Instagram
This isn’t a takedown of self-care, it’s a reality check on what wellness culture has become: a glossy performance that often leaves people out.
Maybe real wellness isn’t something you can buy, post, or prove.
Maybe it’s the small, unfiltered things that actually keep you human.
🎧 Listen now for a wry, honest look at the business, aesthetics, and quiet absurdities of modern wellness culture.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm welcome to another episode of the Emma Gunner Show. |
| 0:11.8 | Thank you so much for joining me for spending this time with me. |
| 0:15.0 | I thought that we would revisit something that I spoke about the other day actually |
| 0:18.5 | because I had such a huge response to the |
| 0:20.8 | podcast where I talked about walking out of a sound bath. So many people DM me on Instagram to say, |
| 0:27.4 | oh my goodness, you have put into words what I had started to feel quite uncomfortable about the |
| 0:33.1 | wellness space, which is obviously very flattering to hear. I had lots of people saying I couldn't |
| 0:36.8 | agree more, but it just seems a very unpopular opinion. I had lots of people saying I couldn't agree more, |
| 0:41.7 | but it just seems a very unpopular opinion to have this idea of wellness being performative. |
| 0:47.0 | So I just thought that we would expand on it a little bit more because since the sound bath, and it wasn't the soundbath's fault necessarily, it was more the bigger thing. Since then, |
| 0:51.8 | I've thought about it a little bit more and also your messages that I've |
| 0:54.6 | received either to the email address or to below the substack or to my Instagram have made me |
| 0:59.8 | think, actually, there's a little bit more to this that maybe deserves a little bit of airing out. |
| 1:04.7 | So a quick recap. Last time, my central pillar of annoyance was how wellness had become performative, |
| 1:15.5 | how it was less about the activity or the thing, making you feel good, and more about looking |
| 1:23.5 | as though you've got your life together. It's, um, it's just become sort of quite empty and meaningless, |
| 1:29.0 | I think, and how it's got to smell a certain way because you've got to have either incense |
| 1:35.7 | or a candle or something. It's got to look a certain way. It's got to have a certain amount |
| 1:39.9 | of comfort. It's got to be in a particular kind of environment. It has to be seen almost. |
| 1:47.9 | But I have been thinking more about it and I've realised wellness isn't just performative now. |
| 1:55.2 | It actually feels really exclusive or should I say excluding because it feels like a club and not everyone gets an invite. |
| 2:05.6 | Maybe you agree, maybe you don't, but I just think that this idea of doing, spending time on yourself with the objective of feeling better, learning more, be, I don't know, whatever it might be |
... |
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