In our search for the next pill, protocol or microdose, have we forgotten some of the things that make us healthy in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, happy? 

I have been fascinated by the world of wellness for well over a decade. So fascinated, in fact, that I changed careers to study it more deeply. I wanted to understand what actually makes us well: what we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how we manage stress and, ultimately, how all of those things shape the way we feel. 

And I still find much of it fascinating. 

We now have access to extraordinary amounts of information about our bodies. We can understand our sleep in greater detail, track changes in our glucose, learn more about our hormones, personalise our nutrition and spot patterns we might once have missed entirely. Used well, these things can help us understand ourselves better. 

But I have started to wonder whether, somewhere in our enthusiasm to know more about ourselves, we have become slightly less practised at simply being with ourselves. 

It is no longer enough to feel healthy; we are encouraged to optimise. And, as a woman, it can feel as though that expectation has seeped into almost every arena of life. We are not only invited to improve our bodies, but our friendships, relationships, careers, finances, homes and inner lives too. There is always another area to refine, another version of ourselves to become. Online, particularly, the goalposts seem to edge a little further away just as we reach them. What once looked like self-development can begin to feel like a life lived permanently under review. 

Within wellness, that expectation has become increasingly measurable. Our sleep can be scored, our glucose tracked, our biological age calculated and our supplements personalised. There is a protocol for our hormones, a hack for our cortisol and a growing number of ways to quantify how well we are doing at being human. 

Much of this comes from an entirely understandable place: we want to feel better, have more energy, sleep more deeply, live for longer and feel more at home in our bodies. 

But what happens when the pursuit of feeling better becomes another way of avoiding how we actually feel? 

I sometimes wonder whether optimisation can become a particularly sophisticated form of distraction, an external language through which we can interpret ourselves without having to ask the messier questions underneath. Am I happy? Do I feel connected? What am I missing? What makes me feel alive? Do I actually like the life I have built? 

A watch can tell you that you slept for seven hours and forty-three minutes. It cannot tell you why you feel lonely. A glucose monitor can show you what happened after breakfast, but not whether food has become the place where you are trying to create a sense of control. You can know your VO2 max, resting heart rate and biological age and still have absolutely no idea how to be kind to yourself on a difficult Tuesday afternoon. 

Perhaps that is the disconnect. 

This is the tension I kept returning to while writing Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard. The deeper I went into the science of health, the more interested I became in everything that sits around it: our relationships, our sense of belonging, the way we speak to ourselves, our capacity for joy and whether the pursuit of self-improvement can sometimes become indistinguishable from self-rejection. 

In many ways, the book became less about becoming a better version of yourself and more about returning to the person who was there all along. 

There is a subtle but important difference between wanting to care for yourself and constantly believing you need to improve yourself. 

I saw this in myself, and I saw versions of it again and again among the people who walked through my clinic door. Sometimes the fixation on food was not really about food. The relentless search for the perfect routine was not necessarily about health either. Underneath it might be loneliness, uncertainty, a lack of purpose, a need for control, or simply someone who had become so disconnected from themselves that following another set of rules felt easier than listening inwardly. 

I have come to believe that obsession often has more room to grow when we become disconnected from the things that give our lives meaning. When we are absorbed by things that light us up, relationships, creativity, work we care about, friendship, play, purpose, health itself is less likely to become the central project of our existence. 

Of course, that does not mean people with full and meaningful lives cannot struggle with obsessive behaviours. Life is far more complicated than that. But I think there is a question worth sitting with: have we become so focused on being well that we have forgotten what we wanted to be well for? 

A friend of mine brought this into focus for me recently. She is a successful men's stylist, living the fun, creative and, at times, fairly savage reality of freelance life. After reading my book, she told me she had tried one of the exercises I suggest: taking herself out for dinner. 

On the surface, it is hardly a radical act, yet she described the experience as surprisingly profound. Why, she wondered, had she been waiting for someone else to be free before allowing herself to do something she already knew she wanted to do? 

It is a simple question with a more complicated answer than it first appears. So much of our enjoyment can become conditional on other people's availability, enthusiasm or permission. By booking the table anyway, she realised she did not need somebody else to accept the invitation before she could participate fully in her own life. 

Not long afterwards, she messaged me to say she had been dancing around her kitchen while cooking one of the recipes from the book. What struck me was not the dinner or the recipe in isolation, but the subtle shift taking place around them. Her life was beginning to contain more of what gave her pleasure, more of what made her feel like herself, and that seemed to spill naturally into the way she was looking after herself. 

She was cooking more, nourishing herself and creating moments she truly enjoyed, but these behaviours were not emerging from discipline, restriction or a sense that she ought to be healthier. They were growing out of a life that felt more pleasurable to inhabit. 

It made me wonder whether we sometimes have the equation the wrong way around. We tend to assume that if we perfect our health behaviours, happiness or ease will eventually follow. But perhaps the relationship also works in reverse: when our lives contain more connection, agency, purpose and joy, caring for ourselves can begin to feel less like another obligation and more like a natural extension of being invested in our own lives. 

Perhaps joy is not simply the reward for becoming healthy. It may be one of the conditions that helps health take root. 

This is also why I think we need to be careful not to replace one set of wellness rules with another. The answer is not to throw away our wearables, ignore research or reject the things that help us. I still love learning about health, and knowledge can be hugely valuable. But perhaps data works best when it starts a conversation with ourselves rather than ending one. 

One of the simplest exercises in my book is what I call the Self-Audit. Instead of beginning with What should I change?, begin with curiosity. For a few days, pay attention to what is happening around your food, sleep, stress and energy. Not simply what you ate, but why you ate it. Not just whether you exercised, but how your body felt afterwards. Not only how long you slept, but whether you felt restored. Before automatically reaching for food, your phone, another coffee or whatever your habitual response might be, try creating a tiny gap, just long enough to ask: what do I need right now? 

The point is not to turn yourself into another spreadsheet. It is to replace judgement with information. 

We tend to move remarkably quickly from discomfort to correction. I am tired, therefore I need a supplement. I feel flat, therefore I need a new routine. I have overeaten, therefore tomorrow I need to compensate. Sometimes intervention is useful, but sometimes the more interesting first question is simply: what is this feeling trying to tell me? 

This, for me, is where compassion becomes much more interesting than another optimisation strategy. Self-compassion has somehow acquired a reputation as the soft option, as though criticism is what keeps us disciplined. Yet most of us already know how exhausting it is to live with an internal voice constantly moving the goalposts. One practice in the book is deliberately simple: speak to yourself as you would someone you love, and notice how differently that lands to the way many of us have learned to look in a mirror and immediately assess what needs changing. 

Health cannot only be about extending our lives. It also has to include how it feels to live them. 

That might mean taking a gratitude walk without turning it into a step target. It might mean having dinner with someone you love rather than choosing the evening that delivers the most immaculate sleep score. It might mean going to the gym because movement makes you feel alive, or leaving early because today, your body has had enough. 

The framework I return to throughout Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard is SOFTEN, SEE, STEADY, SHIFT: soften the judgement, see what is actually happening, steady yourself before reacting, and then decide what you want to shift. 

It reverses the order in which wellness is so often presented to us. We are usually encouraged to begin with the change: overhaul the diet, start the protocol, buy the device, become the new version of yourself. But sustainable change is much harder when its starting point is the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with who you are now. 

The point was never health for its own sake. It was to give us enough vitality, freedom and resilience to turn our attention towards everything else: the people we love, the work that absorbs us, the things that make us laugh, the places where we lose track of time and the parts of ourselves that existed long before anyone gave us a score for them. 

Maybe healthy really shouldn't be this hard. 

And maybe sometimes the way forward is not another attempt to become someone better, but finding our way back to ourselves. 

Sarah Ann will be taking this conversation further on the Live Well main stage. Join her on 25 September at Old Sessions House. Book your tickets here.