I find the wellness-industrial complex endlessly fascinating. The same industry evangelizing how to make our lives healthier is also finding a way to monetize every last corner of them. Sleep (both getting us there and tracking it once we’re out), focus, calm, energy, the list goes on.
On one hand, there’s the sweet, almost innocent side of wellness: chamomile before bed, lemon in hot water, a solid eight hours of sleep. On the other hand, though, there’s a potion, pill, or powder for anything that functions in or around the body.
I’ll be honest about where I stand. A while back, I started taking a wellness product (that shall remain unnamed) that promised to help me focus. My husband, who’s a doctor, told me it wouldn’t do anything and that I shouldn’t bother, but nothing about it seemed that intense to me. If it worked, great. If not, there was always the placebo effect. A few weeks into taking it, however, I lost my period, and it absolutely freaked me out. I took those products thinking I’d doom scroll less during the workday, but they were strong enough to change something as significant as my cycle. If something marketed for focus can do that, I wanted to know how these types of products were regulated in the first place, because I couldn’t be the only one.
