Are You Healing — Or Just Finding New Ways to Control Yourself?

What happens when the tools meant to free you become a new checklist? You've done the therapy. You journal. You meditate, take your supplements, and exercise consistently. And somehow — somehow — you feel more anxious about yourself than you did before any of it started.

What happened?

It's possible that the tools meant to free you quietly became a new checklist. A new system for measuring how far you still have to go. And if that resonates, it might be worth asking a more uncomfortable question: What if something is broken in the way we think about healing itself?

When Personal Growth Becomes Self-Surveillance

Let's be clear from the start: this is not an anti-therapy argument. Therapy is life-changing and life-saving, and more people should have access to it. What we're talking about is something subtler: the difference between noticing yourself and monitoring yourself.

Noticing comes from curiosity. It's open-handed. Monitoring comes from suspicion: the quiet belief that if you stop watching yourself, something will go wrong.

Here's where it gets tricky. When we do healing work, our vocabulary expands. We learn the language of nervous systems and attachment styles, of inner child wounds and somatic responses. And that language is genuinely useful. But the inner critic doesn't just disappear when we get smarter about ourselves. It actually upgrades. "I'm lazy" becomes "I'm not doing the work." Shame about your body becomes shame about your nervous system. The words get more sophisticated. The self-hostility stays the same. It's just speaking a different language now.

This is also the difference between mindfulness and obsession. Mindfulness invites you into the present moment. It's observational, not corrective. Obsessive thinking about your wellness is driven by a need to fix something. One is a practice of presence. The other is an anxiety response with better branding.

And then there's social media, which accelerates all of this. When healing becomes content, when your journey is something you perform and document and post, it stops being yours. Your healing is not anyone else's business. You don't owe anyone evidence of your progress.

The Shadow Side of Optimization Culture

Wellness, productivity, biohacking, emotional intelligence — these exist on a spectrum. At one end, there's real and meaningful benefit. At the other, there's something that starts to look like perfectionism.

Consider all the wearables and devices we're being sold. Every gadget, every supplement, every protocol operates on the same assumption: that you are a problem in need of a solution. That your baseline, unimproved self is a rough draft. Advertising thrives on problems, and the wellness industry is no exception.

Even the word healing implies something broken.

What does it do to a person to spend years operating under the premise that they're broken and need fixing?

There's actually a name for this. Sociologist Robert Crawford coined the term "healthism" in 1980, describing a cultural ideology in which personal health becomes the central life value and moral obligation, not just one aspect of life, but the primary responsibility. More recent scholarship has traced how this thinking has spread far beyond the doctor's office, embedding itself in the way we evaluate food (good vs. bad), exercise (earned vs. lazy), rest (productive recovery vs. wasted time), and even our emotions.

The result is that "normal" becomes a moving target; one set less by medicine than by the current whims of culture. And growth starts to look less like an organic, nonlinear human process and more like optimization: mechanical, efficiency-driven, and always pointing toward a target state you haven't reached yet.

The Beauty of Being Unfinished

You are a work of art. And not the kind that ships on a deadline.

Leonardo da Vinci — one of the most celebrated minds in human history — left major works unfinished. Not because he failed, but because perfectionism and overwhelming ambition kept the goalposts moving. Michelangelo intentionally left many sculptures in a state he called non finito, unfinished, because he believed the incompleteness itself evoked something more powerful than completion ever could.

There is beauty in being unfinished. There is truth in it.

This isn't a call to abandon self-reflection or your health practices. It's an invitation to stop treating your personhood as a renovation project with a completion date. What would it mean to be in a relationship with yourself rather than a management relationship? To hold your patterns with interest rather than urgency?

Being unfinished is what it means to be human. The richest human experiences — love, grief, creativity, humor — don't resolve. They don't arrive at an optimized endpoint. When an elderly person loses a spouse after decades together, there's always a sense of wanting more time. More human connection. That's not a failure of optimization. That's the whole point.

Reclaiming Pleasure, Mess, and Your Humanity

So what's the alternative to the self-help or healing treadmill?

Mindful moments. Intentional pleasure. And a willingness to let some things just be.

Pleasure has enormous value in daily life. It sustains us, especially when the world is in chaos. Yes, it can regulate your nervous system. Yes, it can count as self-care. But it can also just exist without justification. Not everything needs to earn its place in your life by being productive.

We are a beautiful mess of contradictions: unresolved feelings, weird habits, bad days, great days, and none of it is simply data. Your Apple Watch might tell you that you didn't get enough sleep last night. But what if that's because you stayed up three hours later than usual, reconnecting with an old friend, laughing until your stomach hurt? Does the device get the final say on whether that night was good for you?

Much like magic, not everything needs to mean something more than it is. Your morning walk can just be about watching the sun come up and letting the dogs get their wiggles out. It doesn't have to be logged and analyzed and optimized if you don't want it to be.

One reframe that can help: instead of setting an intention like "I am someone who takes care of my body," try "I am becoming a person who takes care of their body." There's so much more room in that second version. Room for setbacks, for messiness, for the nonlinear reality of actual human growth. Maybe you're becoming a person who allows for more ease. More creativity. More flowing energy in their days. The direction matters more than the destination.

A Note on Simply Noticing

We are all continuously growing and evolving, both as individuals and as part of something larger. That process doesn't have an endpoint, and it was never supposed to.

When growth stops feeling like expansion and starts feeling like obligation, that's worth paying attention to. Not because something has gone wrong, but because noticing that shift is the work. It's the first step back to yourself, to living a little less optimized, and hopefully a lot more like you.

If this resonated, share it with someone who might be stuck on the healing treadmill. Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is give each other permission to be unfinished.