New book claims to restore ‘health’ to the rich and famous and revive their political radicalism

The new cultural history of the 1970s wellness industry offers urgent lessons for today. This makes it clear that in the 70s, wellness wasn’t narcissistic or self-indulgent, and the practice didn’t involve buying expensive trendy luxury goods. Instead, wellness emphasized the well-being of society as much as it focused on the needs of the individual. Wellness practitioners saw self-care as a way to enable people to prioritize their own health so they could also promote the well-being of those around them.

Today’s wellness industry generates trillions of dollars in revenue, but in a new book, Dr. James Reilly from the University of Cambridge’s Department of English finds that the wellness pioneers of the 1970s are no stranger to today’s celebrity endorsements and luxury brands. This shows that they were imagining something fundamentally different from the traditional health and recreation culture.

“Wellness has never been an elite experience or a shiny, high-value product,” said Riley, a fellow at Girton College. “When we think of wellness today, we think of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and other lifestyle brands. In contrast, in the 1970s, “wellness was more practical and accessible.” , it was political.”

First proposed in the late 1950s, the term described a holistic approach to well-being that equally considers the mind (mental health), the body (physical health), and the spirit (a sense of purpose in life) . life). The goal was more than just “not being sick.” According to Halbert Dunn and, in the late 1970s, John Travis and Don Ardell, being healthy means realizing your potential, living with “energy to burn,” and channeling that energy more broadly. It means to use it for social good.

Riley’s Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourself is the first book to explore the background of the concept of wellness in the broader political and cultural context of the 1970s.

“Wellness in the 1970s was born out of a post-war shift in thinking about health, the same mindset that gave rise to the NHS,” Riley says. “What emerged in conjunction with the counterculture and New Left political activism of the 1960s was a proactive, socially-minded approach to physical and mental well-being that was not about buying off-the-shelf.

“The pursuit of health required time, dedication, and effort. It required thinking about every aspect of life: diet, health, psychology, relationships, community involvement, and aspirations. , it was about changing my behavior, which is better in the long run.”

Riley’s book makes the case for what the wellness industry of the 1970s can do for us today.

“We are often warned of an impending return to the ’70s, a threat based on classic images of the decade: social decline, urban conflict, and industrial discontent. It’s an overworked comparison, and it tends to be more telling. “Modern culture, where our own social problems, political, social and economic crises overlap; “There’s a lot we can learn to overcome this,” he says.

“It wasn’t until the 1970s that we started to think seriously about stress and overwork, not to mention frequently ridiculed ‘events’ such as midlife crises and nervous breakdowns. From loneliness to information overload. , increasingly exposed to the various pressures of modern life, microscopy and wellness provided tools to cope with them.

“Not only are these problems still with us, they’ve gotten much worse. To begin to improve these problems, we need to remember what health meant. The pandemic , despite all its horror, reminded us of the importance of mutual self-care.” “Such a convivial atmosphere in dealing with ongoing issues of physical and mental health.” We need more of this. Being healthy should be within everyone’s reach, and it shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for those who are already in good shape.”

Mindfulness and Wellness

At the heart of Riley’s book is an analysis of the ongoing corporate and commercial battle between “mindfulness” and “wellness.”

In 1979, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where he taught “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.” For Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness meant accepting the inevitable stress that comes with life’s “complete catastrophe” and adopting a calm and resilient attitude in the face of it. Making small changes to your workday, such as a regular meditation practice or trying a different, more comfortable commute, can reduce stress. Little was said about changing the pace of work, which causes stress in the first place.

In contrast, John Travis, a physician who founded the Wellness Resource Center in Marin County, California, in 1975, spoke of the health risks of sedentary, office-based jobs, while Don Ardell, author of “Wellness” (1977), said: We encouraged readers to become agents of change in their workplaces. Both viewed work-centered lifestyles as problematic. Therefore, work and work-related stress were not something to be endured, but something to be solved.

Mr. Adell argued that because burnout is becoming increasingly common, it is incumbent upon employers to provide paid time off to improve the health of their employees. It’s better to be too healthy to go to work than too sick, Ardell said. “It’s easy to think that flex time and remote working are relatively new concepts, especially in the digital and post-corona era, but Ardell was calling for this half a century ago,” Riley added. Ta.

Reilly argues that mindfulness techniques, rather than wellness techniques, are proving attractive to modern corporate cultures because they ultimately help maintain the status quo. Corporate mindfulness puts the onus on employees to weather the storm of stress. “There’s nothing wrong with the company. The problem is with you. This is your pace. Keep going or quit.”

According to Riley, this view is very different from that of ’70s health advocates like Travis and Ardell. They “envisioned a health-oriented citizenship, a process of development in which social well-being follows widespread optimism and purpose” in pursuit of personal health. Self-care has lost its sense of social mission. ”

Riley said this self-care mission was popular among groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which established clinics and operated ambulance services for black communities in and around Oakland, California. He points out that it had a very special meaning in the 1970s.

“They were saying that if you take care of yourself, then you can protect your community. This kind of collective effort is essential because the system was seen as so contrary to Auckland’s needs.” It turns out that “self-care” has great political power.” In this context, it meant radical collective autonomy rather than self-indulgent self-respect. ”

bad guru

As well as suggesting positive lessons from the past, Riley is also quick to point out the problems. “The emphasis on self-responsibility in health culture can easily become a form of patient blaming,” he argues. It ignores consideration of the full range of social and economic factors that contribute to poor health. ”

Elsewhere, Reilly draws attention to numerous claims of exploitation and abuse in a wide range of contexts, including alternative medical systems, new religious movements, and “therapy cults” that proliferated in the 1970s.

“It wasn’t always a free-thinking utopia; the complex, unregulated world of new age groups and alternative medical systems became a minefield of harmful behavior, aggressive salesmanship, and manipulative mind games. Charismatic and highly persuasive human engineers were common, and these anxieties were reflected in the various “bad gurus” of the period’s novels and films. It’s easy to see where they are,” he explains.

“Many people say they’ve had great insights after being pushed to their limits in these situations,” Reilly said. “However, there are many others who, even if not traumatic, are deeply affected by the same experience.”

self-experiment

In addition to exploring the literature of the time, Riley’s research on “Well Beings” found him experimenting with many of the treatments he describes. These include extended sessions in floating tanks, guided meditations, mindfulness seminars, firewalking, primordial cries in the middle of the countryside, distance healing, yoga, meal replacements, nutritional supplements, and more.

For more information:
J. Riley, “Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves” (2024). ISBN: 9781785787898

Provided by University of Cambridge