I Think Your Intense Morning Routine May Be Anxiety
It's just my very informed opinion.
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If my wellness journey were a situationship, it would be the one where I ignored a man’s every red flag because the [redacted] was immaculate. The aesthetics of wellness are just like that man—gorgeous, and how it makes you feel distracts from the larger issues it presents. In 2017, when my journey began in earnest, I loved the matching sets, the farmers market hauls, and the sunrise yoga sessions—I still do, because, well, it’s complicated. But, soon, this love story morphed into a capitalistic pursuit I was too invested in to admit that looking well and being well had nothing to do with each other.
By 2019, my chase had matured into two intense routines. The morning went exactly like this:
Wake up at 6 AM
Make ginger tea
Take AM supplements
30 minutes of power yoga
Shower
Coffee
Commute to work
Hop off the train at Gallery Place to walk a mile to the office
And the evenings:
Leave work at 6 PM
Hit the Crunch Fitness in downtown DC for 45-60 minutes to workout
Walk five blocks back up 12th to Eaton for about an hour in an infrared sauna—only a few days a week though. I’m not made of money.
Walk to the metro station—another five or six blocks—to head home
I was heavily inspired by the rising wellness influencers just beginning to take over Instagram with their very aesthetic depictions of their lives.1 Such a mirage is why I’d built my daily life off their Pinterest boards. It was perfect looking, majestic, aspirational, and it gave me the same high I got from the Marlboros I’d put down three years prior.
It also gave me the same temporary relief from my anxiety. I’m a highly functioning anxious person, according to my therapist, so, naturally, I was drawn to systematized presentations of wellness. Being “that girl”—the rigidity, the optimization, the relentless self-monitoring it requires—is how an impending anxiety attack pregames for women like me. I couldn’t see at the time that building my life around aesthetics wouldn’t make me well. It would only manage my unhappiness and feed my perfectionism (read: anxiety). It would only do that for so long before the oasis fizzled against the horizon of my discontent with myself.
Once I worked through the personal aspects of all this—years of therapy, y’all—I started noticing the same pattern everywhere. I saw it in the 5 AM girlies, the women with the “non-negotiable” morning routines, and the women filming themselves hitting 10,000 steps before sunrise.
This rigidity is often our nervous system trying to build a cage it can control because everything outside of it is ungovernable.
