More We Practice, The Worse We Feel
What yoga always knew about wellness that the wellness industry forgot
Something does not add up, and I think most practitioners quietly know it. The generation spending the most time and money on wellness yoga classes, meditation apps, breath work weekends, supplements, sleep trackers, cold plunges is also the generation reporting the worst mental health. Not slightly worse. Notably, measurably worse. And the gap is not closing.
McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness report, which surveyed over 9,000 consumers across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and China, makes this visible in plain numbers. Nearly 30 percent of Gen Z and millennials say they are prioritizing wellness significantly more than they were a year ago. They drive 41 percent of all annual wellness spending in the United States, despite being only 36 percent of the adult population. They are the most engaged, most invested wellness consumers in history. And yet, in the same survey, 40 percent of Gen Z respondents report feeling almost always stressed, nearly double the rate of the general population. Their mental health needs remain, by their own account, largely unmet. Lululemon’s State of Mind report adds something that stings even more: 61 percent of respondents say they feel overwhelming social pressure not to be well, but to appear well. The practice, for many people, has become a performance. And the performance, it turns out, is exhausting.
You could spend a long time explaining this through the usual suspects social media, economic anxiety, the general state of the world. All of those are real and worth taking seriously. But there is another explanation, one that yoga offered long before anyone was selling wellness as a lifestyle, and it is more uncomfortable because it points directly at the practice itself. Maharshi Patanjali, compiling the Yoga Sutras roughly in the fourth or fifth century CE, identified what he called the kleshas, the root causes of human suffering. Ignorance was first, but close behind it came raga, which is usually translated as attachment or desire. Not attachment to bad things, note. Attachment itself. The compulsive reaching for outcomes. The clinging to results. The need for the practice to produce something you can measure, feel, or show. And the more urgently you reach, Patanjali argued, the more agitated the mind becomes because the reaching itself is the problem, not the thing you are reaching for.
The antidote he proposed was vairagya (non-attachment). This word gets misunderstood constantly. It does not mean indifference. It does not mean you stop caring or stop trying. It means you practice without making the result the reason you showed up. You do the work and then you release your grip on what the work should produce. Maharshi Patanjali paired this directly with abhyasa, the word for consistent practice, in Sutra 1.12. The two belong together. Effort and release. Practice and non-attachment. He was explicit that you cannot have one without the other and still be doing yoga in any meaningful sense.
What the wellness industry has been selling, very successfully and very profitably, is abhyasa without vairagya, effort without release, practice as self-improvement project, movement and breath and meditation all conscripted into the service of becoming a better, calmer, more optimized version of yourself.
That is not what the tradition was describing. And if the data is any indication, it is not working particularly well either.
The harder question this raises is not about the industry. The industry will do what industries do. The harder question is for people who actually practice, who actually care about what yoga is and what it asks of them. Because the pull toward making the practice about results is not just a marketing problem. It is deeply human. We come to the mat because something hurts, or because we are afraid, or because we are looking for something we cannot quite name. That is fine. That is a legitimate reason to begin. But at some point the practice asks you to stop treating it as a means to an end, and that shift is genuinely difficult to make. It requires sitting on the mat on a day when nothing opens, nothing shifts, nothing feels better and staying anyway. Not because you will feel better later. Just because you are there.
The Global Wellness Summit’s 2026 trends report, interestingly, is beginning to sense this from the inside. It describes what it calls a cultural pivot away from optimization, a growing awareness that “optimization without integration is proving costly.” It talks about moving toward “regulation over results, sensation over scores.” That is not a bad instinct. It is also, more or less, what Patanjali was pointing at roughly 1,600 years ago. The tradition had already done this thinking. It had already named the trap. The question is whether modern practitioners and the teachers and studios serving them are willing to actually engage with that teaching rather than simply borrow its vocabulary while keeping the optimization logic intact. Wellness language can absorb almost anything, including the language of non-attachment, and sell it back as a more refined form of self-improvement. The only defense against that is knowing what the teaching actually says and holding yourself to it honestly.
More practice is not the answer. Neither is less practice. The answer the tradition offers is the same one it has always offered: practice without clinging to what practice should give you.
That sounds simple. Anyone who has actually tried it knows it is one of the most demanding things the tradition asks. Yoga stood at this crossroads long before the industry arrived. The question is whether we engage with what it actually taught or keep borrowing the words. That is what this section is for. Share your thoughts in the comments and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.