We can probably all agree that self-care, as a general concept, is a good thing that promotes healthy attention to our own well-being. But what happens when we overdo it on self-care? Enter the recent TikTok trend known as “wellnessmaxxing” or “habit stacking.” Whether it’s answering work emails while doing a facial peel or attempting to meditate while running on a treadmill, the idea is that we can maximize our well-being and personal productivity by performing as many self-care tasks as possible at the same time. But this is inherently contradictory to the very idea of self-care, which has its roots in concepts like mindfulness and meditation, practices that extoll the virtues of slowing down and doing less rather than taking on more.
The current dialogue around self-care is often driven by social media, influencers, quick-hit TikTok reels, and other less-than-scientific platforms. Trends have supplanted real, data-driven or evidence-based methods for coping with stress, fatigue, and burnout. So, all it takes is for one catchy-sounding idea to take off and the multiverse runs with it, disregarding its true merit or the possible drawbacks. Sure, videos and reels of people “wellnessmaxxing” can be entertaining as we watch them assume ridiculous poses and undertake completely unreasonable multitasks, but it is the underlying message that we need to combat. If you are burned out, exhausted, or stressed, doing more is almost never the answer. Decades of psychological and scientific research support the conclusion that rest, restoration, and recovery—not adding more to our plates—are the antidotes to stress.
Ironically, the concept of habit stacking does, indeed, have its roots in psychology but has been, as journalist Amanda Ross puts it, “bastardized, or TikTokified, if you will.” The original idea of habit stacking was as a behavioral-training model that builds new routines by linking them to existing ones—for example, drinking a glass of water upon getting out of bed or stretching after hanging up from a Zoom call—but was never intended as a means to perform unrelated, disparate tasks simultaneously. As is often the case, the online presentation of this concept is incomplete and showy rather than comprehensive and practical.
In a world where we’re always doing more, taking on more, committing to more, and expecting more of ourselves, to think that the answer to our exhaustion is packing even more into every moment of our lives is, in essence, a recipe for burnout. Not only that, but it also presents wellness and self-care as measurable rather than as healthy daily practice. Some TikTok creators might put out self-congratulatory reels of themselves “maxing” out their wellness, but they are, at the same time, unknowingly spreading an unhelpful and unreasonable expectation about how to perform self-care. Wellness is not and should not be presented as a performance metric.
The great irony here is that the message itself is positive: Self-care and wellness are important and can keep us healthy and balanced. But the presentation and dissemination of the message is problematic: Do more, make it glamorous, squeeze it all in, maximize, and optimize it. Meditation is about stillness and attention. Mindfulness is about presence and awareness. And these ways of thinking have been around for thousands of years. “Wellnessmaxxing” likely will not be around in thousands of years. After all, how still, attentive, present, and aware can we really, truly be if our focus is on performing as many self-care tasks as possible at once?