Excerpt from The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1
Why the Hell Is the Advice Always Yoga?

Can you remember the last time you felt free? Do you recall a time in which you weren't consumed by text notifications, computer install updates, grocery lists, school pick-ups and drop-offs, work emails, the news, and shedding "those last ten pounds"? Remember giving less of a shit? Being psychologically unburdened? And relaxed?

Neither do many other women. Modern life, for all its comforts and privileges, can feel wildly overwhelming. To be a woman today is to be stuck in a loop of unrelenting maintance.

I am, by all accounts, not a chill person. Type A is a more accurate description. My husband likes to motion for me "to take it down a notch" whenever I'm riled up by politics, line cutters, or nonsensical fashion. This is partially due to my own makeup but partially bred out of a chaotic career existence. And yes, let me preface all this by saying that I am overall a very fortunate person who is housed, fed, and not stuck in a war-torn country. I am lucky, 100 percent.

But by my midthirties, I'd become loaded with stress, even for Type A me. I worked as a full-time reporter at Fast Company with set hours and was expected to participate in Slack channels, conferences, news shifts, and company-wide initiatives. I even had my own newsletter and represented the outlet at industry conferences. But I wasn't granted any benefits, health insurance, or paid time off. For years I wasn't technically on staff even though I functionally was. Like many others, I'd become a gig worker with none of the "freedom" of a freelancer and none of the assurances of a staff employee. A permalancer. I had a contract stipulating a specific number of stories, but it could be canceled within two weeks' notice. This put me and my fellow writers in a perpetual state of job insecurity, of having to constantly prove ourselves to our "employer."

As a gig worker, taking a vacation or sick leave is out of the question. You aren't paid for any days you aren't working. Thinking about having kids? Forget it. If you can barely afford two weeks off, who is going to pay for your maternity leave?

Mind you, I wasn't about to start complaining, because by 2017, the journalism industry was in free fall as advertising money dried up. I was coming off previous positions where I saw budgets slashed, reasonable freelance wages disappear, and entire teams decimated. Site traffic—not necessarily quality—reigned supreme. Aggregation replaced original reporting. Ad sponsorship commitments steered content decisions. The sensational trumped the meaningful. Be more like BuzzFeed, we were told. Churn, churn, churn.

At those previous jobs, fewer bodies meant more work. It meant you had to be trendspotter, writer, editor, newsletter aficionado, sponsorship deal creative, contributor manager, media partner liaison, social media savant … an entire team in one body. And as digital journalism became more competitive, we had to follow our beats as soon as the "workday" ended. If I wasn't at my desk, I was on Twitter or on blogs trying to keep up with a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Sometimes I'd do my after-hours "research" while I was at the gym—one sweaty, slipping hand on the elliptical machine, the other scrolling my phone—trying to ensure that neither my career nor my body would fall by the wayside.

You couldn't complain. You were told you were fortunate just to have a job in journalism.

I was burned out at this point in my career. The stress was building, the anxiety seeping out sideways into other areas of my life. This was on top of everything else I worried about. As a Jew, I was anxious about rising rates of anti-Semitism. (By 2017, Jews were targeted in 58 percent of all religious-based hate crime incidents despite being just 2 percent of the U.S. population.)2 Then there was concern over reproductive rights, the growing political divide, and so on and so on.

Excerpted from The Gospel of Wellness by Rina Raphael. Copyright © 2022 by Rina Raphael. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.