All this health and wellness is stressing me the fuck out.

Here are the promises of the multi-trillion dollar global wellness economy: You can be stress-free. You can have great skin. You can be flexible and touch your hands behind your back in that one extremely painful yoga pose. And, according to the experts, all you need to do to get rid of stress is to completely change your life, adopt a variety of expensive, time-consuming new habits, and abandon the things that bring you joy.

Human perfection is available to everyone if you're willing to pay for it in dollars and sweat and time and anguish.

The paradox is so obvious. Industry gurus talk about the insidious biological effects of emotional stress while shilling for stress-inducing lifestyles of strict diet, exercise, and meditation routines. "There is never an easy fix for health," several of them have told me while sipping $10 green juices.

I know because I've tried all the buzzy new treatments. I've dabbled in sugar-free diets and reionization treatments. As a writer in the health and wellness space, I have to admit, I'm only contributing to the fuss around self-care. And I'm a pretty decent example of healthy-ish 21st Century living—I make turkey sandwiches for lunch, I drink water during the day, I don't smoke, and I go to therapy. I even go running two to three times a week.

And yet, despite my best efforts, I have learned that my body is incredibly toxic, ripe for tumors, and horribly out of whack with the universe. I am not speculating on any of this—wellness people tell it to me all the time. Which is very stressful.

An ayurvedic healer once told me, during a brief encounter, that cold cuts cause cancer and that I should be gluten- and dairy- and alcohol-free if I wanted a long and happy life.

A colonic technician told me I should stop running because it'll ruin my knees and I need to eat more omegas, like from salmon. Then a spa assistant told me I have to avoid salmon unless I want mercury poisoning.

A brand founder with freckled skin that glows like sunrise over the Himalayas said that stress was the root of all of my problems and that I should eliminate it as soon as possible with the help of a new-to-market cortisol-reduction pill. That, and maybe one to two profound lifestyle changes.

She is correct in that stress is bad for you. Cortisol, a fight-or-flight hormone found in your adrenal glands, is often the culprit. Cortisol suppresses other bodily functions (like, for example, digestion) and redirects your energy where it matters (running from a bear attack). And although we all have some cortisol release every day, extended release can contribute to inflammation, which in turn affects your immune response. Dr. Shanna Levine, an internist at Mount Sinai, observes stress illness in many of her patients. "Patients who have chronic elevated cortisol levels can have stomach issues, bone issues, or altered bodily physiology. It can be detrimental to have high chronic cortisol levels." If it gets really bad, for instance, you might get Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or "broken heart syndrome"—a stress disease that literally changes the shape of the human heart—to observe stress' more serious effects.

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Tons of products and treatments in the wellness category seek to treat stress and inflammation with everything from relaxing massage to acupuncture to restrictive anti-inflammatory diets. But in doing so, it's easy to fall into fear-based marketing. What happens when I can't follow a restrictive anti-inflammatory diet? Once, when I asked a paragon of alternative health this very question, she shrugged, "You don't really have a choice." Cortisol shot up my spine like a geyser.

It occurred to me that I would buy whatever it took to calm down. It also occurred to me that I was less stressed before I started paying such severe attention to my self-betterment.

My conundrum is: I want to get rid of stress without getting super stressed out about it. For somebody in their early 20s, mental and physical health shouldn't require abiding by strict rules and avoiding a list of verboten food groups. It should be a period of introspection, trial-and-error, and fucking up a little bit so you can straighten out eventually, if you want to.

The wellness economy is organized like an oligarchy. At the top, you have the health czars who abide by all of the rules that they also wrote. Just beneath them, you have everybody else, gobbling up the advice and handing over their money. It's fabulous if you’re at the top and it’s generally unfavorable to be anybody else—perpetually just shy of realizing your ideal self, and trying desperately to get there. It’s worth nothing that Merriam Webster defines wellness as an “actively sought goal.” Which means that it’s not attainable in any permanent sense.

But it's not all bad news out there in the wellness-sphere. Actually, a tip from a health czar got me to try acupuncture, which I now love and helps me cope with stress. My only advice is to experiment. Try it all out—without bankrupting yourself—and then stick with whatever works for you. Don’t pay to much credence to the non-doctors and "studies" yelling about toxins. In fact, take a grain of salt with any piece of health or fitness related advice. Except if I wrote it, in which case it is infallible.

Because the trick to reducing stress is to stop trying so hard to fix everything.

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