When Wellness Isn't Enough - and why Yoga Therapy might be the Missing Piece

Despite the endless tracking, monitoring, journalling, different wellbeing initiatives and trends continuing to come and go, more people than ever are feeling stressed, burnt out, disconnected, and sick.

Reading time: 4 minutes

We’re surrounded by wellness and yet we as a society have rarely been so sick. Record numbers of children and young people are too ill to study or work, and rates of anxiety, depression, and obesity continue to rise despite a booming wellness industry.

A quick glance at wellness trends for 2026 suggests that we’re measuring almost every part of our lives, from sleep to steps; we’re digitalising and marketing so-called “Nature wellness” experiences like forest bathing (walking in the woods), star bathing (gazing at the night sky), and joyful experiences like ‘Paint and Sip’ social painting sessions with a glass of wine. Until recently, wellness was all about intensity and high levels of performance; this year we’re looking for nervous system safety, somatic grounding, and social experiences.

At the same time, we’re inviting greater levels of pharmaceutical involvement than ever before in the shape of Mounjaro, SSRIs, and even medicated skincare to prevent the physical signs of ageing. It seems that nothing about the human experience is being left to us, or to nature; even nature itself is measured and monetised as an experience.

In short, despite the endless tracking, monitoring, journalling, different wellbeing initiatives and trends continuing to come and go, more people than ever are feeling stressed, burnt out, disconnected, and sick.

This contradiction appeared in my own life long before I could name it. I had my own moment of realisation that something had to change when I crashed out of my work as a teacher. Despite living rurally and having a decent amount of paid sick leave, the endless walks and runs I took with my dog among the woods and lakes where I live made no difference to my desire to sit and stare at the wall. Even the human connections I had in my family weren’t enough to get me out of that pit. I’d become locked into a cycle of stress and anxiety- shaped by professional perfectionism, but rooted in the social, economic, and circumstantial pressures that had been accumulating for years. I was on SSRIs, I was walking in nature, I had my dog. I was doing all the right things and yet I wasn’t getting better.

Most wellbeing approaches will treat the body, the mind, or both- but that still leaves a lot of a person out of consideration. We talk about social, emotional, and mental health; mental and physical wellbeing; and most of us understand these terms to mean that we’re not in distress, and we’re able to function mentally and physically. Functioning is not flourishing. When you’re depressed you might not feel anything at all, and you might be able to feed and clothe yourself and your kids, so you’re functioning; but you’re not well. There’s an implication among seekers of wellness or wellbeing that there is something more, something the gyms and the mounjaro and the biohacks and the mindfulness apps are all missing.

Yoga therapy starts from the radical idea that we are all multi-layered beings: physical, energetic, rational, emotional, intuitive, and with a connection to something deeper still; a sense of awe and wonder. This concept of the panchamaya kosha system consists of the body (annamaya kosha), the breath or energy (pranamaya kosha), the mind (manomaya kosha), wisdom or intuition (vijnanamaya kosha) and bliss, awe, wonder (anandamaya kosha). Each of these layers is intertwined with the others, and dis-ease in one layer will have impacts in all the others. For an example, if we have someone who is in physical pain, that’s in the body. But pain is likely to limit breath and energy; in turn, that makes it harder to move and may lead to further difficulties. In the mental layer, pain and fear often coexist; the resulting withdrawal from hobbies or social connections makes it harder to access joy or ease.

This is where the yoga philosophy that backs yoga therapy can come in. Yoga therapy starts from the idea that each of us is a multilayered being, with a body and a mind, yes, but with more than that- energy, wisdom, parts of ourselves that make us who we are, and via which we can access a sense of joy and wonder. These are the parts that go missing when we’re not well, and these are the parts which also allow us to know what we need to nourish ourselves- and so when we lose access to them, we also lose access to those parts of ourselves which provide the tools we need to be well. We’re stuck in a doom loop.

A yoga therapist will look at a person’s presentation and then go deeper, inquiring into the things that light them up, and then use yoga practices like movement, breathwork, meditation, or philosophy, to help the person to access all five koshas in whatever way is possible, and to regain their sense of living joyfully. Yoga therapy takes the parts of a yoga practice- the whole practice, not just the movement part- and uses them to address the whole of a person. It understands that healing only happens when all the layers of ourselves are addressed- not just the visible ones, the body and the mind.

When I was off sick and I started practising yoga three, four, five times a week- something shifted. Something which nothing else had been able to touch. I started to get better, to enjoy life again. I stopped wanting to sit and stare at the wall. I found pleasure in food, interest in books, joy in spending time with my daughter. I could imagine building my life, being able to work, and even to enjoy work again. That practice, which combined breath, attentional control, and movement, gave me back a meaning and a joy to my life. I knew at that point that I needed to understand more about this marvel, and to share it.

There’s physiological and neurophysiological elements to this, because after all, we’re biological beings; but there’s a more subtle element too, and that’s what it seems is missing in all the monetised, app-based, measurable trends that the wellness industry thrives on. Yoga didn’t just help me to feel better. It allowed me to come back to myself. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for, beneath the apps and the influencers and the trends- a way back to ourselves, to those parts of us that make life feel meaningful. We’re all seeking something we call wellness. Yoga therapy might not be the whole answer- but it may be the part we’ve been missing.