“My working definition is wellness is ‘a luxury good.’ And it’s the packaging of our health and our beauty into a consumable for sale product.” – Amy Larocca author of “How to be Well”
From Explain It to Me: What wellness costs us, Aug 10, 2025
—
According to this feature, our modern conception of wellness started taking shape in the latter half of the 19th century. From the beginning, wellness has had an uneasy relationship with morality and markets, but by the end of the 20th century, wellness had evolved into a full-blown industry in its own right.
While the factors that contribute to wellness are actually pretty simple, it isn’t easy for most people to build a life and/or career that are conducive to being well. There are all kinds of factors that can interfere with our ability to get enough sleep and regular exercise, consume enough healthy food and water, process emotions in a healthy way and build mutually-supportive (inter-dependable) relationships).
So, we now are surrounded by products that promise to make us well – without requiring us to make fundamental changes in how we approach life.
Still, is wellness really something we can purchase and consume? Or does it require something deeper?
—
About two decades ago, as part of an ongoing engagement with Microsoft Japan, my colleague Andrea Konuma and I designed a 3-session program that rolled out over a two month period called “Peak Performance through Work-Life Balance” that was designed to create space for individual employees to use reflection, dialog, ideation and experimentation to identify specific factors that enhanced or impeded their wellness and performance at work and quality of life.
Each participant discovered their own set of wellness and performance factors. Some focused on daily hygienic habits like diet. Others rediscovered what gave them a sense of purpose and meaning. Others realized that they needed to manage the メリハリ (variability) of their workload to plan breaks that would enable them to take advantage of their natural capacity for recovery and super-compensation.
In the second session, we provided them with a framework (RAFT – Routines-Anchors-Frames-Triggers) they used to organize and plan the integration of those factors into a formula they could use to plan their daily work lives. Then, n the third session, we helped them create a strategy for upshifting and downshifting based on work and life requirements.
Many participants noted that the combination of agency (ownership of own choices) and connection (reflection and collaboration with peers) triggered a fundamental change in how they approached work and life.
In the late aughts, Microsoft Japan was recognized with the #1 ranking in the Great Place to Work survey for Japan. Interviewees mentioned that their experience of agency and connection played a large role in their positive evaluations of their MS Japan work experience.
—
Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
Quote at top of this post comes from “Explain It to Me: What wellness costs us”, Aug 10, 2025
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.