Breathwork, ice baths, yoga, meditation. You don’t have to spend long on social media before someone recommends one of them as a way to improve your health.
And for some people, these practices can be genuinely helpful.
But what happens when you try something that’s supposed to make you feel better and it doesn’t?
Perhaps you leave a yoga class feeling worse than when you arrived. A breathing exercise makes you dizzy or anxious. Or you try cold-water immersion because you’ve heard about its benefits, only to feel thoroughly unpleasant afterwards.
It’s easy to wonder whether you’re doing something wrong.
But perhaps the more useful question is whether that particular approach is right for you in the first place.
Helpful for some doesn’t mean helpful for everyone
One of the difficulties with health and wellbeing advice is how easily an individual experience becomes a general recommendation.
Someone tries a practice, feels noticeably better and tells other people about it. Before long, it’s being presented as something we should all be doing.
There’s nothing wrong with sharing what has helped you.
The problem comes when we assume that everyone else’s body, circumstances and health problems will respond in the same way.
People vary enormously in their physical abilities, medical conditions, sensitivities and preferences.
And when you’re living with chronic illness, something that seems relatively straightforward to someone else may carry additional risks or demands.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Breathwork: when focusing on your breathing makes things worse
Breathing exercises are often recommended for relaxation, and some people find them helpful.
But not everyone enjoys concentrating on their breathing.
Certain techniques involve rapid breathing, prolonged breath-holding or deliberately changing the rhythm of your breath. These can cause unpleasant sensations, including dizziness, tingling or light-headedness.
For someone prone to panic, those sensations may also feel frightening.
Even gentler exercises can be uncomfortable for people who find paying close attention to their breathing unsettling.
That doesn’t mean you need to practise harder until you get used to it.
It may simply mean that the particular exercise doesn’t suit you.
If you’d like to explore breathing practices, you can choose something comfortable and unforced, without feeling obliged to follow a prescribed pattern or hold your breath.
And if a technique makes you feel faint, unwell or distressed, there’s no reason to push through.
Cold plunges: when a challenge isn’t necessarily helpful
Cold-water immersion has become enormously popular, often accompanied by claims about resilience, recovery and mental health.
There is research into its physiological effects, but the strength of evidence varies depending on the outcome being claimed.
Cold water also produces a substantial physical response. Sudden immersion can rapidly affect breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, and it carries risks that are sometimes overlooked in enthusiastic accounts of its benefits.
Those risks may be particularly relevant for people with certain cardiovascular conditions, problems regulating blood pressure or other medical complications.
So if you’ve tried a cold plunge and felt dreadful afterwards, I wouldn’t assume you simply need to build up your tolerance.
Nor would I automatically recommend replacing it with contrast showers or another form of cold exposure.
It’s perfectly reasonable to decide that cold-water practices aren’t for you.
You don’t have to participate in every wellness trend to take your health seriously.
Yoga: when a supposedly relaxing class isn’t relaxing
Yoga can offer benefits for movement, strength, flexibility and wellbeing, depending on the practice and the individual.
But yoga classes vary enormously.
A class that feels wonderful to one person may be uncomfortable, exhausting or unsuitable for someone else.
For people with hypermobility, joint instability or persistent pain, certain positions may place demands on joints that need greater support rather than more stretching.
Someone with significant fatigue or post-exertional malaise may find that even a gentle class exceeds what they can comfortably manage.
And some people simply dislike lying still in a quiet room or being asked to close their eyes.
None of this means yoga is inherently unsuitable.
It means the type of practice, the instructor’s understanding of your needs and your own circumstances matter.
You might prefer an appropriately adapted class, a different form of activity or no yoga at all.
The important thing is not to assume that because something is generally considered beneficial, you should persist when it makes your symptoms worse.
What about walking?
Walking is often suggested as a gentler alternative to more demanding forms of exercise.
It’s something I personally love, particularly when I can get outside in the New Forest or on the coast.
During periods when I was struggling with burnout, walking was one of the activities I still enjoyed and could manage.
But that’s my experience, and it won’t be everyone’s.
For someone with significant pain, dizziness, mobility difficulties or post-exertional malaise, walking may not be comfortable or appropriate. Even a short walk can be a considerable undertaking.
So I wouldn’t suggest that walking is the answer when other approaches don’t work.
What matters is finding activities that are suitable for your own health circumstances and, where possible, that you actually enjoy.
Sometimes that might be walking. Sometimes it might be something quite different.
And sometimes rest or avoiding additional exertion is the appropriate choice.
How do you decide what’s worth trying?
When you’re managing chronic illness, it can be tempting to try something simply because you’ve heard so many positive things about it.
Especially when you’re still looking for answers.
But I think it’s worth taking a moment to ask a few questions before adding another practice to your life.
- What am I hoping this will help with? Is there a particular problem I’m trying to address, or does it just sound like something I ought to be doing?
- What does the evidence actually show? Has it been studied in people with circumstances similar to mine, or are the claims based largely on personal experiences?
- Is it appropriate for my health situation? Are there possible risks, limitations or reasons to seek medical advice first?
- What would it ask of me? How much time, money, energy or preparation would it add?
- Do I actually want to do it? Or am I feeling pressured because everyone seems to be recommending it?
Those questions won’t give you every answer.
But they may help you distinguish something that could be genuinely useful from another thing you feel you should add to your routine.
You don’t have to replace every unsuitable practice with another one
I think this is the part that often gets missed.
When a health or wellbeing practice doesn’t suit us, the immediate response is often to look for an alternative.
If breathwork feels uncomfortable, perhaps we should meditate instead. If cold plunges don’t help, maybe we need another way to challenge the body. If yoga isn’t suitable, perhaps we should find a different exercise programme.
Sometimes exploring an alternative makes sense.
But sometimes it’s worth asking whether we need another practice at all.
Living with chronic illness can already involve a remarkable amount of work: appointments, treatments, research, symptom management and decisions about what to try next.
Every additional recommendation has the potential to become another responsibility.
And the things we do to support our health shouldn’t automatically take over the time and energy we have left for everything else.
The bottom line
Breathwork, yoga, cold plunges and other wellbeing practices aren’t necessarily good or bad in themselves.
Their usefulness depends on the evidence, the individual, the circumstances and what someone is hoping to achieve.
Something that helps another person may do nothing for you. It may even make you feel worse.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done it incorrectly or haven’t tried hard enough.
It may simply be something that isn’t suitable or worthwhile for you.
You don’t have to keep adding things to your life just because they’re supposed to be good for you.
Sometimes it’s more useful to step back, question the claims and consider what genuinely deserves your time and attention.
And to remember that making room for things you enjoy matters too.
Jo 💚
A note from Jo
My background is in biological sciences, scientific research and publishing, and I’m a Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach.
Living alongside complex chronic illness in my own family taught me how easily the search for better health can become another demanding part of everyday life.
These days, I’m interested in helping people make sense of the information and choices they’re dealing with, consider what matters most and find ways to make life a little more manageable.
If managing your health has become complicated or overwhelming, sometimes it helps to talk things through.