Why So Much Wellness Content Sounds the Same Right Now (and why that isn’t a personal failure )

I’ve been noticing something for a while.

Scrolling through newsletters, Instagram posts, event descriptions, even course pages, much of the wellness language begins to blur and a lot of the content is sounding the same. Gentle invitations promoting safe, supportive containers. Everything ever so softly encouraging. Familiar phrases have become repeatable marketing language

It would be easy to blame AI for this — and certainly AI has amplified it, but the sameness began before the machines started writing.

AI hasn’t created the flattening of wellness language.

It has revealed the moment we are living in.

This smooth, soothing content is a cry for help.

It is the sound of survival.

We are living through a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. Not a spike, not a blip — but an ongoing tightening that affects how people rest, choose, risk, and spend. When survival becomes more present in the nervous system, expression changes.

Language becomes safer, more generic, more careful.

Messages widen to avoid exclusion.

For many wellness practitioners, this isn’t theoretical. It’s personal. When income becomes less predictable, when bookings fluctuate, when people want depth but can’t always afford it, there’s a quiet pressure to sound acceptable to as many people as possible.

Not because the work lacks integrity — but because they want to stay housed, fed, afloat.

Survival has a tone. And right now, much of wellness is speaking from there.

When care becomes content

Wellness language didn’t start this way.

Many of the phrases now repeated to exhaustion once came from lived, embodied practice — from therapy rooms, meditation halls, lineage teachings, community rituals. Over time, those words were lifted out of context and absorbed into marketing culture.

Care slowly became content.

AI is trained on what exists in abundance. It reproduces what is already most common, most rewarded, most recognisable. So when you ask it to write about grounding, rest, healing, or safety, it pulls from a narrow and well-worn vocabulary.

But AI is not the origin of the sameness. It’s the mirror.

What we are hearing echoed back is a wellness culture under economic pressure, trying to remain kind, inclusive, and viable — often at the cost of specificity and truth.

The grief underneath the gentleness

There’s an unspoken grief moving through the wellness field.

Grief that work which once felt sustainable now feels precarious.

Grief that people crave depth but don’t always have the resources for it.

Grief that simplifying language to survive can quietly erode the soul of the work.

This grief rarely gets named publicly. Wellness culture is very good at reframing, very good at finding silver linings, very good at offering reassurance.

But real healing work isn’t always soothing.

It can be awkward.

Slow.

Unclear.

Seasonal.

Economically inconvenient.

It often asks for commitment rather than consumption, presence rather than performance. It doesn’t always translate well to algorithms or templates.

When everything must be instantly legible, comforting, and shareable, something essential gets diluted — the path walked, the lived experience, the blood and breath from which the work is offered.

AI smooths this further, because smoothing is what it does best and the algorithm rewards familiarity, not truth.

And yet, something else is happening too

Alongside the sameness, there’s a quieter movement unfolding.

Smaller circles.

Fewer words.

Offerings that don’t scale.

Practitioners choosing depth over reach, even when it costs more to do so.

This work often isn’t loud online. It doesn’t always perform well. But it feeds people in ways that metrics can’t measure.

It feels less like content and more like home.

Less like branding and more like relationship.

A different question to ask

Instead of asking, “How do I make my wellness work stand out?”

Perhaps the more honest question right now is:

“What can I say that remains true, even if it reaches fewer people?”

That’s not an easy question in this economic climate. It requires discernment, humility, and often grief. But it may also be where something more resilient and more human is trying to take root.

If your work feels harder to express or sustain right now, it may not be because you’ve lost clarity.

It may be because your work is out of sync with survival-mode systems and quietly aligned with something slower, older, and harder to commodify.

That doesn’t make it easy.

But it does make it real. And real is what we truly need. Now more than ever.