Contemporary culture sees the body-as-project. We dress it, train it, adorn it, treat it, scent it, prepare it, and present it to the world. 

But a body cannot live only as a project.

The Global Wellness Summit has begun tracking a split in the wellness market between what it calls "hardcare" – hyper-medical , high-tech, expensive optimisation, and "softcare," which captures a growing desire for something low-pressure, simpler, and less relentlessly self-optimising, where emotional and social wellbeing matter most. Turns out people are tired of being projects.

There is a philosophical explanation for why the tipping happens so reliably. South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it the achievement society – a culture that has replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Where older systems of power said "you cannot," this one says "you can, endlessly. You can be better, leaner, more optimised, more recovered, more alive." It sounds like freedom. Han argues it functions as a more efficient cage. We are no longer exploited from outside. We exploit ourselves and call it self-improvement. The perpetual drive for self-optimisation, he argues, serves exclusively to advance perfect compatibility with the market.

The system is structurally designed to push body-as-project past the point of usefulness

This is where the sleep score stops being useful and starts being something else.

A sleep score is useful  but a sleep score that makes you anxious about the quality of your rest is detrimental. A relationship with your body mediated entirely by its performance metrics is a different kind of life. Even pleasure has been folded into the logic of improvement: orgasm as a health outcome, desire as evidence of a self that is functioning correctly, rest repackaged as recovery — a means to an end, something you do so you can perform again tomorrow.

The body can be a project and still need more than that. Both things are true. The question is whether we have left room for the second one.

When the project becomes the only mode, we train a distance between our body and self. We’ve learnt to meta our way out of the body. Researchers call this self-objectification – the shift from experiencing the body as a subject to monitoring it as an object. The documented consequences include disrupted awareness of internal sensation, anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction. The body, watched too closely from the outside, stops being legible from the inside. We eat while watching ourselves eat. We rest while assessing the quality of our resting. We have sex while noticing, from somewhere above, whether we are present enough, responsive enough, whether it looks the way it is supposed to look. Over-optimisation never actually lead us to the nirvana that we seek.

The cost of this is subtle but cumulative. Touch has slowly become transactional, over-sexualised, or made to justify itself through some measurable outcome. It is never just touch as care.

Through this lens, even care can begin to feel suspicious. The nervous system does not always respond to being told to relax (It often has the opposite result).

Simple touch is in increasingly short supply.

The problem with health optimisation is that it is an outside-in approach. It sets goals based on external markers and things that can be measured. At Bed Intentions, we believe that metrics serve a guide, but we must not forget the unmeasurable.

Massage in history started out as medicine (importantly) incorporating both physical and neurological healing benefits.

In East Asia, Tui Na (Chinese massage) and Shiatsu (Japanese massage) do not separate energy balancing and physical improvement. Ayurvedic practitioners in India were using warm oil and pressure to balance the patients' dosha and prana whilst helping to alleviate physical symptoms.

The reason why traditional massage all share an element of emotional wellbeing can be explained through science. Broadly, touch increases oxytocin[i] and reduces cortisol. During massage, serotonin also rises[ii], which is the precursor to melatonin. The body reaches a baseline parasympathetic relaxation[iii]which can allow high-quality sleep and intimacy. Of course, we don’t need science to tell us this because it’s a universal human experience. For time immemorial, people have been using massage to relax.

The outside-in approach has its uses. But it can only take you so far, because the body should not be reduced to a project with a finish line

The parasympathetic state that massage produces a biological yield point that both deep sleep and genuine intimacy share. The body already knows what it needs and the work is not to impose something from the outside but to remove the interference so that the body can hear itself.