Health Update: Health Update: The Aesthetics of Wellness: How Instagram Shapes Happiness and Exclusion – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
Introduction
Instagram has become a central stage for wellness in contemporary digital culture. Images of workouts, healthy meals, skincare routines, and meditation circulate widely, shaping how people imagine well-being and happiness. Yet, while these practices appear to offer paths to a “better life”, they also raise important questions about how happiness is constructed and who is included and excluded from this vision of wellness. This issue sets the stage for this article.
Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) provides a framework to examine this issue. Ahmed argues that happiness should not be seen as a fixed state, but as an orientation toward certain objects that are socially framed as good. These “happy objects” guide how people move through the world, shaping desires, behaviors, and collective ideals. At the same time, Ahmed shows that happiness is never simply positive. Happiness can be bound up with exclusion, as those who do not align with dominant orientations risk being positioned as outsiders. She names this phenomenon: “affect aliens”.
For cultural studies, the importance of this topic lies in showing how power, politics, and media work not only through ideas and representations, but also through the circulation of affect, which shapes both collective life and individual experience.
Building on this perspective, this article explores the role of Instagram in shaping contemporary understandings of wellness and happiness. The research question guiding this study is: In which ways does Instagram wellness culture define and circulate dominant ideals of well-being, and how do these practices marginalize certain groups?
This introduction will be followed by an outline of Ahmed’s framework of happiness and affect. Next, the article examines how wellness on Instagram operates through the circulation of “happy objects” that orient users toward particular ideals of health and success. The analysis highlights not only how these ideals are constructed and amplified, but also how they produce forms of exclusion. Finally, the paper reflects on what these dynamics reveal about the politics of happiness in contemporary digital culture.
Wellness = happiness?
In digital culture, affect plays a central role in shaping what grabs attention and drives engagement. Within the attention economy, content that is emotionally “sticky” is more likely to engage users and be amplified across platforms. Such emotional stickiness means that the content is attributed with being good or bad, which casuses users to retain affective value and influence their oreintations (Ahmed, 2010).
Digital platforms make affect visible, shareable and monetizable. On Instagram, wellness practices – such as workouts, healthy foods, skincare, or meditation – are frequently presented as direct steps toward happiness (Gerstenecker, 2021). These practices appear to form a roadmap to wellness, suggesting that happiness naturally follows from adopting a particular lifestyle.
The Global Wellness Institute (2025) highlights the difference. ‘Wellness’ refers to intentional actions like exercise, diet, and self-care, while ‘Happiness’ is a subjective state of being tied to fulfillment and satisfaction. This shows that wellness practices on Instagram operate as “happy objects” (social goods) that promise or symbolize happiness and direct our affective orientations, serving as means oriented toward happiness rather than happiness itself (Ahmed, 2010).
According to Ahmed (2010), happiness is not a stable state, but a bodily orientation: We move toward objects that are framed as good and that we expect will affect us positively. On Instagram, wellness objects (hydration routines, yoga poses, or carefully prepared meals) are socially validated as desirable. By circulating these objects, social media creates shared orientations toward them, teaching users what is supposed to bring happiness. Seeing others engage in wellness practices can lead to feelings of motivation or joy (Bak et al., 2020), reinforcing the connection between wellness and happiness and creating an affective community (Ahmed, 2010).
However, the promise of happiness through wellness is unstable. Social media’s dopamine cycle of likes and comparisons means that curated images of wellness can turn inspiration into frustration. When individuals fail to achieve the idealized version of wellness presented online, the pursuit of happiness can easily turn into depression over “perfect” images (Lovink, 2019). In this way, the objects meant to bring joy can produce the opposite effect, revealing the fragility of happiness when tied to specific cultural signs.
From personal choice to shared lifestyle
When we look at wellness on Instagram, it is not just about individual health choices. It is also deeply social. People use the platform to share their routines, diets, and fitness journeys, and in doing so, they connect with others who have similar interests. This creates a sense of belonging and it makes wellness feel like a community rather than something done alone. Baker and Walsh (2018) found that adopting a healthy diet was presented not only as a personal decision, but also as a way to join a community of like-minded people. In other words, following a wellness lifestyle online helps people feel part of a larger group.
At the same time, influencers play a key role in shaping what this community looks like. They use Instagram not only to share tips, but also to brand themselves as lifestyle icons. Their posts often link to external websites and include sponsored content (Leaver et al., 2020). This means that, while Instagram wellness spaces bring people together, they also turn community practices into something that can be marketed and sold.
The commodification of well-being
Instagram wellness is closely tied to the commodification of well-being. Products, services, and experiences are heavily promoted on the platform, in which users frame self-care as something to be purchased and consumed (Sepúlveda et al., 2025). This reflects Ahmed’s (2010) idea of “happy objects,” which circulate as social goods and become bound up with economic activity. At the same time, Instagram wellness often presents self-care not simply as an end in itself, but as a way to improve efficiency and performance. This emphasis connects to Ahmed’s (2010) observation that happiness can be instrumentalized and valued less for its own sake than for its capacity to support other goals, such as productivity.
Happy objects, hidden hierarchies
Instagram wellness functions politically by establishing norms around well-being, which are often tied to specific identities and levels of economic capital (Verhulst, 2023). Influencers and communities cultivate “happy objects” (certain bodies, products, practices) that signal status and belonging. Bourdieu’s (1985) concept of social capital helps us understand how these signals operate. Namely, the participation in and the performance of Instagram wellness becomes a way to accumulate social capital – the networks and connections that provide access to opportunities. This, in turn, requires economic capital, creating a system where those with resources are better positioned to succeed and are further validated by the algorithms (Mahmud et al., 2021).
Those lacking the economic means to participate in the performance of Instagram wellness are often excluded from these valuable networks and may face judgement for failing to conform to the dominant norms, aligning with Ahmed’s (2010) concept of “alienation”. Wellness, then, becomes a mechanism for maintaining social hierarchies.
Visibility, status, and the algorithmic shaping of wellness
Behavior is influenced by the algorithm and by the norms people think they should follow. The algorithm often amplifies content from individuals who already possess social capital (Lundahl, 2020), further concentrating power and visibility in their hands and strengthening existing norms around race, class, body type, and self-care practices. This reduces diverse perspectives and maintains inequality.
The algorithm plays a central role in shaping wellness culture on Instagram by deciding which practices and images gain visibility and which remain hidden (Register et al., 2023). Wellness operates online through implicit rules, as users are expected to display positivity, productivity, and consumption, or risk being pushed aside (Coffey, 2024). In this way, social media turns well-being into a political tool, prescribing how people should act and feel in order to be recognized as “good citizens” online.
In essence, Instagram wellness operates as a political system where social capital, often gained through economic means, dictates who gets to be seen as “well” and who gets access to the resources and opportunities associated with that label. This reinforces existing power structures in wellness (Prilleltensky, 2008). As a result, wellness becomes a marker of status (Coffey, 2024). Because the same narrow images of race, class, and body are continuously reproduced, they reinforce inequality even as they are presented as the path to happiness.
From wellness to alienation: who gets left out
The affect of happiness can lead to the alienation of certain people or bodies (Ahmed, 2010). Instagram wellness creates “affect aliens” through systematic exclusion of bodies and experiences that do not align with its narrow vision of well-being. This includes people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, people with differing body types, and those who financially cannot afford to engage in wellness culture (Basas, 2014). They become outsiders to the “community of the well” as they feel out of sync or disconnected from the predominant affective community (Ahmed, 2010), and can therefore not attain the promised happiness of wellness objects.
This exclusion works through specific patterns. Visual absence is central, as these bodies and experiences rarely appear in wellness content, making them invisible to the broader community (Stockinger, 2022). Furthermore, there is built-in blame within wellness culture. If someone is not “well”, it is framed as their personal failure for not trying hard enough.
Being an affect alien creates a social ranking system where some bodies are seen as more worthy of health and happiness than others. The effect is a hierarchy of “deserving” versus “undeserving” bodies, for which Instagram wellness establishes clear boundaries around acceptable practices and lifestyles. Those outside these norms are positioned as problems to be solved, rather than as people with valid and diverse experiences of well-being. As a result, affect aliens must constantly work to navigate spaces not designed for them, managing the contradiction of being excluded while being blamed for “negativity” or resistance (Ahmed, 2010).
This circulation produces a narrow model of well-being that operates as a marker of social capital, rewarding conformity and visibility while marginalizing those who cannot or will not align.
Conclusion
This article has explored how Instagram wellness culture defines and circulates dominant ideals of well-being, and how these practices marginalize certain groups. Building on Ahmed’s (2010) framework, The Promise of Happiness, the analysis showed that wellness practices such as fitness routines, diets, skincare, and meditation are circulated as “happy objects” that orient users toward a promised state of happiness. These practices are not just individual lifestyle choices, but they are also social signifiers that stand for happiness, productivity, and belonging.
At the same time, the analysis demonstrated that Instagram wellness is inseparable from commodification and status. Wellness is marketed as something to be bought and displayed, while the algorithm amplifies those who already fit dominant ideals of race, class, body type, and aesthetics. This circulation produces a narrow model of well-being that operates as a marker of social capital, rewarding conformity and visibility while marginalizing those who cannot or will not align.
As a result, Instagram wellness not only defines what it means to be “well”, but the platform also polices who counts as part of the “community of the well”. Those excluded, whether due to disability, chronic illness, limited resources, or non-normative bodies, are what Ahmed (2010) calls “affect aliens”. These are the users that are absent from representation, blamed for their difference, and denied access to the happiness attached to wellness objects.
In conclusion, Instagram wellness culture functions as both a roadmap to happiness and a mechanism of exclusion. By circulating a dominant aesthetic of well-being that links happiness to consumption, productivity, and bodily conformity, Instagram wellness reinforces social hierarchies deciding who is able to achieve wellness and who is not. Happiness on Instagram is thus not a universal promise, but a socially constructed ideal that privileges some while alienating others.
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