In moments of political tension or social uncertainty, wellness can feel trivial. Skincare. Yoga. Rest. The language of self-care often carries a sheen of luxury, as if tending to the body were separate from tending to the world.

But historically in the United States, wellness has often been about survival.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrant and working-class communities formed mutual aid societies to provide medical care, childcare, and food distribution when formal systems failed them. Settlement houses, led by reformers like Jane Addams, offered sanitation programs and public health education in neglected neighborhoods. Care emerged not from abundance, but from necessity.

By the mid-twentieth century, community-based health initiatives expanded across the country. Grassroots clinics, preventative screenings, and nutrition programs were organized to address systemic gaps in access to care. Health was framed not simply as personal responsibility, but as a collective right.

In the 1960s and 70s, organizations such as the Black Panther Party established free community medical clinics, screening programs, and breakfast initiatives in response to profound healthcare inequities. Leaders including Ericka Huggins integrated meditation and mindfulness into community health education, recognizing mental resilience as inseparable from physical care. Angela Davis has spoken about turning to yoga and contemplative practices during incarceration as a way to preserve clarity and humanity under dehumanizing conditions.

These practices were not aesthetic. They were stabilizing.

Beyond any one movement, many civil rights organizers, labor leaders, and feminist collectives emphasized that sustained activism required sustained bodies. Audre Lorde famously wrote that caring for herself was not self-indulgence, but self-preservation — “and that is an act of political warfare.” Across communities, the principle was similar: burnout weakens movements. Care sustains them.

Over time, the cultural meaning of “self-care” shifted. By the late twentieth century, wellness increasingly entered commercial spaces. What had once been communal and often political became individualized and aesthetic. Wellness became something to purchase rather than something to build together.

There is nothing inherently wrong with pleasure or beauty. But something essential was obscured when care was detached from community.

At its origin, much of modern American wellness arose in response to neglect. It was preventative. It was communal. It was rooted in the understanding that sustained engagement requires sustained health.

In politically charged times, the instinct is often to push harder. To remain vigilant. To do more. But exhaustion has always been an adversary to meaningful change.

Rest, nourishment, movement, tending to the body — these are not retreats from reality. They are stabilizing forces. They allow individuals to remain steady and communities to remain intact.

Wellness does not have to be indulgent. It can be a quiet refusal to collapse. A daily act of preservation. A practice of remembering that care is not separate from collective life.

Care is not retreat. It is resilience.