If you have spent any time on wellness TikTok or Instagram in the past few years, you know the aesthetic. Up at 5am. Morning pages, then a run. Matcha, not coffee. Whole foods, clean fridge, no drama. Pilates three times a week. Glowing skin, not because of anything in particular, just because that is what happens when you are living right.
The "that girl" aesthetic resonated because it sold something genuinely appealing: a life built on discipline, self-care, and intention. And some of what it got right is worth keeping. But some of what it normalised is worth examining carefully.
What it got right
Consistency over intensity
The version of wellness that works is not the version that is most dramatic. It is the version you actually show up for. The that girl framework, at its core, is about daily habits and rituals, not occasional grand gestures. A 20-minute walk every day beats an intense workout once a week. Consistent, adequate sleep beats one luxurious lie-in. A simple skincare routine you actually do beats an elaborate one you abandon.
That consistency principle is genuinely useful and backed by research. The habit and behaviour change literature is unambiguous: repetition builds neural pathways, and neural pathways determine what feels easy and what feels hard over time.
Intentional self-care as a non-negotiable
Treating your body and mind as worth investing in is not vanity. It is not self-indulgence. The that girl framing helped a lot of people give themselves permission to prioritise their own wellbeing without apology. That permission is valuable.
Building a morning routine, having a skincare practice, moving your body because you love it rather than to punish it for what you ate: those are all genuinely good things.
What it gets wrong
The all-or-nothing framing
The aesthetic presents wellness as a complete package. You are either that girl or you are not. You either have the whole routine or you do not bother. This framing is psychologically disastrous for anyone trying to build real habits, because real habit-building is messy, non-linear, and involves a lot of partial days and missed sessions.
Wellness that only counts when it is photogenic is not wellness. It is performance. And the gap between the performance and real life is where people burn out, give up, and feel like they have failed at something that was always designed to be unattainable.
The perfectionism under the surface
There is a particular kind of rigidity that shows up in the that girl content: the meticulous food prep, the spotless kitchen, the unvarying routine. It presents discipline as the goal and deviation as failure. But rigidity and wellness do not coexist well. Rigid dietary rules often tip into disordered eating. Rigid exercise schedules often lead to overtraining, injury, and burnout. Rigid routines break on the first day they are disrupted, and then they feel unrecoverable.
Real wellness is flexible. It bends to accommodate illness, chaos, difficult weeks, and the fact that sometimes the most nourishing thing you can do is skip the gym and watch films in bed.
The implication that looking a certain way is the outcome
Much of that girl content is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) framed around achieving a particular body. The green juice is not just for energy, it is for looking like someone who drinks green juice. The Pilates is not just for strength, it is for the aesthetic outcome of Pilates. This conflation of wellness with aesthetics, and specifically with thinness and a particular kind of softness, is where the trend tips from self-care into something more damaging.
Your wellness is not a before and after. Your worth is not in your routines or your body. These things seem obvious when stated plainly, but the content makes them less obvious over time.
Building a version that is actually yours
Take the useful parts. Keep the consistency. Keep the intentional self-care. Keep the idea that your morning and your body and your mental health are worth investing in.
Drop the aesthetic. Drop the all-or-nothing. Drop any version of wellness that requires you to look a certain way, eat in a certain prescribed manner, or perform your health for an audience.
Your version of wellness should be:
- Sustainable on your worst weeks, not just your best ones
- Built around how you feel, not how you look
- Flexible enough to survive real life
- Private enough that it does not need to be documented to count
The most important question is not "am I being that girl today?" It is "am I taking care of myself in a way I can actually sustain?" Those are very different questions, and only one of them leads anywhere good.