When I met the writer Amy Larocca at a cafe in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, I could not help but notice: She had the glow. Or seemed to.

The glow, as Ms. Larocca explains in her new book, “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time,” is what happens when you purify yourself “from the inside out.” When you never miss a day of your skin care routine, regularly drain your lymphatic fluids and take your collagen supplements. But to truly glow, you must also practice mindfulness, self-care and, ideally, transcendental meditation, avoid processed junk and sleep at least eight hours every night.

Such are the exacting standards of a contemporary wellness culture that has swelled to encompass nearly every facet of life. Not just the serums we slather on our faces or the Pilates classes we scurry off to but the food we eat (always whole foods), the bowel movements we pass (must be “firm and beautifully formed”) and the very thoughts we let enter our minds (intentional ones only).

It sounds like a lot of work. Or one might say it sounds like a lot of work — if it were not so incumbent on a well woman to be perpetually at ease.

After talking to Ms. Larocca, 49, for an hour, I learned she did not do everything a well woman should. She tries to sleep a lot. She exercises regularly. And yes, she wears an Oura ring, the latest in wearable tech for tracking one’s blood oxygen rate, body temperature and other biometrics.

But she does not observe 12-step routines of any kind. She is aware of the fact that dry-brushing may be a great way to exfoliate but that it probably does not drain your lymphatic fluid.

Sometimes, she participates in what she calls “recreational wellness,” something she knows is not likely to achieve what it promises but that nonetheless brings her some form of pleasure. Ms. Larocca, who spent 20 years at New York magazine in various roles including fashion director, is no stranger to the intensely human draw to believe that some of these practices will give her a control over her life and her body that she knows is fundamentally unattainable — which may be the emotional core of our wellness obsession.

This conversation, which took place over a matcha latte and an iced green tea, has been edited for length and clarity.

Going into your book, I had a much more narrow view of what wellness was. But I was compelled by your more capacious understanding of this world.

Wellness is really silly exercise classes. It’s also underserved communities talking about how no one takes their health seriously. We can talk about the way the beauty industry uses wellness as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card when it wants to pretend it’s feminist. We can talk about weird colonic therapists. We can talk about wellness as a socially acceptable term for eating disorders. There are 90 million ways to have a wellness conversation. In the end, I tried to say, wellness is all of this and we just live in this messed-up soup.

At this point, it seems hard to draw any firm boundaries around wellness.

Sometimes you see this when you go to these new medical practices. You’re like, “Am I at a spa? A gym? A boutique hotel? At the doctor? In a Kate Hudson movie?”

You started this book before Covid. How was your idea of wellness shaped by the pandemic?

It quickly became clear who was getting sick and who was dying from Covid. So the concept that was driving the project — coming at it from the perspective of someone who has written about fashion and style all these years — was that wellness had become this thing where we’re being sold our own bodies with the same marketing techniques that people use to sell handbags or shoes or lipstick. It’s incredibly dangerous to live in a society that treats health like a luxury product.

I liked that you pointed out some of the inconsistencies contained within wellness culture. At one point, you mention the concept of a single well-intentioned cigarette — a little indulgence.

It’s because all of these things reside within privilege. There’s a term, the narcissism of small differences. The things that make someone unwell are so much bigger than whatever little wellness protocol. They’re these larger socioeconomic factors.

Something I was thinking about as I read was the gendered aspect of wellness, and wellness as a kind of bonding exercise among women — sharing your insecurities, how you want to self-improve, these personal routines.

I think it can be. Going to an exercise class with friends or to a spa — it’s definitely a bonding ritual for a lot of people. There are wellness social clubs, like Remedy Place. It can also be a form of entertainment or recreation. It’s just a question of understanding its position and your expectations. It’s important to say here: It’s not like I hate wellness. I also participate in a lot of it. I think wellness is too entrenched in our lives to be “pro” or “anti.”

I love the term “recreational wellness.” It seems to relate to an experience I often have, which is knowing something is not going to work but doing it anyway.

It’s a diversion. I exercise a lot — part of it is for recreation, part of it is for actual health. I used to do my red light stuff and drink my collagen. Now I’ve sort of whittled it down. Every once in a while, a friend of mine will call me and be like, “My life has been changed by bovine colostrum!” And I’m like, “I need bovine colostrum!”

Recently, I was in a pharmacy filled with beautiful skin care products in an upscale part of Los Angeles. I knew I did not need anything, but I wanted it. And an elegant woman was floating around the store offering to help customers find what suited them.

It can really make you feel cared for and cosseted. It can feel really nice!

I thought about how it would feel to have all of these things in my medicine cabinet. I would feel like one of the fancy women walking around this neighborhood. Which goes back to the luxury aspect.

It’s the same feeling of, “if I purchase this bag. …”

Why is the pull so strong? We often know consciously that these products are not going to do what they say they will.

Wouldn’t it be so great if they did, though? And in the absence of credible information from actual experts, there’s this incredible opportunity. We want it to be true, and there’s a loss of faith in the systems that are supposed to be protecting us and informing us. And it’s on the left and the right. A lot of the Moon Juice products and the Infowars supplements have some of the same types of ingredients. The message on both sides is, “Prepare yourself for the collapse of the world! Wellness will save us from these terrible inevitabilities!”

Something about knowing that there is so much snake oil and bad information out there can also amplify the feeling that somewhere, hidden among these thousands of products, are maybe the two or three that “actually work.”

Totally! I’m like, “Sometime, one of these Bobbi Brown emails is going to have that tip!” And what if that was the time I didn’t click?

As part of “Believing,” The New York Times asked several writers to explore a significant moment in their religious or spiritual lives.

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I was many weeks into reciting kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning, for my father when I realized I did not know how to pray.

Oh, I knew the words and the melodies for the daily services I was attending — my father made sure of that, bringing me and my sisters to synagogue every Shabbat of our childhoods. I even knew what they meant, thanks to seven years at a Hebrew-speaking summer camp and four serving as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. I knew the choreography: when to sit, stand, bow, touch my fingers to my forehead or open my palms skyward.

I knew it all well enough to occasionally take my rightful place, as a mourner, leading the little group at my local Conservative synagogue some Sunday mornings.

What I was clueless about was God. How to talk to God, how to think about God, whether I believed in God, what he — my father — had believed. I knew what the words of the ancient texts meant in English, but not what they meant to me.

I decided maybe a year before Dad died that when the time came, I would take on the obligation of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish daily for 11 months, as outlined in Jewish law.

I had always found Jewish mourning rituals to be the most powerful part of our tradition. The communal aspect spoke to me: Kaddish is one of the prayers that require a quorum of 10 Jews, known as a minyan, and I appreciated both that I had to show up in public to fulfill this commandment and that strangers had to show up to make it possible. The daily commitment was daunting, but also appealing; a challenge, an opportunity, a statement to myself, to everyone around me and to my dead father that he and our tradition mattered to me.

Kaddish was also something I associated with Dad, whose booming voice whenever he was reciting the prayer on the anniversary of a loved one’s death still echoed in my head.

In the days following his death at 82, some of the loveliest memories people shared with us revolved around this ritual. How Dad made sure that prayer leaders did not go too fast for newbies or drown out women. Or how Dad had reconciled with his own father after decades of distance so he could say kaddish for him with less baggage.

I was excited, as a feminist and mostly Reform Jew, to take on an obligation that historically was the province of Orthodox men. The pandemic had made kaddish much more accessible and diverse: There was a Zoom minyan somewhere to dial into most hours of the day, some rooted in the traditional morning service, others involving meditation, study or song.

Everything made sense except the prayer part.

Kaddish may be the most famous Jewish prayer, infused into the broader culture — Sylvester Stallone recited it in “Rocky III,” and one of Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poems shares its title. It dates back to the first century B.C., and its Aramaic text does not mention death. Rather, it is a paean to God’s strength and sovereignty.

May your great name be blessed for ever and ever, is the central line. Blessed are you, whose glory transcends all praises, songs and blessings voiced in the world.

Scholars interpret this prayer being used for mourning as a declaration of acceptance that death is part of God’s plan. That works if you believe there is such a plan; if you believe in God; if you know what you believe.

Most mourners say kaddish in the same place most days, but my Reform synagogue only has services on Shabbat, so I stitched together a mosaic of minyans. (I’d decided to say kaddish once daily, not the traditional three times, usually at a morning service.)

On Sundays, I went to the Conservative shul in my town, and on Fridays, the Reconstructionist one. The other days, I’d video call into congregations across the United States, sometimes joining the ones where my sisters were saying kaddish, in Washington and Chicago. I said kaddish at a joint Passover-Ramadan breakfast, aboard New Jersey Transit commuter trains and outside a refugee center in Tbilisi, Georgia. I was good at focusing on Dad during the kaddish itself. But during the rest of the half-hour service — listening to the other prayers, reading memorial messages posted in the virtual chat on the side of the screen — my mind often wandered. Sometimes I checked Slack or email. I worried that I really wasn’t doing it right.

Back in religious school, I’d learned the mystical concept of keva and kavanah, Hebrew words that translate to “routine” and “intention.” The idea is that if you chant the same words every day, eventually, moments of connection will come. Kavanah is also translated as “sincere feeling” or “direction of the heart.”

I remembered asking, as a kid, how we would know when we got to kavanah. I don’t remember getting a good answer. Decades later, I was stuck in rote recitation — keva, keva, keva.

Until, as part of a Jewish study retreat in Maryland, I went on a walk in the woods with Rabbi Brent Chaim Spodek.

He called it a “soul stroll,” which sounded pretty hokey, but also as if it had a decent chance for kavanah. He led a little group on a light hike around a pond, stopping at beautiful spots to offer a few thoughts about the meaning of our familiar prayer book.

When we got to the central prayer, 19 blessings known as the Amidah, Rabbi Spodek summed it up as “Wow! Please? Thank you.” And that’s where it happened. I learned how to pray on my own terms.

“Wow” — shevach in Hebrew, or praiseworthiness — is about God’s awesomeness. Rabbi Spodek said he spends a minute or two pondering the miracle that is creation. That there is a (narrowing) climate in which humans can thrive. Plants and animals to nourish us.

“Please” — bakashot, or requests — is where we ask for things. Let my husband’s surgery succeed. Help my kid find his footing. Make me listen more. Big things, hard things, things we really need.

“Thank you” — hoda’ot — is like a gratitude journal. A yummy breakfast. A talk with an old friend. A walk in the woods.

It was hokey. But it worked. For the rest of my 11 months, whenever my mind wandered, I’d close my prayer book and close my eyes and try a little wow-please-thank you.

It did not instantly transform me into a believer. I still struggle, especially on the “wow” part, sometimes finding myself wow-ing God for making humans who figured out some technological, athletic or artistic miracle.

There are always plenty of pleases. And thanks, especially, for the nine other Jews who showed up so I could say kaddish for Dad, whatever he believed.

Jodi Rudoren is head of newsletters at The New York Times, where she previously spent 21 years as a reporter and editor. From September 2019 to April 2025, she was editor in chief of the Forward, the leading Jewish news organization in the United States.