When Having It All Means It’s All Falling Apart

The first message, received while I was at the office one day last month, drowning in work, informed me that my daughter had lice. The second confirmed my son had it, too.

The third, which came as my deadline was approaching and I was feeling phantom itchiness on my scalp, announced that my son’s wonderful kindergarten teacher had quit the week before and was never coming back.

I felt like I’d been cast in an adult version of “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” Everything—work, life, parasites—had collided. In addition to having no idea which crisis to tackle first, I questioned how I’d gotten there in the first place.

Sometimes there is a fine line between having it all and it’s all falling apart. After a stretch when many of us laboured to be Santa at home and year-end heroes at work, all while facing a tripledemic, we could stand to take a deep breath, shift our perspective and, when all else fails, laugh at the absurdity of it all.

“On your bad days, when nothing is going right, you go, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a horrible parent. I’m a horrible employee. I’m a horrible wife. I’m a horrible everything,’” says Lilian Tsi Stielstra, a mother of two grown children in Vancouver, Wash. The 58-year-old says she still remembers the morning years ago when she confidently marched into her office in her brand-new black power suit only to realise it was adorned with a blob of her one-year-old’s snot.

One lawyer and mother of four in Pennsylvania told me she’d once dropped her child off at soccer practice, then figured out, in the blur of juggling back-to-back calls, she’d dropped the wrong child. A nonprofit executive mistakenly threw the plastic bag containing his homemade lunch in the trash and commuted to the office cluelessly clutching a bag filled with cat poop. One tech leader recounted to me the time she received a text message while stationed in a glass conference room in her bustling office. It was her fiancé, breaking up with her.

Some tales of work-life clash are grisly, like presenting to a client in Chicago still bloodied from fresh dental work. Some are eventually funny, like when your child bursts into a research meeting of scientists to announce his pet lizards are having sex.

Navigating our different responsibilities and identities has never been easy. These days, it’s compounded by our current stew of illnesses, corporate chaos and the pressure on parents to make up for everything kids lost during the pandemic.

“It’s all colliding,” says Lisa Duerre, who spent a day last August dealing with an ailing sibling, an anxious child, a crucial client pitch and a dog who decided right then was a good time to get sick all over the carpet.

The chief executive of RLD Group, which advises tech companies on culture, Ms. Duerre recently had a coaching client kick off a session by placing her forehead down on the desk, overwhelmed by caring for a parent with dementia while dealing with a corporate reorganisation.

For those in the throes of acute work-life tensions, Ms. Duerre recommends first pausing. Take three deep breaths. Notice how you’re feeling—are you screaming “Just cancel everything!” in your head? Are your shoulders scrunched up near your ears? Tell yourself you’re just going to choose the next right action, and the next, one at a time. Ask yourself what’s most important to do right now, and then ask for help where you need it.

Go to a peer first if you can, she says, so you’re not constantly sounding alarms to your boss. When you do approach your manager with a problem, bring some possible solutions rather than plaintive queries. The paediatrician only has an appointment during the client meeting; would you prefer I call in from the parking lot there or send someone else to the meeting in my place?

Messy days, and tragic and scary moments too, are part of having a full life. Shouldering many roles, from dad to dog owner to team leader, makes us happier, says Yael Schonbrun, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Brown University, though it can also make some situations harder.

“When we have a life that has a lot of meaning and purpose, it’s often quite uncomfortable,” she says.

See if you can find the silver linings in your busy, complicated days. For example, limited time can force us to be more focused and present, says Dr. Schonbrun, the author of a book about how working parents can manage feeling overwhelmed. Stepping away from work to see our kids or tend to another responsibility can breed bursts of creativity.

When our lives are bigger, a loss or challenge in one area often doesn’t hit as hard.

“Even though I might run at a higher anxiety and higher stress, I don’t run lonely,” reasons Shelley Nelson, who juggles two kids and a job at a financial-technology company. She hit a run of bad luck starting in late 2021, breaking her hand right as she was starting a new job, leaving her with one for typing. Then came pinkeye, a flat tire that made her late for a meeting where she was to meet her new executives, Covid-19 infections for nearly the whole family and the death of her husband’s grandmother.

“I was, like, this is not who I am,” she says of all the accommodations she had to request from her new manager, from extra work-from-home days to time off.

She laughed to keep from crying. She wished she could do better, at everything. But she told herself she was managing as well as she could, and found the bad days built resilience.

I did, too. When the woman at the lice-treatment centre examined my hair and assured me that good moms get lice, I took the diagnosis as proof of my hands-on parenting. When my son came down with a mystery fever the following week, I cherished the extra cuddles on the couch. By the time my daughter was hit with a stomach bug on Christmas Eve, just as my editor was texting me about a column, I was less fazed by it all.

Nothing seemed to be going as planned, but it still felt like a privilege to have so many things I loved, constantly colliding with each other.

For some vacationers, the ideal getaway involves $1,200 ozone therapy or an $1,800 early-detection cancer test.

Call it the longevity vacation. People who are fixated on optimising their personal health are pursuing travel activities that they hope will help them stay healthier for longer. It is part of a broader interest in longevity that often extends beyond traditional medicine . These costly trips and treatments are rising in popularity as money pours into the global wellness travel market.

At high-end resorts, guests can now find biological age testing, poolside vitamin IV drips, and stem-cell therapy. Prices can range from hundreds of dollars for shots and drips to tens of thousands for more invasive procedures, which go well beyond standard wellness offerings like yoga, massages or facials.

Some longevity-inspired trips focus on treatments, while others focus more on social and lifestyle changes. This includes programs that promise to teach travellers the secrets of centenarians .

Mark Blaskovich, 66 years old, spent $4,500 on a five-night trip last year centred on lessons from the world’s “Blue Zones,” places including Sardinia, Italy, and Okinawa, Japan, where a high number of people live for at least 100 years. Blaskovich says he wanted to get on a healthier path as he started to feel the effects of ageing.

He chose a retreat at Modern Elder Academy in Mexico, where he attended workshops detailing the power of supportive relationships, embracing a plant-based diet and incorporating natural movement into his daily life.

“I’ve been interested in longevity and trying to figure out how to live longer and live healthier,” says Blaskovich.

Vitamins and ozone

When Christy Menzies noticed nurses behind a curtained-off area at the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii on a family vacation in 2022, she assumed it might be Covid-19 testing. They were actually injecting guests with vitamin B12.

Menzies, 40, who runs a travel agency, escaped to the longevity clinic between trips to the beach, pool and kids’ club, where she reclined in a leather chair, and received a 30-minute vitamin IV infusion.

“You’re making investments in your wellness, your health, your body,” says Menzies, who adds that she felt more energised afterward.

The resort has been expanding its offerings since opening a longevity centre in 2021. A multi-day treatment package including ozone therapy, stem-cell therapy and a “fountain of youth” infusion, costs $44,000. Roughly half a dozen guests have shelled out for that package since it made its debut last year, according to Pat Makozak, the resort’s senior spa director. Guests can also opt for an early-detection cancer blood test for $1,800.

The ozone therapy, which involves withdrawing blood, dissolving ozone gas into it, and reintroducing it into the body through an IV, is particularly popular, says Makozak. The procedure is typically administered by a registered nurse, takes upward of an hour and costs $1,200.

Longevity vacationers are helping to fuel the global wellness tourism market, which is expected to surpass $1 trillion in 2024, up from $439 billion in 2012, according to the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute. About 13% of U.S. travellers took part in spa or wellness activities while traveling in the past 12 months, according to a 2023 survey from market-research group Phocuswright.

Canyon Ranch, which has multiple wellness resorts across the country, earlier this year introduced a five-night “Longevity Life” program, starting at $6,750, that includes health-span coaching, bone-density scans and longevity-focused sessions on spirituality and nutrition.

The idea is that people will return for an evaluation regularly to monitor progress, says Mark Kovacs, the vice president of health and performance.

What doctors say

Doctors preach caution, noting many of these treatments are unlikely to have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, producing a placebo effect at best and carrying the potential for harm at worst. Procedures that involve puncturing the skin, such as ozone therapy or an IV drip, risk possible infection, contamination and drug interactions.

“Right now there isn’t a single proven treatment that would prolong the life of someone who’s already healthy,” says Dr. Mark Loafman, a family-medicine doctor in Chicago. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Some studies on certain noninvasive wellness treatments, like saunas or cold plunges , do suggest they may help people feel less stressed, or provide some temporary pain relief or sleep improvement.

Linda True, a policy analyst in San Francisco, spent a day at RAKxa, a wellness retreat on a visit to family in Thailand in February. True, 46, declined the more medical-sounding offerings, like an IV drip, and opted for a traditional style of Thai massage that involved fire and is touted as a “detoxification therapy.”

“People want to spend money on things that they feel might be doing good,” says Dr. Tamsin Lewis, medical adviser at RoseBar Longevity at Six Senses Ibiza, a longevity club that opened last year, whose menu includes offerings such as cryotherapy, infrared sauna and a “Longevity Boost” IV.

RoseBar says there is good evidence that reducing stress contributes to longevity, and Lewis says she doesn’t offer false promises about treatments’ efficacy . Kovacs says Canyon Ranch uses the latest science and personal data to help make evidence-based recommendations.

Jaclyn Sienna India owns a membership-based, ultra luxury travel company that serves people whose net worth exceeds $100 million, many of whom give priority to longevity, she says. She has planned trips for clients to Blue Zones, where there are a large number of centenarians. On one in February, her company arranged a $250,000 weeklong stay for a family of three to Okinawa that included daily meditation, therapeutic massages and cooking classes, she says.

India says keeping up with a longevity-focused lifestyle requires more than one treatment and is cost-prohibitive for most people.

Doctors say travellers may be more likely to glean health benefits from focusing on a common vacation goal : just relaxing.

Dr. Karen Studer, a physician and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Loma Linda University Health says lowering your stress levels is linked to myriad short- and long-term health benefits.

“It may be what you’re getting from these expensive treatments is just a natural effect of going on vacation, decreasing stress, eating better and exercising more.”

When Having It All Means It’s All Falling Apart

How to get through those days when your professional and personal lives won’t quit

The latest trend in wellness travel is somewhere between a spa trip and a doctor’s appointment

Vitamins and ozone

What doctors say