MAIS 602

What We Notice, What We Feel, and What We Normalize: A Study of Wellness Influencers and the Value Systems They Circulate

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Research Question

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How do social media wellness influencers in North America use language, imagery, and storytelling to normalize particular value systems within the wellness industry?

 

Abstract

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This research explores how wellness influencers across platforms like Instagram and TikTok shape everyday understandings of what it means to be well. Their posts feel casual and authentic on the surface, yet the stories they tell, the images they curate, and the language they repeat carry subtle pressure to live, think, and behave in particular ways. This research question examines how wellness posts normalize value systems like discipline, self-reliance, consumerism, and constant self-improvement, which are often presented by the wellness industry as forms of empowerment (Badr, n.d.). Wellness content spreads quickly and emotionally, so people often feel its impact before they understand its meaning. Because of this, the study uses methods focus on  to affect, atmosphere, and the deeper meanings that sit beneath curated simplicity (Marks, 2018).

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The research is grounded in interdisciplinary methodologies that allow for creativity, curiosity, and emotional awareness. Methods such as imaging (Coleman, 2018), Figurationing (Dawney, 2018), rescaling (Lobato, 2018), and issue crawling (Rogers, 2018) help highlight how wellness messages move across individual, social, and cultural levels. These approaches allow space to notice how feelings like calm, envy, guilt, and aspiration arise in the first moments of scrolling, and how those early emotional responses quietly reinforce ideas about control, balance, and personal responsibility (Dawney, 2018; Moran, 2000). A critical discourse guides the entire project by drawing attention to the power dynamics within wellness narratives (Foucault, 1998). By tracing the stories that influencers tell and the emotional worlds they create, this question hopes to better understand how wellness has become both a personal project and a cultural expectation. The insights gained can help us see how everyday digital spaces shape our beliefs about health, worth, and the good life.

 

Proposal

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Over the past decade, the wellness industry has quietly intertwined itself into the fabric of everyday life. It shows up in the food we eat, the routines we create, the habits we track, and the products we purchase to become healthier, calmer, more balanced versions of ourselves (McKinsey & Company, 2025). Much of this influence spreads through social media, where wellness influencers present their content as personal stories and helpful advice rather than marketing or ideology. Yet these everyday moments do more than entertain. They shape how people come to think about health, self-worth, success, and control (Ashley, 2016).

My interest in this topic did not begin with theory. In fact, during the first week of this course it took me a full five days of thinking and second-guessing to figure out what actually mattered to me and what I wanted to explore. It began with noticing how everyday wellness content made me feel. Calm one moment, guilty the next, inspired, annoyed, pressured, or strangely motivated to do more, be more, and perfect more. Over time, I realized those feelings were not mine alone. Many people quietly absorb these messages without ever naming the ideological world attached to them (Turner & Levin, 2025). Wellness figures operate like cultural characters that teach us what a good life should look like and what kind of person we should be (Dawney, 2018). Influencers become guides, even if we never invited them to be.

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Because wellness content works emotionally and subtly, the methods I chose needed to be creative and sensitive to feeling, atmosphere, and the layers we often miss. They also needed to help me understand the bigger stories at play, the value systems beneath the surface, and how power moves through language and images (Foucault, 1998). My thinking evolved as I worked through phenomenology, discourse, narrative theory, and methods like figurationing, imaging, rescaling, and issue crawling.

This research asks one central question. How do wellness influencers in North America use language, imagery, and storytelling to normalize particular value systems within the wellness industry?

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To answer this, the question will examine the emotional tone of wellness posts, the visual world they create, the stories they tell about themselves, and the ideological work those stories perform. This proposal outlines the methodological approach, the methods I will use, ethical considerations, and the limits of analyzing public social media content.

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Methodology

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Critical Discourse Analysis as the Foundation

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Although I researched many methodologies, the one that I continually came back to was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). My earlier work in September showed me how much language does behind the scenes. Statements like “you are your only limit” or “discipline is self-love” seem harmless, but they quietly reproduce neoliberal values by blending empowerment with pressure (Jacobsson, 2019). CDA helps reveal these hidden layers. It unpacks how influencers frame wellness as a personal responsibility and how systemic pressures are disguised as individual choice (Phelan & Glackin, 2013).

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CDA is flexible because it allows me to use emotional and visual methods while still keeping attention on power, ideology, and meaning (Tenorio, 2011). It does not limit me to words alone. It allows me to examine images, stories, and emotional cues as part of a broader discourse that shapes norms and behaviour (Foucault, 1998).

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Hermeneutic and Phenomenological Influence

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Phenomenology, as Moran (2000) explains, encourages us to slow down and pay attention to experience before jumping into interpretation. This approach connects with me because that is exactly how I encounter wellness content. I often feel something immediately when scrolling; calm, pressure, envy, motivation, or guilt, long before I can put words to why. That first emotional reaction matters, and phenomenology gives me a way to take it seriously rather than treating it as something to overlook or rush past.

Hermeneutics shapes how I make sense of those experiences by reminding me that understanding is always shaped through language, context, and history (Regan, 2012). I cannot approach these posts as a neutral observer bring my own background, values, and experiences into everything I see. Rather than pretending to be objective, hermeneutics keeps me honest about how my positionality influences what I notice, how I interpret it, and the meanings I draw from the material.

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Why an Interdisciplinary Approach Matters

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Wellness is not only physical. It is emotional, cultural, psychological, economic, and aesthetic. It cannot be understood through one lens alone (McKinsey & Company, 2025). Influencer content touches body image, productivity, identity, gender, class, and aspiration. It draws from psychology, marketing, sociology, media studies, and feminist critique. The interdisciplinary methods from the Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods helped me see that the most revealing insights often appear in the space between ideas (Coleman & Ringrose, 2018).

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What became clear as I moved through the course is that wellness isn’t only about health or self-care. It’s a mix of emotions, culture, money, identity, social expectations, marketing, and personal aspiration all happening at the same time (McKinsey & Company, 2025). No single discipline can fully capture this complexity. Psychology might explain behaviour and motivation, but it says little about the algorithms that make certain images visible. Sociology can speak to inequality and social norms, but it cannot explain the marketing strategies used in wellness branding. A feminist critique can unpack power and gender, yet it may overlook the economic forces driving content creation.

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Interdisciplinary work allows these perspectives to lean on each other. Phenomenology helped me understand the emotional feel of wellness spaces. Figurationing helped me see recurring characters such as girl bosses, healers and minimalists. Rescaling helped me see how what looks like individual choice is often shaped by much larger social and structural forces. Issue crawling showed how ideas travel, pick up speed, and sometimes shift meaning across platforms. Together, these methodologies and methods created a fuller picture than any one approach could offer.

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This interdisciplinarity mirrors the wellness world itself. Wellness culture blends advice, performance, self-help and aspiration into something that looks seamless on the surface but is actually full of a lot of tensions. Influencer content often hides the labour, cost, and emotional burden required to maintain an aesthetic of ‘effortless’ wellbeing (McKinsey & Company, 2025). Looking at wellness from different angles lets us see that it is not just about health. It’s also about selling things, teaching people how to live, and shaping how people feel; all happening at the same time.

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Interdisciplinary methods also remind me that knowledge is not produced in isolated boxes. Insight comes from looking outside the box and noticing contradictions. It’s at the intersection of power and performance, identity and commerce, and aspiration and reality that the most meaningful insights begin to emerge.

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Methods

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Imaging looks at visuals not as distant objects to decode, but as experiences that carry feeling, atmosphere, and meaning (Coleman, 2018). This approach asks what images feel like as much as what they show. Within wellness content, soft lighting, neutral palettes, the “clean girl” aesthetic, smoothie bowls, folded towels, and carefully staged morning routines function as more than surface visuals. They act as cultural signals that communicate control, balance, and effortlessness. Using imaging, I will gather a collection of influencer posts and pay close attention to the repetition of tones, colours, poses, and moods that appear across accounts. The visual mapping grid I will develop to organize my research methods will help clarify how repeat aesthetic patterns operate emotionally as well as symbolically. Imaging will allow me to not only notice what is displayed, but to the affective atmosphere being produced and circulated through these images (Coleman, 2018).

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Figurationing further reshaped how I understand wellness content. Rather than viewing influencers as isolated individuals, this method highlights how recognizable figures operate as cultural characters carrying power, history, and expectation (Dawney, 2018). Figures such as the mindful minimalist, the clean girl, or the fit mom circulate widely across wellness spaces and offer models of who to be and how to live. Through figurationing, I will trace the repetition of these figures across multiple influencers and examine how they shape ideas of identity and aspiration. These characters quietly do important norm-setting work, defining what counts as healthy, disciplined, or successful within wellness culture.

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Rescaling provides a way to move between personal experience, social interaction, and broader cultural ideology to understand how wellness discourse operates across multiple levels. Lobato (2018) describes rescaling as a method for tracing how ideas travel across layers of meaning. In this study, rescaling will allow me to examine how a single post can function differently depending on the lens through which it is viewed. I will move between the personal level, considering how viewers emotionally respond to wellness content; the social level, where posts contribute to comparison, aspiration, and validation; and the cultural level, where these images reinforce neoliberal ideas of personal responsibility (Jacobsson, 2019). This shifting perspective helps reveal how private emotional responses are connected to broader public ideologies.

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Issue crawling complements these approaches by mapping how wellness narratives circulate across platforms. Rogers (2018) describes issue crawling as the process of tracing connections between influencers, brands, hashtags, and websites to see which narratives gain popularity and how they spread. Using this method, I will identify key sources of popular storylines, and the pathways through which wellness values move across digital spaces. Together, imaging, figurationing, rescaling, and issue crawling provide a layered way of analyzing wellness discourse, allowing me to explore not only what is communicated, but how cultural figures, social interactions, and digital networks work together to normalize particular value systems within the wellness industry (Coleman, 2018; Dawney, 2018; Lobato, 2018; Rogers, 2018).

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Ethical Considerations

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The Tri-Agency Framework emphasizes responsibility, transparency, and accountability in research (Canadian Institutes of Health Research et al., 2016). Even though this project uses publicly available content, ethical concerns still matter. Influencers create posts for followers, not for researchers, and many of these posts include vulnerability, emotion, and personal experiences. Being posted for all to see does not automatically mean fair game, especially when identity, body image, or mental health is involved. Because of this, I will avoid using private or locked accounts, I will not identify individuals unless there is a clear and necessary reason to do so, I will focus on patterns rather than personal critique, and I will stay mindful of the influence I have when interpreting and representing others’ stories through academic analysis.

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Ethics, as Bull et al. (2020) note, is an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time requrement, which feels especially true in digital research. Studying wellness content means navigating both performance and real emotion at the same time. People share pieces of their lives online without expecting those pieces to become academic data, and that reality calls for care. This work therefore requires balancing the value of studying public discourse with respect for the people whose lives and emotions appear within it.

There is also the ethical risk of reproducing harm while attempting to critique it. Narratives that promote discipline, scarcity, or perfection can be unintentionally reinforced simply by repeating or closely examining them (Ajana, 2017). This means that how I write about these messages matters just as much as what I say about them.

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Ethical challenges also come from the methods themselves. The methodologies and methods in this study, such as phenomenology, imaging, figurationing, and issue crawling place automatic authority in the researcher’s hands. With that authority comes the risk of reading too much into the material, projecting my own assumptions, or labelling intentions that cannot be confirmed. These methods call for humility and reflexivity, including an openness to what digital traces cannot reveal and a commitment to avoiding assumptions or “diagnoses” about influencers or audiences based on curated content.

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Using creative methods adds extra responsibility to how the research is carried out. Approaches that focus on emotion and lived experience can make it easy to project our own views onto the material. I therefore need to regularly ask whether my interpretations are grounded in the material itself or shaped by my own assumptions. This kind of ongoing self-questioning is essential to maintaining ethical integrity in the research.

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Ultimately, ethical digital research means treating people and their public posts with care and respect. It also means recognizing that interpretation has real impacts, and making sure the methods used deepen understanding rather than contribute to misrepresentation.

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Limitations

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This research has natural limits. Social media trends shift rapidly and algorithm’s shape what becomes visible and what remains hidden (Whitley & Massey, 2018). I bring my own experiences, biases, and feelings to the analysis. Influencers themselves also represent only a small part of the wellness culture, meaning their content cannot reflect the full range of wellness experiences. In addition, focusing on North America limits opportunities for broader cross-cultural comparison.

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There are also limitations connected to the methodologies themselves. Methodologies like phenomenology and hermeneutics rely on subjective judgment (Moran, 2000; Regan, 2012). What I notice (or fail to notice) will ultimately shape the analysis. Figurationing, imaging, and issue crawling are useful, but they are also messy, overlapping, and sometimes difficult to keep separate in practice. None of these methods promise a complete picture; they offer angles, not totality.

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Another limitation comes from the platform itself. Social media content is curated and performative and created with an audience in mind. What people post often reflects aspiration rather than lived reality, so the data is always slightly theatrical (McKinsey & Company, 2025). That ‘performance’ limits what can be said about genuine/meaningful behaviour.

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Reflection on the Development of My Research Question

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My research question unfolded gradually as I moved through the course. In my earliest thinking, I focused on consumer choice, freedom, and neoliberalism. I knew I was interested in how social media shapes identity, but I had not yet found the right angle from which to explore that interest.

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Unit by unit, the question deepened. I began noticing how wellness narratives carry emotion and ideology, how certain ways of knowing are privileged, and how wellness often reinforces Western, individualized values (Jacobsson, 2019). Phenomenology helped me slow down and notice how things feel before trying to explain them (Moran, 2000). Hermeneutics reminded me that understanding is never neutral but always shaped by context, language, and position (Regan, 2012). Critical Discourse Analysis gave me the language to name the power structures I had noticed beneath the surface all along. (Foucault, 1998).

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By the end of the course, figurationing gave me language for the recurring characters I kept seeing in wellness content (Dawney, 2018), imaging helped me focus on emotion and atmosphere (Coleman, 2018), rescaling widened my view to connect personal experience with broader cultural ideology (Lobato, 2018), and issue crawling showed me how ideas spread and gain popularity across platforms (Rogers, 2018). My question shifted from focusing mainly on neoliberal values to exploring the stories, images, and emotions that shape wellness more broadly.

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What surprised me most was how messy the 14 weeks felt. The question never fully settled, and it honestly may still not be completely ready for research yet. The question twisted and pulled in different directions, at times feeling too broad, at other times too vague. I came to realize that this research does not, and should not, fit neatly within one method. Instead, it needs to draw from several approaches, depending on what the material calls for.

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For this reason, I have deliberately referred to this as my Week 14 research question rather than calling it ‘final’. The most important lesson I take from this course is that research questions are not fixed, but working guides that change as learning deepens. Even as I write this proposal, the question is still shifting as new insights emerge. This openness isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength, showing that the research stays reflective and responsive as it develops.

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The best way I can describe this process is through the metaphor I kept returning to throughout the course: tools in a toolbox, or more specifically, an IKEA build. Research, like flat-pack furniture, comes with instructions, tools, and pieces, but not all of them are necessary for the final product. Some steps are optional. Some tools can be swapped out. Sometimes a step is intentionally skipped, maybe you choose not to attach the backing or anchor the shelf to the wall. You still end up with something functional and meaningful, just not identical to the picture on the box.

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Of course, two people can start with the same kit and still arrive at different outcomes. A shelf handle might be installed upside down, yet the shelf still works. That “wrong but functional” result captures something important about this kind of research. We work with what we have, we decide what matters, and we make choices shaped by curiosity, theory, and experience.

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The question I’m working with now feels right for the work I want to do. It’s driven by curiosity, emotion, and a desire to look closely at things that seem ordinary but have a lot of influence. It also recognizes that researching wellness requires flexibility and comfort with things not being perfect (Bull et al, 2020). In many ways, this project reflects how I move through the world day to day, adapting, changing, and learning as I go.