The Mandatory Wellness Initiative
Let me tell you about the time my office decided we were all secretly miserable, and the fix for that was a singing bowl. It started with an email from management. The subject line said "Exciting News for Employee Wellness!" with three exclamation points. I remember reading it at my desk and thinking, nobody asked us if we wanted this. The email said that starting soon, every single person in the department had to attend a weekly stress-reduction session. It was not optional. It said "mandatory" right there in bold letters, which felt like a strange word to put next to "wellness," but nobody in charge seemed to notice the irony. Our office is in the basement of an old building downtown. There are no windows down there, not even a small one up near the ceiling. The walls are a dull beige color that might have been white twenty years ago. The fluorescent lights hum all day long, a steady buzzing sound that gets into your head after a while. You stop noticing it after a few months of working there, but it never actually goes away. It is always there, humming, like a tiny mosquito you can never swat. The company hired a wellness coach named Diane. She showed up that first that day wearing loose linen pants and a scarf with little elephants on it. She carried a small metal bowl, the kind you hit with a little wooden stick, and it makes this long ringing sound that is supposed to help you relax. She set up in the middle of our cubicles, right between Bill's desk and the printer that always jams. "Everyone, please stop what you are doing," Diane said, smiling in a way that felt a little forced. "Close your eyes. Breathe. I want you to picture yourselves on a beach. Feel the warm sand under your feet. Hear the waves." I closed my eyes because I was told to. All I could hear was the lights humming and the printer in the corner making that grinding noise it makes before it jams again. There was no sand under my feet. There was gray carpet with a coffee stain near my chair that had been there since before I started working here. I tried to picture a beach, I really did, but all I could think about was the four emails sitting in my inbox marked urgent and the fact that my coffee was getting cold. Diane rang the bowl. The sound traveled through the room, this long, hollow ringing noise, and it was supposed to be calming, but after a few seconds it just got annoying. It is hard to explain, but there is something about forcing a sound to be relaxing that makes it the opposite. About five minutes in, I heard a snore. I opened one eye just a little and saw Bill, who sits two desks down from me, with his head tilted back and his mouth open. Bill works nights sometimes because his kid has some medical appointments, and I think his body just took the opportunity to actually rest for once. Diane did not look thrilled about it, but she did not say anything right away. She just kept talking in her soft voice about letting go of our tension. Then there was Karen. Karen sits near the supply closet, and she is the kind of person who needs to be doing something with her hands at all times. When Diane told us to sit in silence and find our inner calm, Karen could not do it. She started tapping her pen on her desk, first slowly, then faster, like the quiet was actually making her more anxious instead of less. Tap tap tap. It was loud in that silent room. I think the forced stillness just made everything worse for her, like her brain did not know what to do with no task in front of it. Diane stopped ringing the bowl and opened her eyes. She looked around the room with this expression like we were children who were not listening in class. "I am sensing a lot of resistance in this room," she said. "You all need to actually try. This only works if you commit to the process." Nobody said anything. What were we supposed to say? That our office has no windows? That the lights buzz nonstop? That our emails were piling up while we sat there pretending to be somewhere we were not? I thought about saying something, but I had seen what happened to people who pushed back on management initiatives before. It never went well for them. Then Diane said the thing that really got everyone's attention. She said that participation in the wellness program would be noted, and that a lack of real effort could be reflected in our yearly performance reviews. She said it so casually, like she was mentioning the weather, but the room went very quiet after that. Even Karen stopped tapping her pen. So we did it. Every single that day at ten in the morning, all of us sat at our desks with our eyes closed, pretending to breathe in ocean air that smelled like printer toner and old coffee. We pretended our basement was a beach. Twenty minutes, every week, while our actual work sat untouched and client emails sat unanswered. I remember one day I had a client call scheduled for ten fifteen, and I had to silently stare at the clock through one barely open eye, praying the session would end in time. It did not. I called the client back twelve minutes late and had to make up some excuse about a technical issue. After each session, Diane handed out a little paper survey. It asked things like "Did you feel more relaxed after this session?" and "Rate your stress level before and after, one to five stars." The instructions on the bottom of the survey said that if you did not rate the session highly, you would be scheduled for a one-on-one follow-up meeting with Diane to talk about what was holding you back from fully embracing self-care. I watched one coworker, a guy named Marcus, get called into one of those meetings after he gave an honest three-star review. He came back looking more stressed than before he went in. I learned fast. I always circled five stars. Every single time. I wrote things in the comment box like "I feel so refreshed" and "This has really helped my focus." None of it was true, but it kept me out of Diane's office, and it kept my name off whatever list they were quietly keeping of people who were not taking their wellness seriously. Somewhere along the way, I became known as the calmest person in the department. People started saying it to my face, like it was a compliment. "Linda, you always seem so zen about everything." I would just smile and say thank you. What I never told anyone is that most mornings, right before ten o'clock on weekdays, I go sit in the bathroom stall farthest from the door. I sit there with the fan running so I cannot hear the bowl ring through the wall. I check my phone, I breathe for real, and I wait until I think it is safe to come back out. Then I walk back to my desk, sit down, and act like I just had the most peaceful twenty minutes of my week. That is the real secret to my calm. It has nothing to do with beaches or singing bowls. It is just a bathroom stall and a fan loud enough to drown out the sound of forced relaxation.