Hear the Conversation | Get the Book
The “optimized” life has become a high-maintenance performance. In an age when self-knowledge is increasingly outsourced to wristbands and apps, Dr. Angela Petersen’s The Wellness Glitch: Remembering What It Really Means to Be Well arrives as both diagnosis and rebuke.
A culture enthralled by metrics has come to treat health as a competitive sport, complete with dashboards, streaks, and a quiet sense of failure when the numbers refuse to cooperate. We track our sleep with religious devotion, scrutinize our blood sugar like day traders watching a volatile market, and yet, Dr. Petersen notes, we feel exhausted, inflamed, and strangely unwell. The puzzle, she argues, is not that we are careless. It is that we are obedient to the wrong system.
Dr. Petersen is a clinician whose work sits uneasily between conventional medicine and its more experimental offshoots. She frames modern wellness as a software problem. The glitch is structural. The prevailing medical model, she suggests, excels at crisis intervention but falters when confronted with chronic malaise. She describes it as a loop that treats symptoms as isolated bugs rather than expressions of a deeper malfunction. Patients cycle through prescriptions and protocols, improving just enough to remain functional, but rarely enough to feel whole.
At the center of Dr. Petersen’s argument is inflammation. In her telling, it is the common denominator behind conditions as varied as cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and metabolic disorder. Cholesterol, long cast as the villain of the piece, is reimagined as a secondary character. Not the arsonist, but the firefighter, dispatched to patch damage caused by chronically inflamed vessels. The true threat, Dr. Petersen insists, is the metabolic chaos we have normalized, especially the relentless spikes of blood sugar that stiffen arteries and quietly erode health.
What makes The Wellness Glitch distinctive is its resistance to accumulation. Petersen does not offer another checklist of supplements or a baroque morning routine. Instead, she practices subtraction. She urges readers to rediscover basic biological cues. Eat whole foods. Replace processed substitutes. Seek unfiltered morning sunlight. These gestures are less about optimization than about remembering how bodies evolved to function.
The book’s most persuasive passages, however, move beyond physiology. Dr. Petersen treats loneliness not as a social inconvenience but as a medical condition. She describes a society in which people can live among millions and still lack meaningful human contact, a deprivation she links to anxiety, hormonal imbalance, and a generalized sense of depletion. Wellness, in her view, is inseparable from purpose and participation. A healthy body requires conversation, responsibility, and a reason to get up in the morning that cannot be quantified by an app.
In The Wellness Glitch, Dr. Petersen has sketched a vision of health that is quietly radical. Healing becomes a convergence of science, community, and a reverence for nature. The question she leaves lingering is not how long we might live, but how much vitality we have left to extend beyond ourselves. In Dr. Angela Petersen’s formulation, being well is not merely the absence of disease. It is the capacity to be present, engaged, and, on our better days, generous.