The wellness industry is worth trillions. Burnout among women is still high.
Last night, Talia and Jess were at Holt Renfrew in a room full of founders, leaders, and everyday women — all there for one conversation:
What resilience actually means.
What it actually costs.
And why we keep getting it wrong.
The conversation was kicked off by the GOAT Joanna Griffiths, Founder & President of Knix, KT by Knix, and MNTD — with the kind of candour that made the room go quiet.
Co-moderated by Carolyn Wright, Chief Merchant at Holt Renfrew, and Jessica Snow, the panel brought in:
Chivon John (well-being practitioner)
Ciara Foy (hormone nutritionist)
Jocelyn Pepe (brain health and cognitive performance consultant)
The through line
We are still asking women to solve structural problems with personal optimization.
There is a version of wellness that has become exhausting.
Close your rings.
Optimize your sleep.
Track your hormones.
Fix your morning routine.
Drink the water.
Take the supplement.
Do the breathwork.
Be resilient.
At some point, the thing that was supposed to help us recover became another thing to perform.
That was the tension underneath the entire conversation —
Not whether well-being matters.
It does.
But whether wellness culture has quietly handed women a to-do list and called it a solution.
On resilience
Chivon John reframed it in a way that stuck with us:
Resilience is not bouncing back quickly.
It is not taking yourself off your own to-do list during hard seasons.
That sounds simple.
It is not.
Not when you are leading a team, building a company, raising kids, managing a household, supporting a partner, helping a parent, and still trying to hold it together in every room you walk into.
Resilience is not endless capacity.
It is capacity that gets maintained.
On the brain
Jocelyn Pepe made the biological case.
When psychological stress compounds, the brain conserves energy.
It pulls away from executive function — planning, decision-making, focus — and moves toward self-preservation.
You are not suddenly bad at your job.
Your brain is protecting the system.
That reframe matters.
Because most of us interpret stress symptoms as personal failure.
Indecision reads as weak leadership.
Exhaustion reads as inability.
But the brain under chronic stress is not underperforming.
It is triaging.
On the body
Ciara Foy brought it back to basics — and not in a trend-cycle way.
Sleep.
Blood sugar.
Protein.
Muscle mass.
Hormones.
Infrastructure, not aesthetics.
Especially relevant for women over 35, where perimenopause, cortisol, and glucose regulation start to interact differently.
The body becomes less forgiving.
And yet many of us are still operating like we are 25 —
Sleeping badly.
Skipping meals.
Under-eating protein.
And wondering why clarity disappears by 3 p.m.
Performance has inputs.
The part the wellness industry got wrong
The wellness industry is worth trillions.
Burnout among women is still high.
If the answer were more discipline, more tracking, more products —
The numbers would look different.
Habits matter.
But when wellness becomes entirely self-reliant, it ignores the larger conditions:
Workload.
Caregiving.
Financial pressure.
Lack of flexibility.
Systems that extract more than they restore.
Burnout gets individualized.
The structure gets away clean.
The BFT Take
This is not about doing more.
It is about:
Noticing earlier.
Supporting the system.
Stopping the confusion between depletion and ambition.
Joanna Griffiths reminded us that success does not make you immune to breaking.
Chivon reminded us that burnout can look completely functional.
Ciara reminded us that the body is the operating system.
Jocelyn reminded us that the brain needs space before it can perform.
If there is one thing to take from the night, it is not a habit.
It is a question — or three:
What do I need?
What am I overriding?
What is this costing me?
Because high performance without recovery is not strength.
It is debt.
And eventually, the body collects.
That’s the business of womanhood.
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