5 Reasons Jane Austen Was Totally A 19th Century Wellness Guru

If you’re interested in health and wellness, forget about GOOP or POOSH or whatever other celebrity-backed wellness cult you’re following, and turn your attention to, well, the 1800s. Yep, that’s right: Jane Austen, the author of classic novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, also happened to be a certified pre-pre-pre-Instagram wellness guru.

You might be asking yourself, “What the heck?” What could a sentimental, 19th-century writer possibly know about wellness that is relevant to the modern health nut? After all, folks in the 19th century apparently thought that inhaling smoke into your lungs would miraculously cure your asthma, and writers have rarely been, er, the epitome of health (we’re looking at you, Hemingway). So, you know… not much to be trusted there.

Jane Austen, however, was a very influential person in her time.

She was a cunning critic of pop culture and society, so it’s no surprise that she actually knew a great deal about wellness before “wellness” became the concept we know it as today.

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Just ask Bryan Kozlowski, the author of the book, “The Jane Austen Diet: Austen’s Secrets to Food, Health, and Incandescent Happiness.”  

The book explores the “food secrets of Pride and Prejudice” and the “fitness strategies of Sense and Sensibility,” and shows just how they’re super relevant today. One could very well say that Austen was ahead of her time.

As the book’s description reads, Austen sought wellness in the form of total body “bloom” (sounds good, right?) — eating like Lizzie Bennet (Pride and Prejudice‘s protagonist) and exercising like Emma Woodhouse (Emma‘s protagonist). In fact, Kozlowski notes that “Austen’s timeless body beliefs are more relevant, refreshing, and scientifically sensible now than ever before.” 

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One Amazon reviewer took a particular liking for the book:

“This…made me so happy and encouraged me to embrace life and health like Austen did, with simplicity and sense.”

It’s a tall order, but let’s dive in. 

To put it simply, Austen’s whole approach to life was centered around intuitive and sensible healthfulness: Walk, move, get out of the dang house. Throughout all of Austen’s works — her books, journals, and letters — “incandescently healthy” wellness is repeatedly mentioned, which is what Kozlowski focuses on in his own work.

 According to an interview with Apartment Therapy, Kozlowski says the following of his book:

“My gateway drug was the BBC’s ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ but the lingering attachment was Austen’s mysterious, motivational quality that draws all of us in—that kept me going throughout the years, and that’s how the book idea came about.”

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As he explains, Austen was known as a didactic novelist, or a writer who imparts moral instruction into their work — basically serving as a sort of motivational speaker through letters. As he explains, “She made a lot of counter-culture points in her novels about how to live better. You can focus on her morality or her values or her advice about love, but she’s also very strongly showing us a healthier alternative to life in general, which is clearly so important to her that it can’t possibly be a fluke.”

To Austen, wellness was all about holistic self care.

This meant that health was the cumulative result of various lifestyle approaches: sleep, getting in enough daily steps, cryotherapy, and spending time in nature. If you open any health magazine, or visit any health website, you’ll see these very same topics underscored. Of course, exercise and diet are the obvious go-tos, but health is about much more than just the physical body, and it seems Austen was well aware.

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“That’s why Austen is such an exquisite gatherer of so many lifestyle strategies that are all equally important, including your mind. For Austen to talk about mental health in ‘Mansfield Park’ was incredibly groundbreaking for her time,” Kozlowski notes.

Baller move, Jane. Now, let’s look at some of the specific ways she encouraged others to adopt a life of incandescent health and happiness.

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1. Jane Austen was all about functional medicine.

This is generally considered to be a technique of treating a disease by getting to the root cause of the issue, rather than throwing a band-aid onto the problem and hoping it gets better.  Today, many more people are turning to functional medicine practitioners, allowing us to get to the core of the problems we face and eliminate them rather than temporarily treating them. This can include stress reduction, herbal treatments, and nutrition upgrades.

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It’s important to note that there are many doctors who do not employ functional medicine, though scientific journals do cover its uses and tenets.

In Austen’s work, you’ll see characters waking up and going for morning walks in the sunlight. Even today, we generally consider early morning movement and exposure to light to be good for the body in all sorts of ways, from increasing vitamin D to producing endorphins. If you listen to your body, you’ll know when it needs light and movement — and good food!

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Imagine taking a walk with Jane Austen in the morning?

What would we talk about? If you’re ever in London, pop on over to some of these spots, where she (and her characters) once strolled.

2. Jane Austen was also big into getting enough sleep. 

This is one health goal that every human from every time period could probably agree upon, right?

But before we really understood the impact that poor sleep can have on the body — from cardiovascular disease and weight gain to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes mellitus — Austen was already a huge champion for good sleep hygiene.

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For one, it was clear she was big into rising early for walks — something that could easily be done back in the day because people weren’t hacking away at their computers in the dead of the night, working. As Kozlowski explains, “The calculation comes easy to Austen characters [that] morning + outdoors = feel good, because they lived in a world that respected a truth most of us have forgotten.”

In short, she respected the human body’s natural circadian rhythms, which is something the modern person often fights against. From staying out too late and overworking to staring at blue light well into the evening, our sleep schedules are often a total mess.

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3. Jane Austen was big into going for long walks. Everyday. 

If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us commute by bus, train, car, or subway.

When we do force ourselves into the gym, we do it for about an hour and call it quits. The pleasures of walking have fallen to the back burner for many of us, who think a few gym visits per week will stave off impending health issues.

Because walking doesn’t torch calories or work up a sweat like hot yoga or cycling, we often forget it’s there for us — anytime. Austen didn’t. She and her protagonists were huge walkers. Screw the horse-drawn carriage!

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And she was right:

“Walking is a simple health behavior that can reduce rates of chronic disease and ameliorate rising health care costs, with only a modest increase in the number of activity-related injuries,” says this study — which is just one of many. But it’s more than that 30 minutes of walking per day can dramatically improve mental health as well.

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Kozlowski notes that the Bennet sisters, in Austen’s work, walked back and forth between Longbourn to the village of Meryton, each week, which is a cool six to eight miles. 

4. Of course, Jane Austen was all about earthing, too.

She loved the outdoors and dedicated time to seeking fresh air and perspective. 

Austen and her characters were all about getting that fresh English air. And they’d do so not only by busting open the shutters, but by walking outside, in nature.

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Today, doctors have actually started prescribing nature to their patients. If that sounds a bit quacky, consider the science before you judge: The Journal of Inflammatory Research found that earthing — or being in nature — “produces intriguing effects on physiology and health. Such effects relate to inflammation, immune responses, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.”

Sounds pretty good to us.

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5. Jane Austen loved cryotherapy, too.

Hear us out.

Cryotherapy is essentially the use of shockingly cold temperatures to heal the body, which is usually reserved for wealthy health nuts in major cities these days. Instead of resorting to a modern cryo-chamber, as people do today, Austen was interested instead in taking a dip in that cold English ocean, which, even in summer, averages a soothing 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Cryotherapy has been shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-analgesic, and anti-oxidant effects on the body, says one journal. Just be sure to check with a doc before you pop into a chamber or throw yourself into the ocean too many times!

We can all thank Jane Austen for her brilliant and useful insights, which remain true to this day.

So, make like Sense and Sensibility, and get out for a morning walk tomorrow. Take a brisk shower. And hug a tree.