Health-maxxing: Health Anxiety in the Digital Cultures of Optimisation

This plenary explores how digital and social media environments, self-tracking technologies and contemporary longevity discourses are reshaping expectations of health and generating new forms of health-related anxiety. While access to health information and monitoring technologies can enhance health literacy, agency and a sense of control, it can also intensify bodily surveillance, heighten sensitivity to perceived abnormalities and, through the new ways of ‘health-maxxing ‘, establish increasingly demanding ideals of what it means to be healthy.

Drawing on critical perspectives on health anxiety, self-surveillance, bio-morality and the wellness syndrome, the talk examines how health optimisation becomes intertwined with individual responsibility, identity and moral worth. Online wellness communities and dietary practices offer belonging, shared narratives and reassurance, yet may also reinforce restrictive norms, anxieties about bodily purity and self-blame. These processes are further complicated by inequalities in access to digital technologies, health resources and the social conditions necessary to pursue the ideal of an optimised life.

Ultimately, the plenary asks whether the contemporary promise of greater control over our bodies and longer, healthier lives may also be producing new forms of uncertainty and vulnerability. It argues that we need to move beyond understanding health anxiety solely as an individual's excessive concern about illness and consider how it is culturally and socially produced within environments that make health increasingly visible, measurable and morally charged. In a world where almost everything can be maximised, the new anxiety may be that we are never healthy enough.

Márta Csabai is a clinical and health psychologist, a professor at the Institute of Psychology at the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, and a leading figure in Hungarian health psychology. Over the past 30 years, she has developed several educational programmes for psychologists and health professionals in Hungary. She has received scholarships in London, Rome, and Melbourne and has participated in and led various research projects. She is a regular visiting lecturer at LUMSA University in Rome. In addition to authoring and editing more than 20 books in Hungarian and English, she serves on several journal editorial boards. Several of her books have won Hungarian and international awards. Her latest monograph, "Health Anxiety and the Quest for Safety: Interdisciplinary and Critical Perspectives", published by Routledge in the Critical Approaches to Health series, is a Knowledge Unlatched Select 2026 awardee. Márta is a founder and active collaborator of the Foundation for Women in Healthcare. Her research focuses on the critical social-psychological and clinical aspects of illnesses and care; the social and cultural determinants of well-being; and conflict management in healthcare.

Email: csabai.marta@kre.hu.