Embodied well-being: Energy, exhaustion, and bodily difference among Danish schoolchildren

The well-being of children and adolescents is debated globally, and school settings constitute important sites in which well-being is lived and managed. In contemporary well-being debates, schoolchildren's embodied experiences receive little attention, and well-being is often treated as synonymous with mental health. In this study, we explore and conceptualize embodied well-being in everyday school settings. While Danish media discussed a proclaimed 'well-being crisis' and the government established an expert commission targeting children and young people's well-being, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish public primary and lower secondary school. Between February and June 2025, we followed and observed three classes (2nd, 4th, and 7th grade) for 60 days, and pupils and teachers were interviewed in focus groups. Staying close to pupil perspectives, we propose 'exhaustion' as a conceptual lens that, in dialectical relationships with 'energy', points to sensed, embodied dimensions of their fluctuating everyday experiences of well-being. We characterize exhaustion as a condition in which the mental, physical and social intertwine, manifesting differently in different bodies and situations, and show how movement narratives are central to how children and teachers understand and manage exhaustion. Our analysis is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the embodied 'I can' and a critical phenomenological attention to a socially conditioned 'I cannot'. These concepts illuminate how well-being and ill-being are shaped and articulated through embodied abilities and disabilities. Overall, we argue that the environment and structure of the school day contribute to making exhaustion a recurring, socially shared mode of being-in-the-world for Danish schoolchildren.