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There has never been a better time to be healthy. Or so we're told. We have wearables that score our sleep, apps that track our movement, supplements for every gap in our diet, and an endless feed of content telling us exactly what to eat, when to move, and how to breathe. We have wellness coaches, wellness podcasts, wellness retreats, wellness influencers and a global industry worth trillions of pounds to back it all up.
And yet…we seem to be more unwell than ever. Rates of anxiety, loneliness and burnout continue to rise and young people are measurably less happy than previous generations. The US has just recorded its lowest-ever ranking in the World Happiness Report. So it’s quite clear that the wellness industry that is claiming to make us healthier, isn’t quite keeping its promises.
Our argument is a simple one: the wellness industry has not made us well. In many cases, it has actively made things worse. By creating problems to solve and selling us anxiety about our own bodies, wellness culture has turned our health into a commodity. And is charging us a hell of a lot of money for the privilege.
Wellness overwhelm: how over-optimisation made us more anxious, not less
A decade ago, "looking after yourself" meant getting enough sleep, eating your vegetables, and going outside. Now it means tracking your HRV, hitting your protein macro, taking your morning handful of supplements, monitoring your sleep score, reaching ten thousand steps, and staying on top of whatever the latest evidence says about cold exposure, red light therapy, and hydration.
The amount of information we're expected to absorb, act on, and optimise around has expanded enormously. Social media has accelerated this to the point of saturation. Instagram and TikTok serve you a relentless feed of sponsored morning routines, supplement hauls, before-and-after health transformations, and high-achievers who seem to have cracked the code of the human body in ways you haven't. The cumulative message (whether intentional or not) is that you are not doing enough and that if you dare to have a few glasses of wine, it might ruin the next 3 days of your life.
This is optimisation fatigue: the exhaustion that comes from the constant pressure to perform in wellness. This has become so much more prevalent that clinicians are now documenting it. Sleep trackers have generated a condition called “orthosomnia” which is genuine insomnia triggered by anxiety about your sleep score. The thing that was supposed to improve your sleep, is in fact disrupting it.
And the cost isn't just extra stress and cash. It's that all of this noise can override your intuition. When you're outsourcing every signal to an app or a supplement, you stop practising the skill of listening to yourself. You stop trusting what your body is telling you, and trusting a tracker to give the answers.
The wellness industry is booming. So why are we more unwell than ever?
The global wellness economy is valued at around £6.8 trillion and expected to hit nearly £10 trillion by 2029. This has doubled in a decade, growing at twice the rate of global GDP. To put that in context, the industry now larger than the global pharmaceutical market. By any commercial metric, wellness is doing extraordinarily well.
And yet, by human metrics, we’re not. The 2025 World Happiness Report found that loneliness among young adults has increased by an average of 0.22% per year for the past four decades. In 2023, 19% of young adults globally reported having no one they could count on for social support, which was a 39% increase since 2006. Americans under 30 rank 62nd in the world for happiness, despite living in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. Both the UK and America have seen a fall in happiness in the last year.
These numbers describe people who are most likely contributing to the wellness industry. They are buying the products, consuming the content, downloading the apps, yet they are more lonely, stressed, and disconnected. So even though there isn’t a proven link between toxic wellness culture and decreasing wellness, there seems to be a very likely connection.
A system that keeps you focused on your individual body metrics, your personal optimisation, your sleep score and step count, is not a system that's encouraging you to eat with other people, to rest without guilt, or to trust that you already know what you need.
Wellness washing: the art of selling you a problem, then selling you the solution
Wellness washing is what happens when the language and aesthetics of health are used to sell products that exploit our insecurities rather than address them. It works because wellness content has an authority problem. The line between expert and influencer is blurred. Non-experts speak with the confidence of clinicians, genuine researchers are presented alongside people who took a weekend course, and the overall impression is that you're getting evidence when you're mostly getting marketing.
Outside of social media, podcasts are also contributing to wellness washing and obsessive optimisation. The BBC's Global Misinformation Unit investigated a popular podcast and found an average of 14 harmful or unsubstantiated health claims per episode. Many influencers and speakers that the public trust are sponsored by brands to promote products, so they are incentivised to convince you to purchase. They build a pipeline to maximise their revenue: content builds trust, trust is converted into purchasing behaviour, and the audience pays the cost.
The wellness content ecosystem runs on a version of this model where credibility built on reach rather than expertise, monetised through product recommendations and affiliate deals, with the audience's health anxiety as the ‘hook’. The contrasting and often contradictory information that fills your feed isn't accidental. Confusion keeps people searching for answers. Searching for answers keeps people consuming content. Consuming content keeps people buying products. The industry depends on you never quite feeling like you've got it right and you need the next quick fix to feel even more ‘well’.
The wellness rebellion: people are pushing back
Despite this, we can see that something is shifting. The over-optimisation backlash has been named one of the top ten wellness trends for 2026 by the Global Wellness Summit - quite a notable thing for the wellness industry itself to be acknowledging. The backlash is against stressful and high-tech wellness, and instead optimising for connection and balance.
People are abandoning wearables in significant numbers: around a third of buyers stop using their device within six months, and half abandon them entirely. Content creators are beginning to call out the industry, and major brands like Nike and On are dropping performance language from their campaigns in favour of softness, presence and joy.
People are so fatigued by the over-saturation of wellness content and trends, that they’re pushing back. Comments from highly successful people claiming that having a few glasses of wine “ruined 3 days of their life’ are being called out across the internet for spreading the illusion that you need to be ‘always-on’ to be successful.
Instead, we’re starting to see a celebration of those who live life for the joy of it and not the longevity of it. The grind that people are starting to find aspirational is not the performative, competitive wellness grind - it's the consistent, unglamorous practice of looking after yourself simply.
Wellness is actually very simple
Humans are born with inbuilt trackers and markers. It’s called intuition and it is genuinely sophisticated. It is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of the human body learning to regulate itself - to signal hunger, fatigue, stress, the need for movement, the need for rest, the need for connection. Your body is continuously generating information about what it needs. It has been doing this your entire life.
Wellness optimising, at its worst, overrides this system. When you outsource your hunger to a macro tracker, your tiredness to a sleep score, your need for movement to a step count, you erode your ability to hear those internal signals. Over time, you stop trusting them. You replace lived experience with data, and the data becomes the authority. The result, for many people, is a disconnection from their own bodies.
The research on what actually keeps people well is not complicated. Social connection is consistently one of the strongest predictors of long-term health and happiness. Sharing meals with others is linked with wellbeing across every global region studied. Regular movement of any kind, restful sleep, whole food, time in nature, genuine human connection. These are not new findings - and they’re are also not particularly profitable ones…
Staying well is simple. Not always easy, but simple. Eat well, move well, rest well, and surround yourself with people who fill your cup. Your body is well equipped to tell you when any of these things is out of balance. The hardest part, in the current environment, is creating enough quietness to hear it.
Wellness products you probably don't need (and what to do instead)
This is not an argument against ever spending money on your health. It's an argument for spending it on things that actually work and being clear-eyed about the things that don't.
Sleep scoring. Wearable sleep trackers on measure proxies for sleep quality and you’ll likely be able to feel if you had a good sleep or not when you wake. The anxiety many people develop around their score is now clinically documented as orthosomnia. The replacement: ask yourself how rested you feel. If the answer is consistently bad, look at the basics (consistency of bedtime, caffeine, alcohol, screen time) before buying another device.
Green powders. These solve a nutritional gap that, for most people eating a reasonably varied diet, largely doesn't exist. The replacement: eat actual vegetables in actual colours. A varied diet does what a green powder claims to, more reliably and significantly more cheaply.
Protein supplements. The average person eating a balanced diet is not protein deficient. High-protein versions of everyday foods exists because the margin is better, not because you needed more protein. The replacement: eggs, fish, beans, chicken, dairy. Whole food protein sources come with fibre, micronutrients, and everything else your body needs alongside the protein.
Hydration and electrolytes. Electrolyte supplements were designed for endurance athletes losing significant sodium through sustained, intense exercise. They are now being marketed as a daily essential for normal functioning. For most people, food and water replenishes electrolytes adequately throughout the day. The replacement: drink water when you're thirsty. Eat food. Both of these contain electrolytes.
Step count. Ten thousand steps has no particular scientific foundation and more recent research suggests 7,000–8,000 steps is where the meaningful health benefits plateau. Fixating on a step number can turn movement into a stressful obligation rather than something that feels good. The replacement: move your body in whatever way feels good to you, regularly. Walk, swim, dance, garden. The best exercise is the one you'll actually do.
We're part of the wellness industry too
We want to address the irony here: Unplugged is a wellness business. We sell an experience and we believe benefits collective human wellbeing, heath and happiness.
But we'd like to think we're in it with a different argument. We're not selling you a hack, a protocol, or a shortcut. We're not telling you that you're broken and we have the fix. What we're selling is, if anything, the opposite of optimisation: three nights with your phone in a lockbox, nothing scheduled, no score to beat. Time with the people you love, time outside, time doing nothing. And being genuinely, productively bored in the way that only happens when there's nothing to reach for.
The research on what keeps people well consistently points to the same things: connection, rest, time in nature, good food, movement that feels good rather than obligatory. These are not products and you don't need to pay for them, you just need to create the space to actually have them.
We exist for the times when that space is hard to find at home. When the notifications and the general noise of modern life make it genuinely difficult to stop.