MIAMI—The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) released its annual Future of Wellness report, the longest-running, most detailed (130-page) forecast of what will make waves in health and wellness in the year ahead.
In last year’s report, it was noted that the wellness market was fast becoming a place of contradictory mindsets. A dramatically more high-tech, medical, hyper-optimizing and expensive market was emerging (“hardcare”). At the same time, there is a sharpening desire for much simpler, low-tech, less relentlessly self-optimizing and affordable wellness, where social and emotional wellbeing matter most (“softcare”).
The Analog Wellness trend illustrates the demand for slower, low-tech lives. With the online world’s manipulations, disinformation campaigns, and general brain and culture “rotting,” having suddenly gone too far, GWS predicts 2025 is the year more people aggressively both log off and “analog on”: seizing retro, pre-digital—even pre-industrial—tech, hobbies and experiences…as wellness, and in wellness. The digital disconnection and analog living trends will shake up everything from travel to government policy to home design. The Sauna Reimagined trend investigates the boom in, and reinvention of, one of the most lo-fi, ancient and social types of wellness. The Wellness on the Line trend, about the explosion of creative wellness experiences on cruises and rail journeys, is powered by the hunger for slower, more mindful travel.
Nothing captures hyper-optimized wellness like the Augmented Biology trend, detailing how a new fusion of body and machine (once the stuff of science fiction) is pushing the potential of people’s brains and bodies to superhuman levels. The Supplement Paradox explores new science-grounded and high-tech directions in the vast supplement market, which look to help the major trust issues plaguing that industry.
The Teen Wellness Trend
Wellness will tackle big problems. If spas and wellness destinations have always treated teens as a sidenote, or in infantilizing ways, the Teen Wellness trend explores an industry finally getting serious about their wellbeing, given the skyrocketing teen mental health crisis. The Wellness Tackles Addiction trend identifies a new wellness category poised to further topple taboos around addiction and covers everything from new wellness-focused packaged goods brands targeting harm reduction, to medical treatment centers programming worthy of a five-star wellness resort, to new sober-curious retreats.
The spa and wellness industries have been villains in the global water crisis, but the Watershed Wellness trend reveals how more wellness destinations will preserve and renew water supplies. Longevity Redefines Work explores the radical changes that are coming to work and workplaces as the number of younger workers decreases and the over-65 workforce explodes, and how the wellness industry will be a key player in helping employees work longer and better.
Finally, The Middle East’s Wellness Ambitions explores something most people might have thought impossible: the emergence of the region as a wellness leader, driven by wellness-focused national “vision” plans in GCC nations, and huge investments in cutting-edge preventative healthcare and sustainability, vast wellness tourism destinations, and sports-meet-wellness concepts.
Purchase the full report here.
