Making waves
A new report looks at global wellness trends.
If you are involved in any aspect of the wellness industry, it might be worth your while investing US $100 in a recently-published report.
The Future of Wellness: 2025 Trends, published by the Global Wellness Summit (GWS), provides a detailed 130-page forecast of the major trends that will make waves in health and wellness in the year ahead.
Not all of the report’s content will relate directly to your venue or line of work of course, but if it only sets off one lightbulb moment in your head that gives you an idea you hadn’t thought of, or something that will keep you ahead of the competition, it will have been worth it.
Issues
Inside the report, you can learn how “analog wellness” (a widespread logging off and seizing of pre-digital experiences) is set to expand; how saunas will be reimagined; and how the wellness world can tackle serious issues like addiction, teen wellness, the global water crisis, and the ageing workforce.
In addition, the report highlights the emergence of the Middle East as a wellness leader, driven by wellness-focused national vision plans and huge investments in cutting-edge preventative healthcare and sustainability, vast wellness tourism destinations, and sports-meet-wellness concepts.
So what are some of the top wellness trends to be mindful of? Beth McGroarty, Research Director at GWS and Executive Editor of the report, highlights a few…
A CONTRADICTORY MARKET
In last year’s report, the GWS noted that the wellness market was fast becoming a place of contradictory mindsets. A dramatically more high-tech, medical, hyper-optimising and expensive market was emerging, yet at the same time, there was a sharpening desire for much simpler, low-tech, less relentless and more affordable wellness, where social and emotional wellbeing matter most. GWS said these polarities would only widen, and confirm that that’s the case in the 2025 report.
ANALOG WELLNESS
The demand for slower, low-tech lives continues. With the online world’s manipulations, disinformation campaigns and general brain and culture “rotting” having gone too far for many, 2025 will see more people aggressively “log off” to pursue retro, pre-digital tech pastimes and experiences, particularly in wellness.
THE SAUNA REIMAGINED
The report investigates the boom in, and reinvention of, one of the most lo-fi, ancient and social types of wellness.
WELLNESS TRAVEL
A look at the explosion of creative wellness experiences on cruises and rail journeys, powered by the hunger for slower, more mindful travel.
AUGMENTED BIOLOGY
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 MIDDLE EAST
The region has major wellness ambitions, and is emerging as a wellness leader, driven by focused national plans, especially in Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries.
SOCIAL ISSUES
If spas and wellness destinations have always treated teens as a sidenote, 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 such topics as new wellness-focused packaged goods brands targeting harm reduction, medical treatment centre programming worthy of a five-star wellness resort; and new sober-curious retreats.
The spa and wellness industries have often been seen as villains in the global water crisis, but the Watershed Wellness trend reveals how more wellness destinations will preserve and renew our water supplies. The Longevity Redefines Work section meanwhile 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.
PHOTOS: Global Wellness Summit, Yorgos Ntrahas, Huum, Unsplash, Jackmac34, Pixabay, True Naked Yoga, 7 Lemons Fuerteventura
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