The Wellness Industry Doesn’t Want You To Be Well 

Did you know that ten minutes of lymphatic drainage every morning will, in the words of the wellness influencer Olympia Anley, ‘push the lymph in an upward direction of the nodes that can then detox your toxins’? 

All this time and not once have I thought to vibrate myself towards wellness. My poor nodes. My poor lymph. I’m not sure which of them has been detoxing the toxins, or what the toxins are, or whether my body might actually need those toxins, but I’m persuaded the habit must work. This is just one among the many rituals which Olympia Anley preaches about, enticingly promising the results will ‘send a normie into a coma.’ 

Consider me comatose. 

Lately my social feeds have offered up a veritable buffet of wellness imperatives. Tape your mouth shut every night with surgical adhesive before you sleep for ‘optimal nasal oxygenation’. Drink warm lemon water first thing in the morning, and if you’re really brave, a shot of apple cider vinegar for even ‘greater hydration’. Cut your calories and track every micro and macro. In fact, ‘here are five apps that can do it for you!’ – a video reassured me just today.

At age twenty-two, I might be in my physical prime, yet I find myself preoccupied with my own health. I worry about things I didn’t know it was possible to worry about: the functionality of my gut; the strength of my hair follicles; what a deficit or surplus of this, that, or the other might mean for my ‘ageing’ body. 

But this isn’t a story about my emerging hypochondria: it’s about the $6.8 trillion dollar wellness industry that engineered it. What presents as an industry that champions self-care, is simultaneously one powered by algorithmic greed, unverified health advice, and a business model that depends on keeping us perpetually anxious about our own health.

It’s easy to see why wellness content is so seductive. It taps into a fundamentally good impulse: the desire to feel energised and healthy. But the culture I found myself embedded within wasn’t teaching me how to live comfortably within my body; it was selling me the indefinite prospect of a better body.

This is the industry’s raison d’être. It seeks not to close the gap between where one’s health is and where it could be, but rather to keep that gap permanently open for improvement. A consumer who completes the great task of being ‘well’ is, after all, a consumer who stops paying. 

Sleep better, eat cleaner, live longer

Dr Charlotte Ord is a counselling psychologist specialising in body image, weight and eating. She also has eighty thousand Instagram followers of her own. When we spoke, she described a shift she’d been observing in her practice: wellness, she said, was moving from simply being about feeling better to being about optimisation. 

Before I’ve even decided whether I feel rested, the smart ‘oura’ ring on my finger has already scored my sleep. That’s the shift that Ord is describing exemplified in miniature. Feeling better has a natural baseline. Optimisation, by very definition, does not. You can always sleep better, eat cleaner, track your biometric data with greater granular precision. 

Ord doesn’t dismiss the technology outright; used well, she says, it offers real insight. But she is clear that the process of rigorous tracking can affect the very bodily instincts it claims to serve. For some, trust in basic cues like hunger or tiredness begins to be outsourced to apps, or the advice of a stranger on a screen. As Ord points out, this dynamic can ‘completely lead people down the garden path and away from their own intuition’. A social media creator on your feed, no matter how well-intentioned, can never never possess contextual knowledge of an individual body.

The practice of this outsourcing has a distinct flavour to it. As I trawled through hundreds of wellness accounts during my research, I noted how frequently the genre communicates through thinly-veiled threats. Videos propound ‘non-toxic’ morning routines and condemn ingredients that I must ‘never’ put on my skin, or in my mouth. What emerges is a philosophy of wellbeing delivered almost exclusively in the negative, which is its own kind of erosion of instinct. It’s hard to trust your own natural baseline when the content you’re consuming insists that something might always be slightly wrong with your body. 

‘Platforms reward anything that is emotional, spectacle, or dramatic,’ Krysten Stein, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati, remarks. If influencers simply posted that their lives were fine, their products adequate, their moisturisers and supplements unremarkable, perhaps nobody would watch. I certainly wouldn’t. The algorithms that govern our feeds might not be inherently malicious, but they are indifferent. As we know well, fear sells. Contentment – not so much. 

According to Stein, this helps to reveal why wellness content performs so well. Wellness and longevity sit adjacent to a far more taboo topic: the inevitability of dying. When I open my feed and am offered a targeted supplement or a vibrating disk to balance on, I’m handed a playbook of skills and habits to soothe my overwhelming anxiety about my health and mortality. It is no coincidence, Stein says, that the content succeeding in this present moment is the content promising the most control over the thing we can least control. 

Synthetic Authority

With the credibility of wellness influencers hanging in the balance, the broader question is: who, exactly, is qualified to tell any of us about our health? 

Traditionally, health information arrived via people who had trained for years to give it: doctors, registered dieticians, institutions with a licensing body looming behind them scrutinising their work. Today, it’s far easier to reach a wellness creator with two million followers than to book a GP appointment. 

The asymmetry is reflective of two different commercial imperatives. A doctor’s job is to close the gap between illness and health as efficiently as possible. A creator’s goal, I would contest, is to keep you engaged. It follows that it’s therefore commercially beneficial to keep you convinced that there is always an aspect of your health that warrants further improvement. The commerce of wellness runs deeper of course: many creators in this space are gifted the very products they endorse. Worse still, others are paid a commission on sale. The livelihood of these influencers is thereby contingent on the effectiveness of their promotion, not upon whether or not that product makes any material difference to the customer. Whether, then, the vibrating disks or plastic-free workout sets actually work is beside the point entirely.

Let us think for a moment about what really sells then. In the wellness space, products are rarely shown displayed in clinical spaces or on the shelves of your local pharmacy. Rather, Stein points out that creators often speak to us from spaces of intimate informality; their bedrooms, kitchens, cars. This  ‘backstage intimacy’ lends an authenticity that a sterile consulting room cannot manufacture. 

Researchers into the industry describe this relatability strategy as leveraging credentialism whereby personal testimony becomes a substitute for professional training. In a recent TikTok, Anley chats to us bare faced in a beautifully-lit bathroom, describing the ‘drink of the summer’ not as Aperol, but as ‘clear glowing skin, cellular hydration, stable mood and energy’. You guessed it… her current go to is ‘Vilgain’ electrolytes, no doubt her paid partnership may have guided her choice. I’m not lamenting the era of the TikTok ad: old news. But, in the wellness space, aspirational relatability is an important leveraging tool. 

As sociology researcher Rachel O’Neil notes, personal recovery narratives are the ‘virtual stock-in-trade of conventional wellness influencers’. The emotional labour of sharing a story about what fixed one’s skin, gut, or sleep is more compelling (and more watchable) than measured clinical advice. It’s also far harder to mark as ‘wrong’ because it is, by definition, personal. 

That said, personal testimony also carries no obligation to resolution. A doctor who cures an ailment moves on to their next patient. It is in the interest of the influencer, on the other hand, to maintain their relationship with their followers indefinitely. What this produces is a relationship of sustained intimacy, and a reversal of the usual roles we see in the health space. We rarely know the private details of our local GP’s life; they of course know far more of ours. Among the first things you learn as a doctor is how to take a patient’s ‘history’. The exchange of information with a wellness influencer works in reverse. We’re made privy to the intimacies of their life: their divorce, their chronic pain, their allergy to inorganic cotton. And yet, in a strange exchange, none of their advice is tailored to us – it is catered for the great abyss of their anonymous audience, which must hope to serve as many people simultaneously as possible. 

And there is another burgeoning trend that we must be wary of. The GMC-approved Doctor has become Dr Instagram, or even more concerningly, Dr Chat GPT. An American pastor is suing OpenAI, alleging that months of health advice obtained via ChatGPT talked him out of seeking treatment for what turned out to be a near-fatal pulmonary embolism. The chatbot drew on a particular combination of both medical advice and reference to the 55 year-old’s deep Christian faith, writing: ‘God is still holding your body together, every heartbeat, every breath, even when it feels like you are on the brink’.

If the influencer’s authority rests on the illusion of relationship, the chatbot’s rests on the illusion of machine omniscience: output of fluent medical jargon delivered with unwavering certainty, complemented all the while with hyper-personalised commentary. The underlying incentive hasn’t changed here. The task an LLM needs to complete is not contingent on its output being ‘useful’, rather it simply needs to be trusted long enough for the user to continue engaging with it. 

The 6.8 trillion dollar goldmine

Wellness is not a new trend. From the Victorian’s peddling miracle tonics to the 1970s New Age boom, humans have always been predisposed to pseudo-scientific cures and answers. What has changed is its scale. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy is now valued at a galling $6.8 trillion, projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2030. 

So why is health content having its moment? 

Part of the answer is infrastructural. Over the last year, a reality I continue to rail against is the modern cultural promise of a frictionless life. As the writer Kayla Scanlon has argued, the platforms we inhibit are built to remove friction. In curated online spaces, Scanlon notes that friction is something we even have the opportunity to pay to remove: dating apps, Deliveroo, a TikTok Shop cart recommending adaptogenic greens powders before I’ve even finished watching the video promoting it.

In a now widely-circulated interview, the host of the Diary of CEO podcast Steven Bartlett laments that a couple of glasses of wine ‘ruined [his] life for three days’. In his own words he got worse sleep that night, ate more poorly the next day, and ‘podcasted worse’. He then professes he could track all of this through his wearable tech. 

Friction, in the real world, is unavoidable. Life is frustrating, health can be frightening, inter-personal relationships may be grating. Our digital interfaces have made friction obsolete, an inefficiency that can, and should, be driven out. 

Much wellness content encourages us to seek out that same ease within our own bodies. Not ease of ‘health’, so to speak, but easy fixes and friction-free solutions. We’re always a routine, a ring, a tablet, a new showerhead away from the ‘wellness gap’ simply vanishing. Yet it never seems to do so. All of these habits instead tap into our deepest fears around aging and mortality, replacing that anxiety with a handy toolbox of micro-habits, all for just a small fee!  

Removing friction from our health the way we’ve removed it in so many other parts of our lives is not guaranteed to bring us closer to being well; it simply makes the industry’s underlying motivation to sell the promise and withhold the resolution more discreet. 

Friction isn’t always good. In reality, social, economic and systemic friction is often exhausting. But when we stop engaging with that friction whatsoever, we hand our ability to critically engage, and in certain cases, our wellness over to a system that values your attention more than your health. 

I still don’t know what my lymph nodes are doing with my toxins. But I’ve stopped expecting anyone selling me the answer to know either. 

Other Cultural Critique Articles by Cutting Takes Writers:

The Drama Of Decline Has Reached Both Sides Of The Atlantic

We Should Drink More Wine

Social Media Doesn’t Have To Undermine Human Agency

Sticking a Plaster on It: The End of the Health and Care Worker Visa