Cold Plunges, Cortisol Supplements, Breathwork Subscriptions, and the Celery Juice That Started It All -- A Decade of Optimizing the Human Body Has Produced a Nation That Is Expensive, Exhausted, and Still Checking Its Phone at 2 a.m.
By Francesca Hartwell | The London Prat | Sources: Bohiney Wellness Economy • SpinTaxi Corporate Wellness • Bohiney Subscription Economy • Bohiney Digital Exhaustion • ScrewTheNews.com • The London Prat • ParisFou.com
The Global Wellness Institute confirmed this week in a report that cost considerably more to produce than any of its subjects spent on getting well that the $5.6 trillion wellness industry has, after a decade of unprecedented growth, not made anyone noticeably better. Rates of anxiety are up. Rates of depression are up. Sleep quality is down. Loneliness is at record levels. Cortisol, the stress hormone that seventeen different supplement brands promised to regulate, remains entirely unregulated in the bodies of the 40 million Americans who purchased cortisol supplements, possibly because cortisol does not read the label. The industry, the report notes, has responded to these findings with characteristic creativity: it is launching a new range of products specifically designed to address the anxiety, sleeplessness, loneliness, and elevated cortisol produced by engaging with the previous range of products. The pivot is expected to generate $800 billion in new revenue by 2028. The industry describes this as progress. Economists describe it as a perpetual motion machine. Therapists describe it as their entire client list.
The cold plunge -- a tub of frigid water into which Americans voluntarily submerge themselves at 5:30 a.m. before a workout they will also pay for -- has become the decade's most successful merger of masochism and aspiration. As Bohiney.com's wellness desk documented with the careful tone of someone reporting on a slow-moving natural disaster, the average cold plunge enthusiast has spent $3,400 on equipment, $240 on a subscription app that coaches them through the experience of being cold, and approximately $800 on content creation equipment to film themselves being cold for an audience that is also cold and also filming itself. The wellness benefits of cold immersion, peer-reviewed researchers note, are real but modest. The wellness benefits of filming yourself doing it and posting the result have not been peer reviewed but are widely understood to include dopamine, followers, and an identity organized around discomfort, which is either growth or a personality, depending on the therapist.
Britain, characteristically, has adopted the cold plunge with a twist: the British cold plunge costs nothing because it is called "the sea" and has been available since the island formed, but its recent rebranding as a wellness practice has caused a 340% increase in people standing at the shoreline in branded swimwear looking purposeful in a way that people standing at British beaches in November have never previously managed.
Central to the wellness economy's architecture is what Bohiney.com's subscription economy investigation identified as the Recursive Wellness Trap: a consumer pays monthly for a meditation app, a sleep tracker subscription, a breathwork programme, a gut health protocol, a hormone panel service, and a journaling platform that sends daily prompts at 7 a.m. The combined monthly cost is $187. The combined daily time required to engage with all platforms is four hours. The consumer, who works full time and has children and was hoping to address stress, now has a second job managing their wellness portfolio, which is the primary source of their stress, which the wellness portfolio exists to address.
"We found," said Dr. Annabel Crowe of the Institute for Consumer Wellbeing Economics, "that the average wellness consumer has automated their self-improvement to the point where the automation itself requires management. They are, in effect, project-managing their own nervous system on a Kanban board." She paused. "Several of our subjects use a wellness app to manage their wellness apps. We did not anticipate this."
"The industry created the problem, monetized the problem, sold you the solution, created anxiety about whether you were doing the solution correctly, and sold you the solution to that anxiety. This is called the wellness journey."
The wellness industry's most audacious recent manoeuvre, as SpinTaxi Magazine has painstakingly documented, is its successful infiltration of the corporate compensation cycle. Across America and Britain, employers facing the structural inconvenience of having to give employees more money have discovered that a wellness programme costs approximately 12% of what a meaningful salary increase would cost and produces, in employee surveys conducted by the employer, satisfaction scores that HR describes as "encouraging." The programme typically includes a meditation app that 6% of employees open, a gym subsidy that 11% use, a mental health platform that 4% access, and a printed leaflet about sleep hygiene that 100% of employees receive and 0% have read past the third bullet point.
"The employees are not well," confirmed one HR director who requested anonymity because she is also not well. "But they have access to resources that would make them well if they had time to use them, which they don't, because of the workload, which is why they are not well." She has a cold plunge at home. She has used it twice. It is currently storing pool noodles.
France, as ParisFou.com has observed with the dry amusement of a nation that invented existentialism specifically to avoid paying for therapy, has declined to participate in the wellness economy at scale. The French approach to stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, and cortisol is a combination of cigarettes, wine, long lunches, and the philosophical position that suffering is not a problem to be solved but a texture of experience to be savored, ideally with a good cheese and someone interesting to argue with. French wellness spending per capita is approximately 30% of American levels. French life expectancy is higher. The French wellness industry responded to this data by noting that the data does not account for what it called "the joy gap," which is not a recognized medical metric but has been optioned as a podcast.
A long-overdue accounting of the celery juice era -- the period between 2018 and 2022 during which millions of Americans rose at 6 a.m. to juice celery on the advice of a man called the Medical Medium who communicated with a spirit he described as the Spirit of Compassion and who had no medical qualifications but an exceptionally good Instagram following -- has found that the measurable health outcomes of daily celery juice consumption are, in clinical terms, indistinguishable from drinking water. The measurable financial outcomes are an estimated $2.4 billion transferred from consumers to celery farmers, juicer manufacturers, and the Medical Medium, all of whom are well. The consumers are fine. They have moved on to AG1, which costs $79 a month and contains 75 ingredients, one of which is celery.
ScrewTheNews.com confirmed this week that the Medical Medium has launched a new protocol for addressing the anxiety caused by having spent four years juicing celery every morning before work. It involves a supplement. It is $94 a month. Pre-orders have exceeded 200,000 units. The Spirit of Compassion could not be reached for comment, but a spokesperson confirmed it is supportive.
The National Health Service, operating under a budget that has been described by its own staff as "theoretical," issued new wellness guidelines this week that The London Prat has reviewed in full. The guidelines recommend walking, sleeping, eating vegetables, spending time with other humans, and reducing screen time -- a set of recommendations so ancient, affordable, and evidence-based that the wellness industry cannot monetize them, which is why they have been ignored for a decade while $5.6 trillion was spent on alternatives. An NHS spokesperson confirmed the guidelines cost nothing to implement. A wellness industry spokesperson confirmed they were "not wrong, but incomplete," and suggested supplementing them with a $49.99 monthly protocol available at the link in their bio.
"The wellness industry spent a trillion dollars telling me I was broken and another trillion selling me the fix. I am not fixed. I am, however, subscribed to seven things I can't cancel and I own a cold plunge I use as a planter." -- Amy Schumer
"America is the only country that turned going to bed, eating a vegetable, and taking a walk into a $5.6 trillion industry. In Texas we call that Tuesday. We do not charge for it." -- Ron White
"The celery juice era is over and we don't talk about it enough. Millions of people got up at 6 a.m. to drink celery water on the advice of a man who talked to a ghost. And we just moved on. We just moved on to the next thing. That's remarkable." -- Jerry Seinfeld
The Global Wellness Institute's new product category -- Remedial Wellness, targeting the anxiety, expense fatigue, subscription overwhelm, and identity confusion produced by Foundational Wellness -- is expected to launch at the Global Wellness Summit in October, where 4,000 delegates paying $3,800 each will convene in a Bavarian spa resort to discuss why people are not getting better. Day one will cover breathwork. Day two will cover the science of sleep. Day three will cover cold exposure. Day four will cover nutrition. There will be a panel on community and loneliness. Nobody has confirmed whether the panelists have managed to schedule dinner together beforehand. The Doodle poll closes Friday. Tuesday the 17th is currently winning.
At press time, the $5.6 trillion wellness industry had released its Q2 earnings. They were excellent. Cortisol levels among investors were described as optimal. A press release confirmed everyone involved was thriving. It was sent at 11:47 p.m. by someone who has not slept properly since February and owns three meditation apps, none of which they opened today.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/spending-thousands-on-wellness/