Wellness Deserves a Better Definition
Wellness is a perfect buzz word for marketers, a term so happily imprecise and malleable that it’s easier to frame it in terms of what it isn’t.
Every time I hear the term wellness, I can’t help wondering what we are talking about. Here’s a word that everyone is familiar with and no one can clearly define. It’s a vaguely conceptual word of apparent simplicity. The French have a colloquial expression that fits it perfectly: “fourre-tout”; a bag or container in which you can stuff anything you want. Wellness is a term so ill-defined and vague that even the most reputable English dictionaries cannot come up with an articulate common definition.
For all the above reasons, it’s the perfect buzz word for marketing. The combination of vagueness and familiarity makes the term pliable and adaptable to suit all advertising purposes. Wellness can sell health, fitness, real estate, tourism, food supplements, coaching, self-help, nutrition, or more prosaic services that best fit into the category of obsessive self-pampering under the dubious umbrella term of “self-care”.
The Global Wellness Institute, an industry consortium, claims that the “Wellness Economy” represents a $4.5 trillion market. Yes, you read that correctly, trillion.
Marketers are opportunists. They fill a void. A perfect illustration of this is Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s business venture that embodies the extremes of wellness culture and pseudoscience, permeating into mainstream adoption. Goop is the type of toxic business that has helped sell Americans on the idea that “wellness” means buying things until you feel better.
But marketing cannot be blamed for the void people create for themselves. Anything can be labeled “wellness” simply because it sells better and commands higher prices. Most of the time, wellness products are attached to no clear outcomes or benefits other than to satisfy consumers’ fickle emotional needs. An unreasonable obsession with wellness can drive people into a type of paranoid skepticism that compels them to buy useless products, read pseudoscience, and orient their lives around ailments that don’t exist.
The real question is, why is Wellness so desirable as an abstract concept, and what are the key drivers?
Wellness is a word that was rarely spoken or seen in print prior to 2010. Yet, in the last few years, it has become ubiquitous in consumer and trade media and has entered the vernacular all around the world. Why is wellness such an attractive proposition?
Why has wellness become the new Holy Grail, and what is wrong with us as a species in the early twenty-first century? Have we suddenly become unwell? By all objective measures, that’s not the case. Taking a fact-based worldview, we live longer, we are wealthier, and most environmental and societal factors have improved. The problem is that we are not objective or rational, and the fact-based worldview is often substituted by an overdramatic one, fueled by ignorance of facts and neuroticism.
Neuroticism is defined by psychologists as one of the Big Five personality traits, also known as negative emotionality. Scoring high in neuroticism is associated with a slew of negative outcomes that impact our physical and mental health. If your worldview is clouded by negative thoughts about yourselves and the world around you, negative emotions ensue, closely followed by dysphoria and dysfunctional behaviors (eating disorders, addictions, compulsive behavior).
It’s hard to measure how much neuroticism has increased in the last two decades, but it’s undeniable that the spectacular ascent of digital media channels, social networks, and the proliferation of information that we subject ourselves to on a daily basis have an anxiogenic impact on our lives. Mental health professionals have seen a significant rise in depression, anxiety disorders, and compulsive behaviors, especially among younger generations.
How does neuroticism relate to wellness? As negative thought patterns emerge, we seek physical and emotional relief. Wellness is the ideal market: a bottomless well that can never be filled, because negative emotions operate like a feedback loop, and chronic dissatisfaction feeds imaginary needs.
There is however, an other, more beneficial way to look at wellness.
Carolina Granados, a Colombian real estate entrepreneur and architect who develops Wellness Real Estate projects in Mexico, has her own definition that drives the outcome of her projects with the goal of improving people’s lives:
Wellness is a personal journey that begins from the conscious moment you realize you cannot keep living an unhealthy lifestyle, in a toxic environment, while sustaining wrong habits.
The Global Wellness Institute offers a multidimensional view of the term that encompasses six different dimensions:
- Physical: Nourishing a healthy body through exercise, nutrition, sleep.
- Mental: Engaging the world through learning, problem-solving, creativity.
- Emotional: Being aware of, accepting and expressing our feelings, and understanding the feelings of others.
- Spiritual: Searching for meaning and higher purpose in human existence.
- Social: Connecting and engaging with others and our communities in meaningful ways.
- Environmental: Fostering positive interrelationships between planetary health and human actions, choices, and wellbeing.
I think the concept of wellness itself isn’t flawed, but we need to question our motivations. When it’s not driven by a desire to fulfill obsessive emotional needs, seeking wellness can be akin to listening to an inner voice that tells us if our lifestyle is not in harmony with nature and is detrimental to our health. It’s a sign that something needs to be fixed on more than one level. It is up to us to be honest about our worldview and decide whether we want quick fixes or real sustainable lifestyle changes.
Wellness deserves a better, less ambiguous definition, and marketers need to become accountable for delivering meaningful outcomes rather than empty promises that surf on the trend of a marketing buzz word.
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