From purity to power

Unpicking the wellness cultural operating system: Guest post by Lucy Neiland & Anna Geatrell

A new trend has been circulating on Instagram: sungazing. Influencers film themselves staring straight at the sun, promising healing and ‘realignment’. Sungazing, along with other practices, is framed as a secret that has been kept well hidden - because experts, institutions and governments don’t want you to know. The videos often feature men squinting into daylight, eyes watering, skin flaking, talking about curative properties.

While this feels contemporary, sungazing is not new. Versions of it appeared in Western health culture in the early twentieth century, most notably through the work of William Bates, during a period when spiritualism and alternative healing flourished alongside scepticism toward institutional medicine.

That historical echo matters. Moments of institutional strain have often produced practices that promise direct, personal access to truth, bypassing expertise in favour of embodied revelation.

And whilst this feels at the fringe end of wellness, it tells us something about the way that wellness is not simply a set of behaviours to keep in good shape but is now growing into a belief system: one that is increasingly political, questioning the trust traditionally placed in institutions and governments to navigate what’s best for the individual. Common threads in the wellness space on social media include “just do the opposite of what the government recommends”. As sociologist and wellness culture author Stephanie Baker points out in an interview with us, there was already a steady decline in institutional trust before the pandemic, but “this social distrust and distrust in experts and institutional experts in particular has intensified.”

Traditionally, the term wellness has been understood to mean practices and routines that sit outside the pharmaceutical and formal healthcare industries. More recently, this remit has expanded well beyond health, operating increasingly as a moral and social framework, offering guidance on how to live, eat, and sleep, what to value and trust, and how to understand success and failure. It centres on the individual performing constant work and remaining constantly vigilant.

For brands and policy makers, there are increasing challenges – the difficulty is less that people have become anti-expert, and more that the terms on which expertise is judged have changed. In a wellness landscape shaped by social media pressure, we find that credibility is achieved through relatability, transparency, and perceived alignment with everyday life. Food and health choices now carry a moral weight, meaning that messages from traditional sources of advice and information, designed to inform or empower, can easily be read as judgment or control.

For policymakers, this growing mistrust is a real problem: when expertise feels distant or opaque, doing the same thing or shouting louder isn’t going to work. And for brands, the challenge is how to navigate a noisy and confusing wellness landscape, where people are often looking for help to make sense of choices rather than more instruction.

Over the past six months, we have been exploring this industry, now globally valued at US $6.3 trillion. We have used ethnographic research, expert interviews and survey findings to examine how wellness manifests in people’s everyday lives. What emerges repeatedly is how wellness has shaped our mental models of the self and its increasingly central role in our lives.

Our research shows that the growth of the wellness industry is, in large part, driven by a widespread desire for greater control and agency over health and wellbeing. For many people, wellness offers a sense of autonomy in a context where public systems feel slow, fragmented, or unresponsive. At the same time, it has become an increasingly demanding and difficult space to navigate. Advice, products, and claims circulate at speed - often through largely unregulated markets - leaving individuals to constantly judge what is safe, effective, or trustworthy.

This paper examines how these conditions have helped to transform wellness from a set of practices into a cultural operating system. We explore what this means for the individual, as well as some of the central tenets of wellness, such as purity and naturalness, which increasingly shape what is purchased, consumed and deemed a moral achievement. We also examine how trust is being reconfigured away from traditional institutions and towards horizontal, peer-led sources of learning.

Finally, we consider what these dynamics mean for brands, policymakers, and institutions, arguing that while wellness amplifies confusion and pressure, it also creates an opportunity for more transparent, supportive, and trust-building forms of guidance in a fragmented cultural landscape.

The drive for agency

For many, wellness culture has definite upsides - providing connection, information and healthier practices. Part of the appeal stems from the fact that, globally, struggling public health systems lead to long waiting times and limited continuity of care. According to a recent Ipsos Health Services report, 68% globally agree that waiting times to get an appointment to see a doctor in their country are too long. We also know that a large proportion of people with chronic conditions report receiving limited or no information after diagnosis.

Added to this, our previous research into women’s health and the health experiences of minority communities shows how people in marginalised groups have long been ignored and disadvantaged, and excluded from clinical trials, for example.

Within this context, looking outside formal systems, engagement with supplements, alternative therapies, and online peer networks can be understood not merely as lifestyle experimentation but as attempts to reassert autonomy and care when institutions appear slow, biased, or simply impenetrable. A recent Ipsos Global Trends report found that 8 in 10 respondents worldwide want greater control over their health decisions. Wellness, in this sense, functions as both a coping mechanism and a critique.

But, as Stephanie Baker told us in an interview, the growth of wellness poses real challenges in itself:

“Increasingly, during the pandemic, we saw not only individual influencers but also networks of influencers who were disseminating false and misleading advice. And increasingly this is motivated by a variety of incentives, political gain, social gain, clout and fame as well as commercial gain.”

One of the problems, Professor Colleen Derkatch, author of Why Wellness Sells, notes, is that the wellness movement relocates responsibility onto individuals to resolve issues that may well be beyond their control. Problems may be structural rather than personal, and yet the individual is left to decipher these alone. As Derkatch points out, wellness can offer the feeling of agency without its substance, holding out the promise of self-improvement through discipline and mindset while leaving the conditions that constrain wellbeing firmly in place.

This points to a critical tension at the heart of wellness culture: where responsibility for health is located. It is this tension that the next section explores more directly, by examining how responsibility has shifted between individuals and collective systems of care.

From structural causes to individualised responsibility

Even wellness experts find this landscape difficult to navigate. Colleen Derkatch describes visiting the doctor to have her child vaccinated and, in that moment, questioning her own judgment as a mother, despite trusting the evidence of the vaccination's value. The current climate, she says -

“assumes that everyone has the resources of time and money and knowledge to make their own health decisions. It becomes much harder to see that a lot of the problems people actually experience come from big social, collective problems of living.”

This dilemma is captured by anthropologist Didier Fassin, who writes about health as ‘moral economy’ in which collective society-level failures are subtly placed at the feet of individuals. Wellness culture arguably operates on the same basis, encouraging people to interpret tiredness, anxiety, or illness as evidence of personal failings rather than structural strain, whether, for example, from precarity of employment, racism and sexism or poor housing.

This redistribution of responsibility has concrete consequences in people’s everyday lives. For many, the result is not empowerment but confusion, particularly when moral pressure to optimise collides with a lack of trusted guidance. As Derkatch said:

“for some people that can be especially challenging because they can end up perusing wellness products and services that don’t have established safety or efficacy, and they can get into trouble with products can make them quite sick.”

One of our ethnography participants told us that when someone in her mom WhatsApp group shared how they were feeling better on a higher dose of vitamin D, another of the moms ended up in hospital after taking the same dose. Another of our ethnography participants told us he is opento trying most health tips he finds online. But recently, he had a bout of debilitating headaches that led him to worry seriously that he had a brain tumour. After a trip to the neurologist and a brain scan that came back clear, he realised it was the Himalayan salt drink he’d been taking, discovered from a gym buddy, that left him severely dehydrated. He stopped taking it as soon as he realised. “You’d like to think there’s good regulation out there” he told us.

The messy landscape saturated with advice can also mean people don’t engage with appropriate medical care, as Richard Simcock, Chief Medical Officer of Macmillan Cancer Support, told us in an interview. It may even mean that people “don’t seek appropriate medical care, or decline evidence-based high-quality medical care.” As a GP we interviewed told us, she is seeing more people coming in with their own ideas that sit outside the medical model – which in previous years she might have dismissed, but now has to work with so they stay in her care.

Constant work and personal choice

One of the other problems with the wellness space is the constant pressure to be our best selves – as one social media influencer posts, there is no such thing as ill health – it’s just bad diet and not taking the right supplements. The expectation is that the individual should stay vigilant: read ingredient lists, avoid ‘toxins,’ and demonstrate self-discipline. The message is - if you do this, you will be well. But if you don’t, then ill health is your fault. This is a moralised model of well-being in which goodness is measured by how disciplined we are. As the GP we interviewed told us, this has led people to constantly feel disappointed that they aren’t feeling optimal all the time. Derkatch sets out two primary wellness orientations that she has seen in her research:

· Restoration: efforts to regain what age, stress or illness has worn down

· Enhancement: aspirations to go beyond ordinary functioning

The challenge here is that this keeps people in a continual cycle of self-improvement, leading to disappointment because there is no clear point at which one can be judged to be ‘well enough.’ The state of ‘being well’ remains perpetually out of reach, with each achievement simply revealing new areas to work on, new deficits to correct. As one of our US participants in her early 20s told us:

“Tik Tok has begun new concerns in me that I never had before, like having low cortisol levels or I have to take this supplement everyday otherwise I’m not healthy”.

In this framing, health and wellness are treated less as conditions shaped by circumstance and more as outcomes of personal choice. The result is that people feel morally responsible not just for their behaviours, but for their health itself – often without trusted guidance.

Another GP we talked to reported that she’d seen an uptake of young men coming to her concerned about their testosterone levels – prompted by social media. She says, “I tell them they just don’t need to.” But for those deep into wellness – this is counterintuitive – they have heard from multiple sources online that testosterone levels are a problem. What this means,

A fitness instructor told us, is that lots of gyms are rife with locker room advice about ‘T-levels’ (testosterone), vitamins and steroids. The problem, he shared, is that often people don’t feel heard by formal medical systems - for example, concerns about their testosterone levels. So they look elsewhere for advice.

As Mike Nicholson from Progressive Masculinity tells us, many young people (and young men in particular) believe that information is being hidden from them, therefore dismissing concerns is not going to work. It is critical to understand the narratives and perspectives that patients and consumers are coming from

Horizontal information

Across the challenges outlined so far, a further and compounding problem emerges: the growing prevalence of wellness misinformation. This is not incidental to wellness culture but closely tied to the information dynamics of wellness, where the trust pathways are horizontal rather than vertical, away from conventional hierarchies of professional or institutional authority. Credibility is frequently built through peers and influencers on social media accounts that offer experiential ‘truths’ rather than the expertise of a credentialed healthcare practitioner. In fact, recent polling finds that 45% of people heard about GLP-1 drugs from social media, versus 19% hearing about them through medical professionals.

Much of this horizontal information flow can be experienced positively. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing can reduce stigma, surface lived experience that formal systems overlook, and help people feel less alone in navigating health concerns. For those who feel dismissed or rushed within clinical settings, these spaces can offer recognition, empathy, and a sense of agency.

But as Baker explained to us, this is also an environment in which misleading health advice, with short-form video platforms a particularly fertile ground. In a study, she examined one of the leading social media platforms and analysed the top 50 videos surfaced in cancer-related searches. What she found was stark: 81% of the videos promoted false or misleading information about cancer cures. These included unproven or dangerous remedies such as essential oils, dog and horse dewormers, and supplement powders, many of which were directly monetised through links, sponsorships, or product sales.

This matters not only because the information is incorrect, but because digital platforms dramatically lower the barriers to entry for profiting from misinformation. Influencers and content creators can disseminate health advice at scale without clinical oversight, regulatory scrutiny, or accountability, while still appearing relatable and trustworthy to audiences seeking guidance.

Andrea Love, a science communicator with a mission to counter misinformation, considers that many of the wellness narratives erode trust in science and public health. Her concern is that, for example, unfounded fears about chemicals are not simply a quirk of wellness culture but a public health crisis that undermines trust in vaccines, food safety, and preventive medicine. This is not simply an issue of false information, but a deeper shift in where credibility itself is located. Wellness misinformation does not circulate in a vacuum; it travels along changing trust pathways, shaped by who people feel listens to them, understands them, and represents their interests.

COVID-19 exacerbated this pattern, political analyst Catherine Fieschi told us. She argues that perceived government and scientific overreach, combined with a rising cost of living and overloaded healthcare systems, have fuelled the sense that people must take matters into their own hands and withdraw trust from ‘top-down’ authority. When social institutions such as education, housing, and healthcare fail to provide stability, Fieschi suggests that the resulting disaffection often reconfigures as anti-elite sentiment. Within this environment, wellness becomes a means of expressing distrust while at the same time offering a sense of agency.

One GP we spoke with told us that, for the first time, she is engaging with alternative treatments rather than dismissing them. “It’s a new era”, she told us, “If you say no, then you know people are going to try things without your supervision. I want to keep in a dialogue with them.”

This reflects the way that wellness has become a form of ‘underdog politics’, challenging the hierarchies of medical expertise and scientific legitimacy: turning to ‘natural’ remedies or community-based advice is not only an act of care but an assertion of independence. It is only a small step from here for wellness to fuse with populist politics. Influencers and even politicians (such as Robert F Kennedy Jnr) position themselves as defenders of bodily autonomy against state and scientific overreach: there is a sense of health as a struggle in which regulatory safeguards are evidence of elite capture of the system, and public health institutions are enemies rather than a shared resource.

With this in mind, we can see how wellness has drifted from a set of practices into a belief framework where distrust is normalised, personal intuition trumps collective evidence, and public health is mistrusted.

The role of purity and naturalness narratives

So, what are some of the central features of wellness? There is an intensified focus on purity, particularly in relation to food. In wellness culture, eating is increasingly framed not just as nourishment, but as a moral practice.

“If you want an early grave, carry on eating seed oils… We’re all being killed, watch until the end if you want to know what to do about it.”

In one widely shared Instagram video, a popular influencer takes us around a UK supermarket, inspecting different products and preservatives, questioning provenance, pointing out the impurity of different ingredients, some of which are not derived from natural processes. He warns of the dangers these pose.

In our ethnographic research, we found confusion around ingredients and what to stay vigilant about. As one of our participants shared, she had heard that certain brands of chocolate contain lead, and that is deeply concerning. For her, the upside of wellness culture is about prevention, trying not engage in practises that can cause ill health by ‘eating right’, but she is struggling with who to listen to and trust, and how to make sure her food is “pure”.

Increasingly within wellness culture, eating is framed not just as nourishment, but as a moral practice - choosing the “right” foods signals discipline, awareness, and independence, while the wrong ones imply contamination or failure. Ideas such as “clean eating,” “toxin-free” diets, and “natural” or “ancestral” foods draw a sharp line between what is pure and what is suspect.

For example, one of our participants in his early 20s showed us his social media feed - filled with short videos promoting a return to raw milk or raw meat. When we visited him, this played out in a tense exchange with his mother. “Raw milk is bad,” she told us, also talking to him. He disagreed, “You don’t understand, you haven’t researched it like I have.” Raw meat is also part of this eating-as-your-ancestors movement, which he adheres to.

What we see is a moralised food landscape in which individuals are expected to remain constantly vigilant. Structural questions, such as about food systems, affordability, regulation, and access, fade into the background, replaced by the idea that health is something earned through discipline and exclusion.

This notion of purity also has a gendered element, a move towards what journalist Sian Norris refers to as the “mythical gender roles of the past” when women stayed at home and were close to nature, and men went out and fought. Despite this era not actually existing (hence a mythical era), she expresses concern that culturally we seem to be doubling down on this notion.

And as political analyst Katherine Fieschi points out, the wellness content for women reflects this pattern: it highlights natural births and living closer to nature,
which we are encouraged to associate with moral goodness and fertility. For men, says Mike Nicholson of ex-teacher and Director of Progressive Masculinities, the pressure is to do with optimisation and endurance, privileging strength, resilience, and sovereignty over the body as a site of performance and control.

Where does this take us?

Political power once resided primarily in formal institutions, but it seems that wellness now operates as a key form of ‘soft power’, shaping what we see as credible and aspirational. Its logic goes well beyond health, and influences buying behaviour across categories as diverse as technology, finance, fashion, and automotive design. A protein drink signals optimisation; a meditation app suggests discipline; a luxury car marketed as a ‘wellness environment’ offers restoration – all amid a sense of wider social and economic instability.

The slipperiness of the term wellness means it can be applied to almost any product or service, which means brands can reframe many products and services as ‘self-care’. But while this may offer short-term gains, the danger is it also invites accusations of opportunism when wellness claims outpace actual substance – people do also see this.

Yet despite these contradictions, wellness does surely offer genuine social and psychological needs. It provides routines, symbols, and communities that promise continuity in a world that feels increasingly unstable and difficult to navigate. Practices such as morning exercise, supplementation, or mindfulness give accessible ways to create order and a sense of agency. In this way, wellness thrives, perhaps not despite instability, but because instability creates the conditions in which it feels necessary.

The challenges outlined in this report point to a clear opportunity. For policymakers, there is a chance to address the structural gaps that wellness often steps in to fill, particularly around trust, visibility, continuity, and care within public systems. For brands and marketers, the opportunity lies in engaging the wellness space more constructively: supporting understanding and decision-making rather than amplifying anxiety or moral pressure for short-term gain.

The shared task is to ensure that wellness does not function as a substitute for collective provision, but as a complement to it and in doing so help people navigate complexity without shifting the full burden of care and judgement onto individuals alone.

IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS

Key risks

1. Responsibility without blame: Wellness narratives that place strong emphasis on personal responsibility can easily slide into blame, implying that poor health reflects poor choices, insufficient discipline, or lack of effort. For many people, this framing feels alienating rather than empowering.

Implication: Avoid messaging that suggests individuals can ‘fix’ themselves through consumption, discipline, or mindset alone. Where possible, acknowledge the limits of individual control and position products, services, or guidance as supportive rather than corrective or morally superior.

2. Gender regression as reputational risk: Some wellness narratives, particularly those focused on purity, fertility, restraint, and bodily control, echo restrictive gender norms. For women, this can feel like a quiet rollback of autonomy; for men, it can reinforce narrow ideals of masculinity. These frameworks also routinely exclude or invalidate trans and non-binary people, whose bodies and experiences sit outside the naturalised ideals of sex, reproduction, and bodily “correctness” that much wellness culture assumes. Audiences are increasingly sensitive to these signals, even when they are implicit.

Implication: Consider which bodies, roles, and ideals are centred in wellness communication. Avoid aesthetics or language that promote perfection, restraint, or bodily moralism, especially where expectations fall unevenly across genders.

3. Purity narratives and political spillover: ‘Clean,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘natural’ framings can carry ethical and political baggage. When taken to extremes, they can be interpreted as coded language for reactionary politics. Even brands with caring intentions can find themselves adjacent to these logics.

Implication: Exercise caution with purity language, which can generate anxiety and mistrust rather than reassurance, and once politicised, is difficult to contain.

Where the opportunity lies

Across the research, one pattern is consistent: people are not rejecting expertise outright, but they are struggling to navigate a wellness landscape that feels crowded, contradictory, and morally charged. Many experience the burden of having to ‘get it right’ without reliable reference points, trusted explanations, or clear guidance.

This creates an opportunity for brands and institutions willing to engage wellness not as aspiration, but as orientation.

1. Wellness as foundation, not optimisation: For many people, wellness does not begin with enhancement or aspiration, but with whether life feels manageable. Security, predictability, rest, and access to basic resources remain the foundations of feeling well. When these are absent, optimisation narratives can feel irrelevant or even insulting.

Implication: Recognise the gap between the aspirational wellness culture visible on social media and the material conditions that actually support wellbeing. Credibility increasingly comes from acknowledging both.

2. Wellness as guidance through transparency: A defining feature of contemporary wellness culture is uncertainty. People are exposed to claims about ingredients, deficiencies, risks, and hidden harms, yet often lack the tools to evaluate them. In the absence of trusted guidance, people are left to arbitrate complex health decisions alone, often relying on peer anecdotes, influencer narratives, or intuition.

Here, both brands and public institutions have a constructive role to play. What many people are looking for is not more instruction, nor louder authority, but help in making sense of competing claims. Transparency in the shape of showing how decisions are made, what evidence has been weighed, and where uncertainty remains, can support agency, without demanding blind trust.

Implication: Help people understand why recommendations are made, what trade-offs exist, what is known, what has been researched, the limits of this research, and what is uncertain. Guidance that reduces confusion rather than adds to it is increasingly a marker of trustworthiness.

3. Wellness as ally, not authority: Declining trust in institutions reflects frustration with unresponsive expertise rather than rejection of knowledge itself. People respond more positively to guidance that feels respectful, and grounded in everyday realities and in stories they can make sense of, that are relatable - rather than prescriptive or judgemental.

Implication: Advice that feels responsive rather than shutting down people’s real worries is more likely to be trusted than expertise imposed from above.

4. Challenging the status quo with care: Wellness also reflects a broader appetite to question inherited ideas about success, productivity, and the ‘good life.’ This challenge is less about disruption for its own sake and more about meaning and legitimacy.

Implication: Challenging norms in wellness requires engaging carefully in values conversations rather than simple oppositional positioning.

Wellness cannot be addressed solely through products, campaigns, or behavioural nudges. For policymakers, it underscores the need to address the structural conditions that wellness all too often compensates for. For brands, it highlights the responsibility and opportunity to reduce confusion rather than amplify it.