The desire to live a healthy and fulfilled life has seen the growth of industries aiming to support this goal.
Sometimes its hard to know what to pursue and how it might help, but it’s also exciting to clock the increase in possibilities being developed.
In a bid to provide clarity about where that focus is moving, the The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) has released its 2025 Future of Wellness Report, flagging changes in the business of wellness and also our evolving desires when it comes to engaging in them.
The trends are authored by industry experts and presented at the the summit’s annual gathering of some of the industry’s top professionals alongside the Global Wellness Institute, an organisation dedicated to analysing the wellness space.
This year, the divide between ‘switched on’ and logged off’ approaches continues to grow, as some seek out futuristic “augmented biology” for superhuman optimisation while others look to the past for traditional and back to nature approaches.
The top 10 trends:
1. Analog Wellness
This trend illustrates the demand for slower, low-tech lives. With the online world’s manipulations, disinformation campaigns, and general brain and culture “rotting”, having suddenly gone too far, 2025 is the year more people aggressively both log off and “analog on”: seizing retro, pre-digital tech, hobbies and experiences … as wellness, and in wellness.
The digital disconnection and analog living trends will shake up everything from travel to government policy to home design.
2. Sauna Reimagined
The boom in, and reinvention of, one of the most lo-fi, ancient and social types of wellness.
3. Wellness on the Line
All Aboard! There’s been an explosion of creative wellness experiences on cruises and rail journeys, is powered by the hunger for slower, more mindful travel.
4. Augmented Biology
Nothing captures hyper-optimized wellness like the this trend, 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.
5. The Supplement Paradox
New science-grounded and high-tech directions in the vast supplement market, which look to help the trust issues plaguing that industry.
6. Teen Wellness
If spas and wellness destinations have always treated teens as a sidenote, or in infantilising ways, this trend explores an industry finally getting serious about their wellbeing, given the skyrocketing teen mental health crisis.
7. Wellness Tackles Addiction
A new wellness category poised to further topple taboos around addiction, and covers everything from new wellness-focused packaged goods brands targeting harm reduction, to medical treatment centers programming worthy of a five-star wellness resort, to new sober-curious retreats.
8. Watershed Wellness
The spa and wellness industries have been villains in the global water crisis, but this trend reveals how more wellness destinations will preserve and renew our water supplies.
9. Longevity Redefines Work
Exploring 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.
10. The Middle East’s Wellness Ambitions
The emergence of the region as a wellness leader, driven by wellness-focused national “vision” plans in the GCC, and huge investments in cutting-edge preventative healthcare and sustainability, vast wellness tourism destinations, and sports-meet-wellness concepts.
