Welcome to the Global Wellness Summit’s annual Trends Report, the longest-running and most detailed forecast of that will make waves in health and wellness in the coming year.
We may have been the first wellness trends report, but there is a sea of them now. Our team of wellness experts increasingly feels that the trends we select—from the dozens considered—must meet certain criteria and standards.
Do they reflect major, long-term cultural or demographic shifts that will inevitably change the world and the world of wellness? Do they tackle major crises in human and planetary health? Do they impact the wellness of people beyond the 1%? Do they capture what is truly new but won’t be fleeting?
The 10 trends below, in different ways, all met these criteria.
Several themes emerge for 2025:
An even more polarized wellness market.
In last year’s report we noted that we had seen more shake ups in wellness leading up to 2024 than in the last 15 years. We described the emergence of a newly contradictory wellness market and mindset, which we dubbed “hardcare” and “softcare.”
Hardcare refers to the very high-tech, medical, complex, hyper-optimizing and expensive market, from biohacking to longevity clinics. Softcare captures the rising desire for a simpler, slower, low-pressure, less relentlessly self-optimizing, lowtech, less expensive breed of wellness, where social and mental wellbeing matter most. Last year we predicted that the “harder” and “softer” wellness market polarity would only widen. Our 2025 report confirms it.
Nothing illustrates better the desire for slower, low-tech lives than the Analog Wellness trend. We argue that the online world’s relentless manipulations, marketing, disinformation campaigns, and general “brain and culture rotting” have gone too far, and that 2025 will be THE year where people get aggressive about logging off, with new digital detox tools and destinations to help them.
We also explore how people will be “analog-ing on” as never before, embracing retro, pre-digital tech, hobbies, crafts and experiences—as wellness, and in wellness. We detail how the digital disconnection and analog living trends will shake up wellness, travel, government policy, and even home design.
The Sauna Reimagined trend captures the hunger for one of the most lo-fi, ancient, social and affordable types of wellness. It takes a deep dive into sauna’s extraordinary reimagining, from new social saunas becoming the cool, new nightlife and entertainment hubs, to poetic and rustic waterfront saunas popping up everywhere.
The Wellness on the Line trend, about the explosion of wellness experiences on cruises and rail journeys, is powered by a desire for slower, more mindful travel. The trend explores not only the unprecedented wellness programs onboard, but also how more cruise and rail excursions are now about jumping ship, or train, to experience authentic local wellness activities, from wild swimming to soaking across the spa towns of Europe.
No trend better exemplifies hardcare hyper-optimization than the Augmented Biology trend, investigating a new fusion of body and machine—once the stuff of science fiction—that pushes the potential of people’s brains and bodies to superhuman levels. This includes performance enhancing brain-computer interfaces, neurocell wellness, extreme performance fitness, and wearable robotics, such as exoskeletons that help athletes endure the most intense exertion.
The Supplement Paradox explores new directions in the vast $178 billion supplement market that are poised to tackle the trust issues plaguing the industry. Supplements are becoming more precise tools of lifestyle optimization, thanks to the rise of AI- and diagnostic testing-driven formulations, detoxification innovations, and more sciencebacked products for everything from GLP-1 to menopause and fertility issues.
Wellness will tackle serious crises.
The Wellness Tackles Addiction trend identifies a new category, with the wellness market poised to topple taboos around addiction, just as it has for sexual wellness and menopause. The report covers everything, from new wellness-focused packaged goods brands targeting harm reduction (such as nicotine replacement products, or ingestibles that help you come down safely if you get too high), to new luxury medical treatment centers with as much wellness programming as a wellness resort, to new sober-curious retreats.
Spas and wellness destinations have always treated teens as a side note, or in rather infantilizing ways. With the skyrocketing teen mental health crisis, the Teen Wellness trend explores how the industry is finally getting serious about teen wellbeing, offering resorts and retreats that teach them emotional intelligence, resilience, and how to survive in a digital world, and creating a new wave of teen mental wellness apps.
The global water crisis—the biggest crisis that nobody is talking about—affects millions of people worldwide, and is driven by climate change, urbanization, pollution and the mismanagement of water resources. The spa and wellness industries have long been water hog villains, but the trend Watershed Wellness shows how wellness destinations are doing more to preserve and renew our water supplies.
Seismic demographic shifts are underway in the workforce, as the number of young workers decreases across the world and the over-65 workforce explodes in an age of longevity. The Longevity Redefines Work trend explores the radical changes coming to the work space: what roles we’ll fill, how long we’ll stay, and how we’ll adapt. And how the wellness industry will be a key player in helping employees—that want or need to—work longer and well, with new solutions focused on the extremely valuable older corporate worker.
The final trend, The Middle East’s Wellness Ambitions, explores the eye-opening ways the region is racing to become a serious contender on the wellness stage. The Middle East is seeing an explosion of new wellness resorts (especially
in places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE), and is placing a powerful focus on cutting-edge preventative healthcare, sports as a wellness driver, and culturally authentic Islamic spas and halal beauty.
2024 was one extremely stressful year, from rising climate disasters (like the Los Angeles wildfires) to over 50 divisive elections held globally. 2025 looks to be even more stressful and complex. People will seek wellness and healing. It’s one reason the wellness market has reached a new peak of $6.3 trillion and is expected to grow to $9 trillion by 2028.
If the world is suddenly more complex, so is the wellness market. As this trends report shows, it is increasingly defined by radically different business models and polarized trends.
This is the only wellness trends report based on insights from hundreds of health and wellness experts—CEOs, doctors, investors, academics and technologists—that gather each year at the Global Wellness Summit. Each trend is packed with new ideas, sub-trends, and examples of the companies blazing these new trails.
We hope it provides clarity and insight into a wellness market that is both defying economic expectations and transforming rapidly.
Beth McGroarty
VP, Research and Forecasting
Obtain the full report here
CONTRIBUTORS
- Executive Editor: Beth McGroarty
- Managing Editor: Jane Kitchen
- Editors: Nancy Davis, Susie Ellis & Heidi Moon
- Project Management: Jessi Brandt
- Art Direction & Graphic Design: Amy Detrick
Copyright © 2025 by Global Wellness Summit. This executive summary is reprinted with permission
